The executive order didn’t specify Japanese-Americans as a group, but the U.S. military detained more than 100,000 people in the next six months and moved them to camps and facilities with armed guards and barbed wire.
There were 10 camps set up nationally, and about 120,000 people were interned in the camps during the war. About two-thirds of them were Japanese-Americans who were born in the United States. People of Italian and German heritage were also detained.
The controversial moves were met with legal challenges, which eventually were unsuccessful in freeing the detainees from the camps, despite the serious constitutional issues involved.
—The National Constitution Center, February 19th, 2024.
If you’re looking for an explanation of Massie’s defeat in a Republican primary election, consider the extraordinary possibility that Republican voters might have had something to do with it, having made their own evaluation about the quality of his service in public office. The change in the last two years is that Massie entered into a political partnership with Democrats, allying with the Bay Area Congressman Ro Khanna, a particularly repellent Democrat, to try to harm Trump politically. He was also one of two Republicans in the House to vote against the Big Beautiful Bill, the landmark legislation of Trump’s second term.
Republican voters are punishing elected officials who don’t work consistently to advance the agenda of the Republican Party and its much-ignored base, while also telling a clear story about working to advance a Republican agenda. Republican voters are … Republicans. Massie didn’t lose because of Donald Trump or because of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Elder, who would have become the state’s first black governor had he won, was smeared continually by California media at the behest of the left in the most absurd and often quite offensive ways.
The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion column in August [2021] headlined “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.” Another Los Angeles Times columnist linked Elder to the politics of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.
How It’s Going:
I love how every article like this is like, "Hi, I'm a disabled, transgender anchor baby whose family's existence was drain on American taxpayers. I hate children and my sexual fetish is watching homeless drug addicts writhing in their own feces on the sidewalk so I love the… https://t.co/BfHZw1LVjx
Tweet concludes, “‘so I love the status quo here in LA. Anyway, please vote for the candidate that will allow me to keep pleasuring myself to the sight of living corpses on our streets.’”
Sean Davis responds, that the L.A. Times are “claiming Pratt has a ‘dark vision’ for Los Angeles because he opposes the city constantly being on fire. What a bunch of psychopaths.”
A “journalist” named Marlo Stern recently responded to Pratt’s promise to leave Los Angeles if he loses. I guess he said that on some podcast. I don’t know if he was joking. I don’t know. He said it.
And Marlo Stern’s response was:
Okay. Why does he live in Santa Barbara?
Because his house burned down.
That’s the whole point of his campaign. That’s why he wants to be mayor. He knows better than most people how incompetent the government is.
But the Democrats don’t have an answer for that. They can’t rebut the centerpiece of his campaign. So they just pretend it didn’t happen. They act like he doesn’t live in his own home by choice. He decided to move.
And that was Pratt’s response:
That was a “wild meltdown,” according to the Daily Beast. Because Spencer Pratt is not a Democrat.
And now this Marlo Stern idiot is playing victim, because the big bad Republican was mean to him. All he did was make fun of the guy for his house burning down. That’s journalism, isn’t it?
That’s all they’ve got, because he’s exactly right about the problem. And they don’t know how to solve problems. All they can do is lie about it. All they can do is call you names about it.
I’m skeptical that Spencer Pratt can win in L.A., but the Democrats sure think so. That’s why they’re panicking.
Either way, I’m glad he’s pushing back against these corrupt… I can’t think of a word that I won’t have to bleep out. These corrupt so-and-so’s. How about that?
Philadelphians reelected Democrat Wilson Goode in 1987 after his administration burned four city blocks, which “killed 11 people, and left 250 people homeless,” when the police bombed the radical chic MOVE group out of their compound and the resulting fire spread out of control. Los Angelenos will soon likely award far worse incompetence.
May 20, 2026
RUBIO TO CUBA: “The reason you are forced to survive without electricity is not an oil blockade by America. It is because the people who control your country have plundered billions.”
pic.twitter.com/cDNVHZrdIo 🇨🇺 🇺🇲 Rubio delivered remarks in Spanish directly to the Cuban people tonight, hours before the DOJ announces at Miami's Freedom Tower tomorrow. The argument he made: GAESA – the military conglomerate Raúl Castro founded 30 years ago – has $18 billion in…
While Donald Trump is indicting Cuban communist dictator Raúl Castro, Barack Obama was attending baseball games with him in Havana. pic.twitter.com/egW8I0Hndc
— Enrique Alejandro (@EnriAlejandroTV) May 20, 2026
There’s a famous joke that gets at where we suddenly find ourselves:
A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God greets him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully.”
The man asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?”
God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone.”
The man pauses. “Shit. This goes higher up than I thought.”
That’s the country now. Not just the guy in the joke—all of us, drowning in what I’d call X-Files politics: a shallow understanding of first principles, a deep distrust of every institution, and a general paranoia in which the lack of evidence is proof. “The truth is out there,” The X-Files promised. Except it isn’t. Increasingly, it feels like the truth is nowhere.
In fairness to the conspiracy-minded, most of this stuff has some basis in reality. There really was an island with a shrine where young girls were served up to the most powerful men in the world. The Boy Scouts really was full of pedos. There really are grooming gangs in the UK.
All the ugly truths escaped containment, and every conspiracy theorist could point at them and say see, we were right all along. Add to that the blatant “don’t believe your lying eyes” levels of propaganda that have occurred in the last decade. Racism is the real virus. Mostly peaceful protests. Russiagate. Very fine people on both sides. Politicians, institutions, and their media mouthpieces got caught lying enough times that “trust the science” became a punchline.
The Establishment collapsed. The Void opened, and it filled with half-truths.
The Kennedy analogy is apt; a fellow leftist assassinating JFK caused massive cognitive dissonance and paranoia among big government Democrats in the 1960s. That was one of the topics explored by James Piereson in his 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:
The distrust and suspicion of the national government that developed in the years after Kennedy’s death represented an especially important adjustment in approach by the reform movement. From Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, including most especially John F. Kennedy, liberals expressed great faith in the capacity of the national government to carry out programs to improve the lives of a majority of Americans. The countless programs they promoted are ample testimony to that faith. Yet such a faith could not help but be undermined by accusations that elements of the national government might have engineered the assassination of a president and then conspired with prominent leaders to cover it up. It was perhaps not well understood that such accusations, when not backed up by hard facts and evidence, struck at the heart of the welfare state that liberals over the preceding generation had worked so hard and intelligently to construct. After all, one can hardly argue before a perceptive audience that the national government is so corrupt as to engineer the assassination of a president but at the same time sufficiently competent and trustworthy to administer the pensions and health care of the American people. This ambivalence about national power-that is, the idea that the government is at once deeply corrupt and potentially beneficent-entered into the mainstream of liberal thinking in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Such ambivalence compromised the case for the welfare state; indeed, it may have opened the way somewhat later for potent attacks on it from a conservative direction.
Or as Charles Cooke asked the left in 2016, “Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: ‘Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?’”
The sense that late-night plays to a particular type of audience wasn’t supposed to be part of the mix. Johnny Carson made fun of politicians, but mostly their public goofs, not their policies. Leno rarely became political. And Letterman, often irascible, feuded with politicians but not over what they did in Washington. John McCain became a Letterman target because the former U.S. Senator canceled a 2008 appearance on “Late Show” in favor of talking to Katie Couric. When Letterman squabbled with former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it was because of a demeaning remark he made about Palin’s teenage daughter.
Late-night shows in 2026 are a wholly different creation. “These shows were built to be vaudeville in the box in your living room,” says Young. “They were a place to watch jugglers and clowns and funny people doing impressions. They were not made for this.”
Colbert wasn’t looking to alienate crowds. He was simply following what had already made him successful. This is, after all, an improv comedian and writer who got his big break working for Jon Stewart at Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” at a time when Stewart was presiding over a cable program that asked its young viewers to look harder at media and politics. Colbert did the unthinkable when he launched “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central in 200, playing a fictional character for nearly a decade who was meant to satirize conservative TV pundits.
So entrenched was the character in viewers’ minds that Colbert spent several sketches after he moved to CBS trying to separate himself from the creation he once played. Indeed, his former employer, Viacom, made outreach asking whether such use of intellectual property was fair. It didn’t help, of course, that the character shared Colbert’s name.
“Colbert never shook his ‘Colbert Report’ persona. That show was groundbreaking,” says Marx. “And he really brought some of that savvy audience with him from Comedy Central.”
Comedy Central’s fortunes rose and ebbed over how many younger male viewers it could reach. CBS’ hinged on the network’s ability to draw the biggest, broadest crowds. The challenge: The biggest crowd CBS could get was a cohort composed largely of people who wanted to see Colbert zing the powers-that-be. And maybe some hate-watchers, too.
Even as CBS won the ratings, the group of people watching late-night became less heterogenous. And as other hosts adopted a similar stance, more of midnight-TV viewership developed in the same way.
In which Variety either rewrites or stumbles upon the same observation that Robert Tracinski made in 2017 at The Federalist: “What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.”
Like Conan O’Brien, Colbert will in short order reinvent himself as a podcaster and/or YouTuber. Or perhaps he’ll host a show on CNN or M-SNOW, albeit one with a far smaller budget.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOMELESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: “No one getting paid $26,153.85 every 2 weeks to solve the homeless problem is going to solve the homeless problem.”
Spencer Pratt reveals he knows homeless NGO executives are making over $1 million dollars per year
“Homeless "nonprofit" execs are raking in over $1 million a year on the homeless problem — guarantees the problem is never solved”
If you notice, the clips don’t come with the usual disclaimer at the end: “I’m Spencer Pratt, and I approve this message.” That’s because his campaign isn’t producing them. These are “fan” videos, made by filmmaker Charlie Curran.
This is something new—videos that look like and do the work of political advertising but that aren’t paid for by a campaign or political action committee and don’t feature any footage or audio from the candidate himself. The Federal Election Commission regulates political advertising, largely by requiring disclosures and enforcing funding limits and coordination rules. Does any of that apply here? Hard to tell. Mr. Curran has free speech, after all.
In the predigital world, campaigns were limited by what they could afford. The typical candidate’s fundraising pitch is built around the need for money to put commercials on TV. Nobody can say for sure how much a 60-second AI-generated spot costs to make. But it’s radically less expensive than hiring a film crew to produce cinematic ads like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” or Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy.”
Mr. Pratt may not ultimately win, and his approach may not work for every outsider looking to make a quick splash on the cheap. But his campaign is proving that AI and social media are enough to make the right candidate competitive in the right circumstances. Campaign consultants have gotten rich for decades by selling the idea that a strong spot at an opportune time can determine the outcome of a race.
What will they sell now?
The promise that they and only they know the magic coding sequence to prompt the AI. Or that “nobody reads Facebook and X” in the local market that a candidate is running in, so it’s still necessary to set millions of dollars alight to buy traditional TV commercials.
Invoking Orwell to defend a totalitarian dictatorship and make excuses for its decades of corruption and mismanagement. Literally rolling over in his grave. https://t.co/4trlTgcqd6
In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
It’s been a “few decades.” How is Mr. Gore’s prophecy working out? Did he even get the direction right?
Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.
Yet there is a greater chance that all of them will be eaten by gators by next Friday than there is of Mr. Gore issuing an “Oops.” Hey, he was merely saying, “According to some predictions,” right? Maybe he was quoting a soothsayer he met in Reno. Maybe he did some research at the local facility for the criminally insane.
Maybe he was quoting that legendary soothsayer, Dan Rather, in 1982:
Rather was pivoting from another legendary soothsayer, Walter Cronkite, during the previous decade:
Former Vice President Al Gore warned a Hollywood audience Thursday that a Gulf Stream collapse could occur within 25 years, remarks that came 20 years after his climate documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” drew criticism for predictions that did not bear out.
Mr. Gore, 78, appeared at the inaugural Sustainability in Entertainment Honors, co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance at Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. He participated in a keynote conversation with actor Bradley Whitford of “The West Wing,” timed to the 20th anniversary of “An Inconvenient Truth.”
According to a Breitbart account of the event, Mr. Gore invoked the scenario depicted in the 2004 disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow” — though he repeatedly referred to it as “The Day After,” the title of a separate 1983 television film about nuclear war — saying a shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, commonly called the Gulf Stream, is “a very real threat within the next 25 years.”
“That movie that I mentioned, ’The Day After’ about the Gulf Stream shutting down, well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of the scientists who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.
Mr. Whitford raised a more compressed timeline, suggesting that a Gulf Stream collapse could put the world “in an ice age in, like, 10 years.” Mr. Gore pushed back, saying such a scenario would unfold more slowly, while acknowledging the consequences would be severe.
“It would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond our, anything we can compare it to today,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.
Exit quote from Smith: “But as the tone on climate change adjusts to reality, he risks joining Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich to go down in intellectual history as one of the Three Stooges of man-caused global disaster.”
These fans of the soon-to-be-former congressman (and other lunatics) will now be tasked with determining which supernatural force bears more blame for Massie’s defeat—Donald Trump or the Jews? A rhetorical question, of course. As the antisemites have certainly realized by now, even someone as handsome and powerful as Trump is not impervious to Jewish influence. The real question is whether they will ultimately grasp the futility of waging a lame crusade against an omnipotent cult that controls the weather, the space lasers, and the White House.
“My people are smart enough to understand that this is Israel trying to buy an election,” Massie told Fox News on Tuesday. Alas, his constituents’ brains did not prove beyond the reach of the meddling globalists, who spent a small fraction of their towering net worth to defeat a man Trump once charitably described as a “complete and total disaster as a congressman and, frankly, as a human being.” Money well spent, in our opinion. His righteous defeat concluded what was arguably the most important primary of the 2026 cycle. His victory would have emboldened the antisemitic conspiracy mongers that exist on both sides of the political spectrum. The result is proof that Republicans are not willing to coddle these freaks and are willing to happily purge them from their ranks. It sends a strong signal that frothing Groyperism is not a winning message in GOP primaries, which is good for the long-term health of the party and the country. For that, we can thank the unyielding leadership of Donald Trump—and whatever forces are controlling his mind.
Related: “Meanwhile, on the Left, an antisemite like Hasan Piker is praised, mainstreamed, campaigned with, and sanitized. Someone who doesn’t believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state like Zohran Mamdani is lauded as the future. Accusing Israel of genocide is the cost of entry, and the word Zionist has become a slur. Being pro-Israel, as the vast majority of Jews are, is a non-starter. The two sides are not the same. The Right may have antisemites—but the party is easily and eagerly purging itself of them. The Left is plagued by antisemitism—because it is embracing its antisemites.“
Based on this manifesto, it seems entirely possible the San Diego shooters intended to target a Jewish synagogue and ended up at a mosque because they’re idiots. https://t.co/KbBNcT7UdZ
— Trinity Votes 🇮🇱🇺🇦 (@TrinityMustache) May 20, 2026
And:
Friendly fire? One of the three deceased Muslims killed at the terror-linked Islamic Center of San Diego praised Adolph Hitler for killing Jews. Amin Abdullah is being celebrated by the media and Muslims on social media.
Tweet concludes, “The two teens who killed themselves after the shooting appeared to have left behind manifestos praising Hitler. The mosque is infamous for having some of the 9/11 hijackers among its members.”
Nicholas Kristof’s column in The New York Times continues to reverberate a week after publication, and has created an internal rift between the newspaper’s newsroom and its opinion section.
The column, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” includes allegations of systematic sexual abuse by Israeli prison guards and soldiers against Palestinian detainees. It cites testimony from 14 Palestinians alleging the use of batons and carrots, threats to rape family members and dogs used for sexual assault while prison staff laughed and filmed the incident.
The article drew widespread reactions around the world, including protests and calls to cancel subscriptions. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for libel against the State of Israel. Israeli officials and the Israel Prison Service have completely denied the claims, and Netanyahu called them baseless.
Think about that: the journalists who would run with allegations from the Steele Dossier and make a two-year crusade out of proving it are too ashamed to touch Kristof’s accusations.
That’s how absurd this story is.
Thus the kerfuffle between the Gray Lady’s “news” and opinion departments:
BREAKING: A massive civil war has reportedly emerged within the New York Times, with many journalists questioning the credibility of Kristof’s piece.
One NYT journalist stated: “I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section.”
Brilliant demolition of the NYT's BS dog rape story – by veteran Australian editor Alan Howe: What NYT should’ve asked before publishing its Palestinian rape story https://t.co/Jkee8Y6XMWpic.twitter.com/Ff4Jle1KXi
Controversy-tarred congressional candidate Maureen Galindo this week pledged to transform a site south of San Antonio now used by the Trump administration to detain migrants into an internment camp for “American Zionists.”
“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend, referring to herself in the third person. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
Galindo’s latest set of inflammatory remarks comes as the Democratic hopeful for Texas’ newly redrawn 35th Congressional District continues to draw national attention for remarks critics have called antisemitic and untethered from reality. The controversy is snowballing as she heads into the May 26 Democratic primary runoff.
Over the past week, Galindo has accused her runoff opponent — former Bexar County Public Information Officer Johnny Garcia — of participating in a human trafficking conspiracy orchestrated by billionaire zionist Jews. She also pledged during a Texas Public Radio interview to put Garcia on trial for treason.
Beyond her attacks on Garcia, Galindo has continued to promote the narrative that a cabal of Jewish zionists controls Hollywood, the media and even local politicians.
Will she be appearing on Candace, Tucker, or Megyn’s next show?
Above, host Stephen Colbert with dancers dressed as COVID vaccine needles in September 2021. (CBS, via YouTube)
Other guests whom Colbert lifted on his show since the 2015 election of President Donald Trump were antisemites such as Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, and socialists such as former Democratic Missouri Rep. Cori Bush and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). An interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (he/him), who maintains that God is “nonbinary” and white skin spreads the “virus” of racism, was put online after concerns about violating the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule.
During the recent NYC mayoral race, Colbert had on Hamas apologist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, along with City Comptroller Brad Lander.
Yes, the Brad Lander. What a tremendous thrill it must have been for the late-night audience to hear from a city accountant.
Though it’s not fair to say that Colbert never had on a Republican. Trump-haters, former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were also on. By one measure, the host had 176 left-leaning or Democratic guests, or 99% of his visitors.
Carson, despite perceptions, did have political guests such as Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jerry Brown, Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. The point, judging from old clips, was to show the human side of these political celebrities, not to use the show as a campaign stop.
Colbert, whose legacy Eric Deggans at NPR says was that he “distinguished truth from truthiness,” is free to feature anyone he likes on the show. He can also be out of business. The monotonous, one-sided, cringy disparagement would become painful for anyone who wasn’t obsessed with politics to watch. One of the problems is that leftists simply can’t ridicule themselves. Not really.
CHLOE MELAS: CBS was recently acquired by Skydance Media, whose owner David Ellison is a prominent Trump supporter. CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision and not related in any way to the show’s performance. But that statement doesn’t ring true to everyone. Brian Lowry is a media veteran reporter.
BRIAN LOWRY: There was a sense the studio was eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.
The Ellison MAGA rebrand is an important element in the ongoing canonization of late-night comics to Resistance™ sainthood. In Colbert’s particular case this narrative is useful inasmuch as it helps brush off the financial reality of the show as a key element of its cancellation.
Another road is if Colbert decides to launch his own talk or interview show — whether a podcast or on YouTube. The average age of a Colbert viewer is 68, which perhaps says more about CBS’ audience than it does Colbert’s, but it also makes it a bit tougher to imagine Colbert hustling viewers to “smash that like and subscribe button” on YouTube alongside MrBeast.
But there’s almost three million of them. So, perhaps the next stop for Colbert is Substack?
Stephen Colbert was losing $40 million a year but this is the signal that Substack wants him and it will be the death of the platform. https://t.co/qqnTqRaiQs
This is kiddie entertainment from start to finish, a parade of new creatures, mediocre CGI and cuddly characters who would make the Minions blush.
The fact that Jon Favreau (“Swingers!” “Elf!” “Iron Man!”) co-wrote and directed this slop is tragic. He gets little out of his cast. Pascal, who previously made his presence felt while behind a mask, has zero arc or character to play.
He’s Protagonist 101. That’s it.
Sigourney Weaver walks through her role as a New Republic commander. She’d be Razzie worthy if she had more screen time.
The new villains barely have a pulse, from Coyne to a crimelord (Hemky Madera) who couldn’t threaten a toddler with his theatrics.
On the other side of the big pond, the London Times’ film critic concurs, giving the movie one star and concluding, “Fold the companies, cancel the forthcoming movies and close the theme park. You wouldn’t leave a dying dog like this. But that’s what Star Wars has become. Putting it down would be a mercy killing. Oh, and Martin Scorsese provides the voice of a four-armed capuchin monkey called Hugo. So that’s nice.”
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