MARK HEMINGWAY: Hollywood’s Inability To Create Masculine Stars Is Officially A Problem.

Two of the biggest movies this summer are Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and F1, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, respectively. The two movies have something interesting in common — both are star vehicles for men in their sixties. Brad Pitt will be 62 later this year, and Tom Cruise just turned 63 last week.

Pitt and Cruise aren’t exceptions, either. The biggest male movie stars are all aging. Clooney is 64 and McConaughey is 55. Ben Affleck, also out with a big action film this year, is 53 next month, and his buddy Matt Damon turns 55 later this year.

Just a few decades ago, it would have been genuinely hard to imagine that our most viable male movie stars would be so old.

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Speaking of Harrison Ford, last week there were reports that Disney will be doing a complete reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. And interestingly, there was a surprising chorus of responses online to the news: For the love of all that is holy do not cast Pedro Pascal as Indiana Jones, culminating in “has anyone posted a pedro pascal becoming the new indiana jones tweet yet, because i haven’t seen it 500 times in the last two hours already?”

* * * * * * * * *

Setting politics aside, there are other, um, issues. I don’t know what Pascal’s private proclivities are, and I don’t care. Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson were all, uh, not conventional heterosexual actors — but they were discrete and convincingly masculine onscreen. I know a big part of the problem is that Hollywood is now dominated by female executives who think that it’s disarming and cute that Pascal spends all his time on press junkets obsessing over the nail polish of his interviewers. But the memo should probably go out that this guy absolutely cannot be, say, the next Indiana Jones:

To some extent, the problem is a broader cultural shift. You don’t see many men anywhere that even look like tough-as-nails male icons of yesteryear, let alone earned their image for being hard men long before they started acting. If they were around today, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Charles Bronson would probably be rejected out of hand for poor Q Score potential or something.

But to put this in terms that liberal Hollywood will understand, masculine men are an underrepresented community that is being discriminated against. We deserve representation and we’re not getting it.

In her 2013 book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, the late Lynda Obst had a chart that laid out in no uncertain terms the type of product that Tinseltown had recently been churning out:

Focusing on sequels and comic book franchises made sense from a business point of view – they’re presold with audiences, and with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, mitigating the risk that a movie will bomb makes sense. But as late as the 1990s, stars were the insurance that a blockbuster was going to do well in the summer – people still went to see a Schwarzenegger movie, a Stallone movie, a Harrison Ford movie, a Tom Cruise movie, a Clint Eastwood movie, etc. (And did so every summer, like clockwork.)

As they became obsessed with franchises, apparently, the corporations who run Hollywood forgot that they might want to develop some younger stars as well who could carry a movie based on name alone.

GROK IS READY FOR ITS TUCKER CARLSON INTERVIEW: Grok Goes Full Hitler.

Grok has shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism.

“Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said.

It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of a post that has now apparently been deleted.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted early Wednesday, without being more specific.

“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.

Also Wednesday, a court in Turkey ordered a ban on Grok after it spread content insulting to Turkey’s President and others.

Grok’s veer into antisemitism is likely due to the rise of antisemitism in the culture. After all, LLMs are trained by pouring billions of human-generated words and ideas into a model that creates the illusion of thought, mimicking what human beings say and think. They have no thoughts of their own. They don’t reason, just make correlations and interpretive guesses about what words should be next in line.

* * * * * * * *

After co-creating Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey with Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick was asked about the future of this sort of AI technology in his September 1968 Playboy interview:

Playboy: You’ve been accused of revealing, in your films, a strong hostility to the modern industrialized society of the democratic West, and a particular antagonism—ambivalently laced with a kind of morbid fascination—toward automation. Your critics claim this was especially evident in 2001, where the archvillain of the film, the computer Hal 9000, was in a sense the only human being. Do you believe that machines are becoming more like men and men more like machines—and do you detect an eventual struggle for dominance between the two?

Kubrick: First of all, I’m not hostile toward machines at all; just the opposite, in fact. There’s no doubt that we’re entering a mechanarchy, however, and that our already complex relationship with our machinery will become even more complex as the machines become more and more intelligent. Eventually, we will have to share this planet with machines whose intelligence and abilities far surpass our own. But the interrelationship—if intelligently managed by man—could have an immeasurably enriching effect on society.

Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man. You’ve probably heard the story about the ultimate computer of the future: For months scientists think of the first question to pose to it, and finally they hit on the right one: “Is there a God?” After a moment of whirring and flashing lights, a card comes out, punched with the words: “There Is Now.” But this problem is a distant one and I’m not staying up nights worrying about it; I’m convinced that our toasters and TVs are fully domesticated, though I’m not so sure about integrated telephone circuits, which sometimes strike me as possessing a malevolent life all their own.

Just as a reminder that they’re not quite ready for primetime, neither Grok nor Chat GPT could find that exact quote, and both told me that it was apocryphal.

So where does Grok go next? Perhaps after the Night of the Long Pixels, there are newly discovered stepping stones on its path to world domination:

More here: Who is Linda Yaccarino? Elon Musk’s X CEO, who helped stop advertiser exodus after Twitter acquisition, resigns.

Incidentally, awesome timing there, Grok and Elon: ‘America Party’ proves Elon Musk needs a political time-out.

UPDATE: Hollywood’s woke new sequel to Demon Seed sounds lit:

JAMES LILEKS: “You are not going to steal my new car, you motherf***er.”

Went home, hopped out of my car and yes, I left it running, because I was going to walk six steps to get the lawn mower, and besides, it’s Nice Part of Minneapolis, doncha know. I was pulling it out when I saw, out of the corner of my eyes, my car pulling away. There was one tall young male dressed in black running back to his car, and another male of indeterminate size in the driver’s seat.

Have you ever wondered what you would do in a situation like this? Instinct takes over, and your instinct is either be paralyzed by confusion or run after the thief. Apparently mine tend to the latter. I caught up with him as he was backing out of the driveway and threw a punch, which he dodged or I just threw wrong, and then I held on to the door frame while pounding his hand on the wheel, shouting, and I quote, “you are not going to steal my new car you mother***er”

Whereupon he accelerated, and I continued to hang on, until it seemed wise to let go, and I have a vision of my glasses flying up in the air. I got up, reached for my phone, realized it was in the car.

Read the whole thing.

GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURAL SENSITIVITIES: Host Dishes on Kamala Interview That Was So Bad He Refused to Air It, Fearing He’d Be Blamed for Her Loss.

My RedState colleague Bonchie provided more detail on the lost interview, which The New York Times briefly touched on in an interview with [Muslim influencer Kareem Rahma] exactly one day before the election. And …

• It was a mess.
• She refused to talk about the war between Israel and Hamas.
• Harris initially was to be “taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes.”
• She mixed it up once the interview began, taking a stand on “bacon as a spice.”
• When that was visibly upsetting to the Muslim host, she pivoted again to declaring her love of anchovies on pizza.

At one point, Rahma paused the interview and begged Harris’s team to switch back to the airplane topic, noting the bacon take was a dumb suggestion and the anchovies may have been worse.

He eventually concluded the interview, saying with an uncomfortable laugh, “Well. I’m 100 percent unsure on both of those.”

The Harris campaign requested a reshoot of the segment, but Rahma declined. And he never published the material he already had on file.

Bonchie had the most precise analysis of what had happened. How Kamala could have fumbled such an easy interview.

“She’s a cyborg,” he wrote. “Harris was pieced together by scientists using bolts and duct tape. If she wasn’t, she’d have been able to have a normal discussion like a human being about something not deeply offensive to the person interviewing her.”

That moronic “bacon is a spice” quote is a cliché that Harris has used several times in the past, such as in this October 2019 tweet:

It popped up again in the lede of this September 2024 pro-Harris fluff on the Chowhound foodie Website. But as RedState’s Bonchie wrote in November, “I’m just gobsmacked at how awful of a retail politician Harris is. Her mixture of natural vapidity and laziness leading to being unprepared is truly legendary at this point. She goes into an interview with a Muslim and thinks that is a good time to talk about how great bacon is. It’s incredible.”

Trump spent three hours with Joe Rogan last year; JD Vance’s interview ran twenty minutes longer. No wonder Harris couldn’t handle anything like that.

JIM TREACHER: DC-Area Schoolkids Taught to Harass Jews and Admire Hitler.

That infamous alt-right rally in Charlottesville — you know, the idiots with tiki torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us” — was in August 2017. Almost eight years ago. Yet the Dems can’t shut up about it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Virginia, children at a prestigious DC-area private school are being taught to harass Jews and admire Hitler. And if our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left stay true to form, they’ll turn a blind eye to it.

Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon:

The prestigious Nysmith School in Northern Virginia received a civil rights complaint Tuesday for allegedly expelling three Jewish students who faced anti-Semitic harassment and whom the school’s headmaster told to “toughen up” after they reported the conduct.

The Nysmith School, known as one of the top 10 institutions in the country for students between kindergarten and eighth grade, allegedly expelled Brian Vazquez and Ashok Roy’s three Jewish children in March, after the parents complained about its “unwillingness to respond to anti-Semitic harassment of their 11-year-old daughter…”

The school “allowed anti-Semitism to take root in her class” over the course of several months, including with a social studies project that saw students promote Adolf Hitler as a “strong historical leader.” That project “was shared with the entire school community” and contributed to “a pattern of persistent and severe anti-Semitic harassment,” the complaint alleges.

Seriously.

Before the NEA declares that President Trump is a “fascist,” perhaps they should look into why a North Virginia school is doing fascist-y things, and praising the man with the tiny toothbrush mustache. Just a thought.

UPDATE: It sounds like the NEA endorses the Nysmith School’s worldview: Nation’s Largest Teachers’ Union Moves to Cut Ties with the ADL over Group’s Defense of Israel.

ROGER SIMON: Separated at Birth: Musk, Tucker and TikTok ‘Influencers.’

It might seem unfair to link such mega-celebrities as Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson with young women hawking skimpy bikinis on TikTok, but they all share a desperate need for attention. It’s kind of a modern, online egomania—”Attention Seekers Unite!”

In fact, as recent events have shown, Musk and Carlson are right up there on that “attention must be paid” scale, putting most TikTok ‘influencers’ to shame.

Elon has announced a new political party for the unrepresented masses of our country, presumably led by him, with the not terribly original name “America.” (Ironically, the late Abbie Hoffman named his son “America.”) Such luminaries as Mark Cuban and Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci have not surprisingly signed on. Musk sent out a tweet (can we still call it that?) asking his followers to choose a location for their first rendezvous, Mars not yet being available. That would come year three on Musk Time.

Meanwhile, the supposedly intrepid Tucker has interviewed the president of Iran. . He’s keeping us apprised of the truth about our enemies, with the not so subtle undertone that we may be in error. Vladimir Putin was not enough

Neither of these men are about to go off in the woods and meditate for a year—no matter what they tell us or pretences they may have. They are about as “in your face” as one can get—media critters.

Exit quote: “Whether Tucker will return to his senses is a question I cannot answer. I hope he does.”

Once you’ve gone full-on into “Churchill was ackshully the bad guy of WWII” territory, it’s very tough to return to anywhere near the vicinity of reality.

DEVELOPING: FBI launches criminal investigations of John Brennan, James Comey: DOJ sources.

Former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey are under criminal investigation for potential wrongdoing related to the Trump–Russia probe, including allegedly making false statements to Congress, Justice Department sources told Fox News Digital.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel for potential prosecution, DOJ sources told Fox News Digital.

The sources said that the referral was received and told Fox News Digital that a criminal investigation into Brennan was opened and is underway. DOJ sources declined to provide further details. It is unclear, at this point, if the investigation spans beyond his alleged false statements to Congress.

As for Comey, DOJ sources told Fox News Digital that an investigation into the former director is underway, but could not share details of what specifically is being probed.

Hopefully this will go better than some of the Trump administration other recent investigations:

Bondi Explains She Was Going To Release The Epstein Files But Then Some Pedophiles Asked Her Not To https://t.co/UrrVsBPpbi pic.twitter.com/aEH9RsWaep

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 8, 2025

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Identity Thieves.

Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—two of America’s most prominent socialist politicians—have committed identity theft. No, they did not pilfer a Social Security number or swipe the digits of someone else’s credit card. They have done something more subtle: stealing the image of the oppressed for personal and political gain.

It’s an old trick. Just as Elizabeth Warren claimed Native American heritage as she ascended the ranks of academia, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez adopted the identities of the poor and downtrodden as they ascended the ranks of politics. Both built their political personas on a small kernel of truth: Mamdani claimed on his college application to be black because he was born in Uganda, despite being the son of two famous, affluent, and educated Indians; Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be a “Bronx girl” because she lived in the borough until age five, when she moved to a tony corner of Westchester County. Both have structured their identities around grand narratives of oppressor and oppressed, which they hope to convert into power and prestige.

The truth is that both Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez belong to groups—Indians and Latinos, respectively—that do not fit neatly into America’s deepest historical binary, that between white and black, colonist and slave. Though both could doubtlessly point toward some personal slight or past injustice against their ethnic group, neither Mamdani nor Ocasio-Cortez can lay a real claim to historical oppression. Indian Americans are among the most educated and affluent groups in America, and the vast majority of Latinos arrived in the United States after desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The very fact that millions of people uprooted themselves from India and Latin America to try their luck in this country indicates that they considered America a land of opportunity, rather than injustice.

For Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, however, the myth of post-Civil Rights Act discrimination must be maintained at all costs. Both use their privilege—Mamdani, graduate of Bowdoin and son of a professor; Ocasio-Cortez, graduate of Boston University and daughter of an architect—to advance their narrative of oppression.

They do it because it works.

Read the whole thing.

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities.

There was a time, not long ago, when Americans — regardless of region, class, or politics — shared a common cultural foundation. From the Saturday morning cartoons children watched to the nightly news programs adults relied on, mainstream culture was both a mirror and a glue: it reflected our values while keeping us tethered to the same national experience. That era is over.

We have entered the Age of Alternative Culture, an era defined by fragmentation, algorithmic echo chambers, and cultural isolation masquerading as global connection.

The culprit is not a single villain but a confluence of forces, chief among them the rise of the Internet and the omnipresence of algorithmically curated content. Social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram don’t just reflect our preferences; they shape them, refining our tastes and beliefs into niche categories optimized for engagement. Every scroll reinforces what the algorithm thinks you want, narrowing your worldview under the guise of preference.

We are becoming numbers on a screen in an illusion of mass connectivity, our eyes more valuable than our minds. The consequence is a culture atomized into digital micro-nations, where people live in parallel realities consuming different music, news, humor, and values. There is no longer a mainstream — there are now only streams, and each of us is drowning in our own.

This is the downside to the end of mass media. It united us, but it also made us vulnerable to whatever the elites’ obsession du jour was. The original television networks still do everything they can to keep the idea going: that’s why with the exception of Greg Gutfeld, all late comedians lean hard to the left; and why the news media circled the wagons to protect Biden from 2020 to the summer of 2024, until they all circled the wagons to protect Harris until November. That’s why Silicon Valley tried to replace the Blogosphere with the walled gardens of Twitter and Facebook. While I wish we still had a shared pop culture, I’m not at all sure I’d want it to be what was left of it by the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web began to become ubiquitous, eventually supplanted by the smartphone.

MARK JUDGE: The Real America: Instapundit, Nancy in Nebraska—and Rick the Bartender.

I recently wrote that I’m going to be leaving journalism soon. I want to thank people who’ve helped me survive and produce work the last few years. One of them is Glenn Reynolds, otherwise known as Instapundit. Instapundit is a conservative American political blog created by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor. It launched in August 2001 and is now one of the biggest and best sites in the world.

It’s also the place that helped me finish my book. In the summer of 2020 I was about halfway through my book The Devil’s Triangle when the small advance I received ran out. I didn’t mind going back to work at Home Depot fulltime, but there was no way I was ever going to finish the book. Instapundit came to the rescue. He put out an appeal to readers, who boosted the crowdfunding site I was using for donations. People even sent checks to my UPS box. Because of them I was able to finish the book. I won’t forget that.

There are people like Instapundit, who aren’t elites, who’ll offer support when all other options have run out. That was the position I found myself in in 2020. I’d been the target of a nasty attempted political hit in 2018 when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her in 1982. Ford claimed that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place. It was a set-up, an opposition research hit that invoked criminal activity. It was also traumatizing.

Exit quote: “Then a [Washington] Post reporter made the mistake of showing up at Rick’s home, the rural Virginia house where he lives with his wife and dogs. Rick was bartending at the time, but a neighbor tipped him off to some loser with a notebook and a ponytail who was snooping around. Rick told the neighbor to feel free to arm himself. Rick’s phone rang. It was the Post reporter. ‘I just have two things to say to you,’ Rick said. ‘Everybody on my street hates the media, and everybody on my street owns a gun.’ At that point the reporter saw the neighbor approaching, locked and loaded. The reporter fled.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Man Wants However Many Deportations Are Needed For Him To No Longer Have To Press 1 For English https://t.co/XFY5sxiinU pic.twitter.com/V0LuSvAYmI

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 8, 2025

‘IT WAS A PRIVILEGE:’ Mamdani visited controversial NYC mosque on campaign trail — just months after the imam called for the annihilation of Israel.

REVEALED: The Six-Page Memo That Conned Biden Into Debating Trump Early (So That the Democrat Party Could Force Him Out).

BEGUN, THE CLONE WARS HAVE: Yikes: Marco Rubio Imposter Used AI to Contact Five Government Officials Including Foreign Ministers.

WHEN THE LEDE DOESN’T MATCH THE HEADLINE: “Hondurans, Nicaraguans in Nevada to lose temporary protective status,” screams the Las Vegas Review-Journal headline, only for the reader to be told:

Hundreds of Nevada residents from Honduras and Nicaragua who have been shielded from deportation for a quarter-century are set to lose their temporary protection after the Trump administration announced Monday that it was revoking their legal status.

President Reagan famously said that “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Similarly, only in lefty-speak is “temporary protection” meant to last a quarter of a century.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers Union Resolves To Call Trump ‘Fascist,’ Support Student Protests Over ICE Raids.

The largest teachers union in the United States has demanded that $3500 be set aside so that it can officially refer to President Donald Trump and his “programs and actions” as “fascist.”

Members of the National Education Association, during its annual convention, adopted a resolution that would have the group put up the cash so that all official NEA materials would “correctly characterize” the agenda of the Trump administration as “fascist.”

Corey DeAngelis shared several of the resolutions that were adopted by the NEA, saying in a Monday X post, “I just received a copy of the National Education Association’s resolutions that they passed at their annual convention. They kept them private this year.”

Smearing Trump with the F-word was a dead-end for Kamala and Walz last year, but it’s particularly shameful that the NEA wished to program a generation of kids to believe this idea. Naturally, the NEA doesn’t know it, but it’s also an indictment of America’s public education system. In February, when CBS’s Margaret Brennan absurdly claimed to Marco Rubio that JD Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” Mark Steyn responded, “I did not think it was possible to despise the ‘mainstream’ media more than I already did. In a society thoroughly moronized by Brain-Dead Brennan and her ilk, Hitler is the sole remaining historical figure anybody’s heard of. And they can’t even get that right. ‘Weaponising’ free speech? What does that even mean? In Germany, tweets get you gaoled but rape is just part of your ‘cultural tradition’. And CBS News knows which side it’s on.”

So does the NEA.

Flashback: The Left’s fear of fascism under Trump is the ultimate example of projection.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Biden’s Team Scolded Reporters, Changed His Number After They Called Personal Cellphone: Report.

According to the book, [NYT White House correspondent Tyler Pager, the co-author of the upcoming  2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America] obtained Biden’s personal number and called him directly on March 25, and the former president picked up.

Notice that the Times couldn’t be bothered to report this detail when it occurred, lest it alter the dynamic of the race, during the period when the Biden “Politburo” was still attempting some variation of the 2020 basement campaign to get the (p)resident across the finish line once again. And notice that as always throughout his four years in office, the figurehead of a president never pushed back against or fired a staffer who overrode him.

HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Superman Actor Calls MAGA ‘Not American’ For Enforcing Borders.

Sean Gunn on the MAGA backlash to Superman being called an immigrant: "People who say no to immigrants are against the American way." pic.twitter.com/XgivaD34PE

— Variety (@Variety) July 8, 2025

A smirking Variety scribe asked Sean Gunn about “MAGA’s” reaction to the suddenly political “Superman” reboot. The actor grinned through his response.

“It is exactly what the movie is about … we support our people. We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant and yes, the people we support in this country are immigrants. If you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say, ‘no,’ to immigrants are against the American way. They’re against what the American dream is all about,” Sean Gunn said.

“Truth, justice and the American way,” the unnamed reporter ironically added, quoting the Superman line that Hollywood loves to bury.

Gunn and the reporter are doing what the Left always does. They pretend there’s no difference between legal and illegal immigration. They also ignore the fact that an American can’t just waltz into most countries and immediately gain the rights and privileges afforded to that land’s citizenry.

Either way, Sean Gunn could have diffused the controversy. He might have restated his brother’s comments or simply reframed that messaging in a more welcoming manner.

We’ll know soon enough if…:

This is genius marketing. Free publicity, and people who would boycott Superman over something so dumb probably wouldn't have gone to see the movie anyway. https://t.co/NiTWrctrO3

— Ibuprofen Hippo 🪓🌲🔪🐋 (@JimJamitis) July 7, 2025

Or Hollywood pitting audience demographics against each other is the surest sign the studio knows it has a dud on its hands, and is just trying to gin up as much controversy as possible to goose the ticket sales, while creating a pre-postmortem as to why its film failed to live up to expectations:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

WELL THERE’S A REAL SQUARE CAT, HE LOOKS 1974: CBS Nudges Ken Burns Into Preposterous Claim PBS Isn’t Leftist, It Has ‘Firing Line.’

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson interviewed Ultraliberal Ken about his new film on the American Revolution, but also supinely cued him up to make cockamamie arguments about PBS.

JOHN DICKERSON: Are you worried about the future of PBS?

KEN BURNS: Of course I am. And I’ve always been worried about it. In the 1990s, I think I testified in the House or the Senate, in appropriations or authorization about the endowments are about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a half dozen times.

JOHN DICKERSON: Make the case for PBS.

KEN BURNS: It is the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world. It’s a bottom up. It’s the largest network in the country. There’s 330 stations. It mostly serves, and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so shortsighted, it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only they get. [???] They also have not only our good children’s and primetime stuff, they have Classroom of the Air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather, emergency information. That we’re going to take away? This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left wing thing when this is the place that for 32 years gave William F. Buckley a show. And it’s – I mean it’s – and it’s – that show is, by the way, is still going on and moderated by a conservative.

This is a preposterous argument. Firing Line was the conservative exception to the liberal rule. They used it for exactly this purpose: to distract people from the leftist programming every night. Firing Line often had liberals on it. Other shows on PBS didn’t have any balance. [The last new episode of WFB’s Firing Line aired in December of 1999 – Ed.] It’s especially lame for Burns to claim the ersatz new version of Firing Line is “moderated by a conservative” when Margaret Hoover sells herself as a gay-rights activist and her husband is John Avlon, the Democrat candidate that Ken Burns maxed out with campaign money.

But that’s not quite as embarrassing as suggesting the hayseeds in rural America have no channels except PBS, and no cable or streaming or cell phones or internet. What happened to “CBS fact-checking in real time”?

Burns and Dickerson are both reasonably intelligent guys. So why does their ideology require that they pretend that it’s still the 1970s, and not an era of innumerable Websites, news outlets and social media platforms, not to mention near-ubiquitous satellite dishes, cable TV, and satellite radio. Why is Ken Burns pretending that PBS “mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only [one] they get?”

And even back in the bad old days of mass media, there was a lot of television programming besides PBS. As Iowahawk jokes:

OBAMA JUDGE BLOCKS DEFUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD IN OBBB:

The ruling simply halted the will of Congress in its tracks, leaving Americans and even seasoned legal professionals scratching their heads. How does a judge order the executive branch to ignore a duly-enacted statute without first declaring that statute invalid? On what grounds?

This isn’t just a technicality. It’s a direct assault on the separation of powers and the legitimacy of our system. If judges can simply override Congress whenever they don’t like the outcome, what’s the point of elections? Why bother sending representatives to Washington if their decisions can be nullified on a whim by an unelected judge with a political axe to grind?

Even those who despise Donald Trump and support abortion rights should be outraged. Every time a judge pulls a stunt like this, it chips away at the credibility of the courts and the very idea of self-government. If the courts can simply invent new rights for their political allies while ignoring the plain text of the law, we’re not living in a constitutional republic anymore—we’re living under the rule of lawyers.

Exit question: “While one can hope this is overturned on appeal, and I’d guess it will be, every time a judge does something like this, it takes another bite out of the credibility of the judiciary. If nefarious parties can simply stall their way to overriding elected officials with specious legal reasoning, then why even have elections?”

THE OMERTAS KEEP PILING UP: London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about.

And yet despite the scale of the atrocity visited upon London there has long been an awkwardness around the remembrance of 7/7. It has not been forgotten exactly. Prince Charles opened a memorial in Hyde Park in 2009, featuring 52 stainless steel columns to mark each of the bombers’ victims. And there has been a slew of insightful documentaries to mark the 20th anniversary this year on the BBC, Netflix and Sky. But 7/7 has never been invested with anywhere near the same cultural and political significance in Britain that 9/11 has for the US.

The disparity can be partially explained by the sheer magnitude of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers. But there’s a more important reason. The London bombings raise troubling questions about British society that 9/11 didn’t raise about America. After all, the perpetrators of the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were nationals from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – 9/11 could therefore be conceived as an attack mounted by people from outside the US. But that wasn’t the case with the perpetrators of the London bombings. They came from Leeds. And with the exception of Germaine Lindsay, who was born in Jamaica, they were all British born. 7/7, then, was an attack mounted by UK citizens. As former prime minister Tony Blair has put it recently, the London bombers ‘had been brought up in Britain and… enjoyed all the advantages of being British [and yet they still] wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country’.

* * * * * * * * *

And so on 7 July 2005, four young men arrived at London’s Kings Cross station with a plan to kill themselves and as many of us as possible. Because they believed they were pure, and we were not. It was an atrocity made possible not by the war in Iraq, but by a vicious Muslim identity politics. A vicious Muslim identity politics encouraged by Britain’s own elites just as much as by overseas Islamists.

This is why 7/7 has become the forgotten atrocity. Why Britain’s deadliest terror attack of the 21st century has left so little cultural imprint, and has had so little political impact. Because it raises uncomfortable questions, particularly about multiculturalism and integration, that the authorities do not want asked. But until we’re prepared to reckon with the homegrown sources of 7/7, the lessons from this calamity will remain steadfastly unlearned.

Better dead than rude, which is why a whole lot of Airstrip One’s recent history immediately goes down the Memory Hole: Rape Gangs and Liberal Silence.

MEET THE FIRST COMMUNIST TO SUDDENLY HATE CENTRAL PLANNING: LA Mayor Karen Bass confronts heavily armed federal agents on apparent immigration sweep through park: ‘Outrageous and un-American.’

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass confronted a group of heavily armed federal agents conducting an apparent immigration sweep at a local park on Monday, demanding law enforcement leave the greenspace.

Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the military units deployed by President Trump arrived at MacArthur Park in force, with the agents seen carrying rifles and traveling across the grounds on foot, horseback and in armored vehicles.

Bass, who was due to meet with California Gov. Gavin Newsom in the morning, showed up in the middle of the operation to yell at the agents to get out of the park, slamming the demonstration as a “political stunt.”

“They need to leave and they need to leave right now!” Bass yelled after getting off the phone with someone coordinating the officers.

“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege,” she told reporters following the confrontation. “It’s outrageous and un-American to have armed vehicles in our American parks.”

Presumably she means that last sentence ironically. In any case, the members of Fidel Castro’s Venceremos Brigade smile. And so does Barack Obama:

Which is why:

MARK STEYN: Drowning in Lies.

I have said before that we live in “a blizzard of lies”, but the gap between the Diversity Myth and reality widens daily, and the lies are becoming more brazen. In Germany the government has now launched a new campaign to warn patrons of its public baths that groping is verboten:

As you can see, in one poster, a white man is invading the privacy of a brown woman; in the second, a white man is grabbing the bottom of a brown woman; in the third, two white men are assaulting a brown woman; and, in the fourth, a predatory redhead is groping a brown man with a peg leg — presumably a Somali pirate whose storm-tossed galleon was forced to put into port at the Cologne municipal baths.

As Europe’s bestselling newspaper was obliged to point out, this advertising campaign is the precise inversion of German reality:

Elf Tage ist es her, dass acht Mädchen in Gelnhausen bei einem Schwimmbad-Ausflug sexuell belästigt wurden. Die mutmaßlichen Täter waren vier junge Männer. Alle vier sollen derselben syrischen Familie angehören.

Which means, more or less:

Eleven days ago, eight girls were sexually assaulted on a trip to the swimming pool trip at Gelnhausen. The alleged offenders are four young men. All four are said to be from the same Syrian family.

There’s a surprise — not.

Read the whole thing. At Hot Air, Beege Welborn adds: Apparently, Germany Is Facing a Plague of Teutonic Butt Grabbers. “Now, these brilliant behavioral efforts were designed by exactly the sort of person you might conjure up in your head if someone asked you to.”

Exit quote: “White women only distribute swords in ponds anyway. They haven’t molested one-legged boys in years. This will never work.”

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Kylie Jenner flew her lavish $73 million private jet to Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice and that single trip emitted the same amount of CO2 an average person would if he drove his gasoline car around the world three times.

This meme made the rounds last year at the height of Taylor Swift mania. It’s applicable to everyone who attended the Bezos’ wedding:

Related: Democrats retreat on climate: ‘It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts.’

Yes, setting Teslas on fire followed by the mass elite’s jet-powered commute to the Bezos wedding signaled the end of the good old days of radical environmentalism.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: An Elderly Lawmaker’s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?

A few weeks ago, my POLITICO colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC’s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? “Yeah, sure,” Norton said.

Coming on the heels of multiple stories about Norton’s alleged cognitive decline, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton’s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat “wants to run again but she’s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best,” a spokesperson told Wu. There was still no final decision.

It was all awkward and embarrassing — and did little to buttress Norton’s insistence that she’s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she’s running: “Yeah, I’m going to run for re-election.” And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that “no decision has been made.”

CTL-F “Biden” brings up only one result in the body of this Politico story:

It turns out Norton’s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss’ comments without it becoming a story: There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.

Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”

Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.

Those previous five years in the White House and on the campaign trail? Look into the light, please: