LEGENDARY HOLLYWOOD LEFTIST PINES FOR THE 1950s: Good Night, and Good Luck review: George Clooney makes his Broadway debut in a sleepy newsroom play.

“Good Night, and Good Luck,” the play that opened Thursday at the Winter Garden Theatre, is a big story with a huge set and an enormous star.

So it comes as a surprise that the impression left by the dusty historical drama as the audience pours out onto Broadway is so small and fleeting. Good Night, and What’s For Dinner?

The celeb du jour is George Clooney, who makes his Broadway debut — twice. He’s both the co-playwright and stars in the genteel role of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who waged a public battle with Communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

“Good night, and good luck,” was the man’s famous sign-off.

That line is spoken many times in this attractive but empty show. I enjoyed looking at the massive and elaborate TV studio and retro suits for a while. But you can’t light a damp log.

W. Joseph Campbell responds, “In fact, Murrow was quite late in taking on McCarthy in the 1950s. Journos who called out McCarthy’s witch-hunting ways long before Murrow did in 1954 included columnist Drew Pearson, Richard Rovere of the New Yorker, and James Weschler of [the New York Post].

In 2010, Campbell wrote that Murrow was “No white knight–and not above the political fray:”

“Broadcast icon Edward R. Murrow was not a registered Democrat or Republican–he was an independent. Before courageously taking on Sen. Joe McCarthy, he was considered an anti-communist, supporting, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs as spies for the Soviet Union. He wouldn’t have dreamed of giving donations to political candidates.”

To say Murrow he was studiously nonpartisan is to misread history. Murrow wasn’t so above the fray, and he was no white knight.

Notably, he donated time and expertise to helping the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson.

In my latest book, Getting It Wrong, I cite A.M. Sperber, one of Murrow’s leading biographers, in noting how Murrow privately counseled Stevenson on “the finer points of speaking to the camera.”

Sperber wrote in her 1986 work, Murrow: His Life and Times, that although the 1956 presidential election was a foregone conclusion, that Republican incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower was certain to win,  Murrow agreed “to help the Democrats.” Sperber called Murrow’s decision  “a radical departure from his usual practice.”

The idea, Sperber wrote, was “to effect a liaison between the broadcaster and the candidate, to discuss the use of TV in the forthcoming campaign.”

She noted that the Murrow-Stevenson “connection was kept under wraps,” that the “understanding” between the broadcaster and Stevenson advisers was that Murrow “was acting as a private citizen” and that the matter was to be “kept quiet.”

Why did Murrow do it?

Murrow wasn’t the first Democratic Party operative with a byline — and he certainly wouldn’t be the last.

In 2017, Campbell added that “Murrow ‘was very late in confronting McCarthy’ and ‘did so only after other journalists had challenged the senator and his tactics for months, even years,’” creating what Campbell likes to a classic “media myth” that Clooney adopted into first a movie in 2005 and now a Broadway play. That being said, everyone in the media who lives to recreate those moments could have had their equivalent over the last four years with the endless number of failures of the Biden administration (not least of which, their lack of an actual functioning president), but chose to remain silent, and take one for the team. And so did Clooney! Until Obama apparently gave him his blessings to write a New York Times column condemning Joe’s senescence in his catastrophic debate with Trump last June.

And then there’s blacklist subtext of any film or play about McCarthy. That’s a topic that should never be touched by Hollywood again, since the industry has spent the last quarter century blacklisting anyone to the right of Stalin – and even blacklisting lefties who have made anti-blacklisting movies. Or as Glenn wrote in late 2020, “After a decade of seeing leftists doxxing people and getting them fired for expressing a forbidden opinion, I have to ask what’s their beef with Joe McCarthy?”

Heh, indeed. Still though, Clooney’s new play is a triumph on one level:

BLOFELD RESIGNS AS HEAD OF SPECTRE: Schwab Out As WEF Chair.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

In recent weeks, the Forum has been shaking up its leadership after the board received the findings of an investigation into the organization’s workplace culture. The investigation was prompted by a Wall Street Journal article last year that revealed allegations by employees of discrimination against women and Black people at the Forum, which is based in Geneva.

Schwab and the WEF originally denied any allegations of wrongdoing, but CEO Børge Brende refused to substantiate the findings but said that the organization would address the issues that had been raised. In a memo, Brende said, “Over these past months, we have taken time—time to pause, to listen, and to reflect. This period of reflection has been grounded in a desire not just to do things differently, but to do them better.” Other departures are said to include Schwab’s son, Olivier, who had been the organization’s managing director, Malte Goberson, who oversaw digital services, and chief legal officer Nicola Port.

“Schwab will remain in his position until a replacement is named,” Lincoln Brown of PJ Media writes. And you vill be instructed to still eat ze bugs until further notice, comrade.

No word yet how NPR is taking this news, but here’s how they freaked out over eating ze bugs in 2023: It’s NPR vs. NPR on ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ about eating bugs.

SETH MANDEL: Rules for Jews.

Unlike most voters, American Jews apparently do not get to choose which policies or government actions they support based on political principles. There’s a list, you see, of Special Obligations. Jews must do this or that, because as Jews we have a special obligation to everyone except ourselves.

This Law of Special Obligations is on full display in a New York Times article on the pro-Hamas crackdowns on college campuses.

The Times article itself was inevitable. Any time a politician or government does something ostensibly “for the Jews,” the Times will assign a reporter to write a story on how “the Jewish community is divided” over that thing. If kosher Chinese food were to fall like manna from the heavens, the New York Times would write a story titled “U.S. Jews Are Divided Over Free Chinese Food.” If the Times were around during the Exodus from ancient Egypt, it would publish an article titled “Schism Within Jewish Community Over Freedom From Slavery.” If the Purim story were to happen today, we’d get “How Haman’s Humiliation Has Become Fraught For Many Jews.”

The current version is “Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews,” though another Times article about this topic used the “schism” framing, and a third used “divide” in the headline.

The point is not that it’s unusual for Jews to have varying opinions on the same issue—that’s the norm. Instead, what jumps out from the Times piece and others like it is the idea that Jews don’t get to choose. Like Hebrew National hot dogs, we answer to a higher authority apparently. Unlike Hebrew National hot dogs, the higher authority being referenced isn’t God.

It turns out that, like Judaism itself, Jewish political opinion-forming entails many rules. As far as I can tell, here are the main ones.

From the Times: “‘Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,’ wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday. ‘You’ll be looking awhile.’”

Related: Writing in the Boston Globe (which was owned by the Gray Lady from 1993 until 2013), the dean emeritus of Tufts University insists: Jewish community must stand up to Trump’s targeting of international students.

The image is seared into my mind: masked federal agents emerging from unmarked vehicles on a Somerville street, forcibly detaining a frightened young woman in broad daylight as she was walking to an interfaith center to break her Ramadan fast. The surveillance video of Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk’s detainment by Department of Homeland Security agents evokes images that should terrify every American who values democracy and the rule of law.

What happened next is equally chilling. Despite a federal court order requiring that Ozturk not be moved out of Massachusetts without advance notice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials transferred her to a detention facility in Louisiana. Her F-1 student visa had reportedly been terminated without notice or due process. Despite the fact that, according to her attorney, no criminal charges have been filed, Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar pursuing a PhD in child study and human development, has been branded without evidence or due process by the US government as a threat to our national security.

This is not an isolated incident. A University of Alabama doctoral student from Iran was detained March 25 without explanation, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently boasted, “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”

Well, good:

300 students visas have been revoke by the State Dept and counting. Here Secretary Rubio answers questions on Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student from Turkey who was detained by ICE:

“We revoked her visa. It’s an F-1 visa, I believe. We revoked it, and here’s why…If you apply for… pic.twitter.com/8ZohhuzjYI

— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) March 28, 2025

Related: There’s More Than One Way to Shape a Narrative™: “Networks Spend 10x More Time on Student Arrest Than Gang Leader Capture—That’s the liberal media for you.”

OH NO, NOT THE EPA MUSEUM, TOO! EPA Museum – Yes, One Actually Existed – Shuttered After Zeldin Calls Out Massive Funding, Lack of Visitors.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Administrator Lee Zeldin, has decided to close the National Environmental Museum and Education Center, a project launched during the Biden administration, Fox News reports. Despite its mission to “highlight environmental achievements,” the museum struggled to attract visitors leaving taxpayers with a hefty bill for a largely empty space. Even with free admission, relatively no one could find any desire to walk through the doors. Although the lack of visitors is likely not surprising anyone, the money being poured into the museum just might.

The museum, located at the EPA headquarters near the White House, opened in May 2024 with the goal of celebrating America’s environmental progress. Former EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan envisioned it as a space to honor bipartisan efforts to protect public health and the environment. However, the museum saw fewer than 2,000 visitors in its first nine months, which some may call pathetic.

Taxpayers had invested $4 million to bring the museum up to Smithsonian standards, with an additional $600,000 per year required for upkeep. That worked out to about $315 per visitor—a price tag that Zeldin and his team argue cannot be justified.

But what will fans of the Newseum do, now that they no longer have a museum they can look down upon?

(Found via Ace of Spades, who writes, “These people [are] demented space aliens. They have no conception of how actual humans think. Real humans do not go to Museums of Bureaucracy. I used to laugh at conspiracy theories about ‘the Reptilians.’ Now I want to know more.”)

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bill Burr Executes Perfect ‘Clown Nose On’ Backpedal.

He also keeps saying “Free Luigi,” referencing the young man accused of shooting a healthcare CEO in cold blood. Naturally, two reporters pressed Burr about his recent comments on the red carpet.

So how did Burr handle the questions?

“Hey, I’m just a comedian.” He didn’t say those words, but he came remarkably close.

He refused to clarify his Mangione comments to one reporter. Doing so would give her the reporter the click-bait moment she craved, he said.

Later, he continued his backpedal when a second reporter pressed him on his recent comments.

“I don’t watch the news,” Burr said, adding he prefers watching goofy videos on Instagram. You can almost see him putting that clown nose on for the reporter in question, Nicholas Ballasy.

Burr began in a humorous manner but quickly turned serious. And a tad cruel.

“I don’t think you should be asking a comedian … you’re a journalist,” Burr said before Ballasy defended his line of questioning.

“Comedians are on top of current events,” Ballasy began to say.

“No, no. That’s weak. That’s you guys passing the buck,” Burr said, cutting him off. “You guys need to have balls again which you don’t. You guys always goes, ‘Should we be thinking this?’ Duh? You guys present stuff like that. You guys used to have balls. You need to get your balls back,” Burr added before moving on. “That’s not my job. I’m a dancing clown.”

The clip may become the ultimate “Clown Nose On” example for years to come. Burr couldn’t have scripted it any better, even if he lacks the self-awareness to see what he did.

“You guys used to have balls,” says the leftist comedian who doesn’t have the balls to defend his own inflammatory rhetoric and love of radical chic.

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO: On April 4th 2020, less than three weeks into the Fauci, Birx, and Trump-approved lockdown, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote: From 9/11 to COVID-19. The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.

It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America. It was an easy myth to puncture, and he has deftly and rapidly ensured that no city or state will ever be America’s battered sweetheart again. We are all on our own.

New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity. That encompasses Ted Cruz’s sneering dog whistle about “New York values” in 2016, and Trump’s newfound loathing of the city he called home for his entire life—a city he was maligning long before the coronavirus came along. Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.

Nobody can blame the coronavirus itself on this president, though we must keep track of how his failure to take action will cost untold American lives. But even as we sit here, waiting, it is worth remembering that Trump has led a three-year project in which leadership consists of laying blame, constantly and relentlessly, on everyone and anyone, and the more inchoate that group is, the better. Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves. We haven’t had to do that; the president has still happily led the charge. The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.

As I wrote five years ago, that last sentence is a classic case of projection. Isn’t Lithwick aware that the rest of the nation is also dealing with the same pandemic? And is a massively diverse group of people who don’t think in lockstep? I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe that Saul Steinberg drew his classic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover as a how-to guide to life for insular Manhattanites.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Book deals for those who hid Biden’s decline.

This information is all well and good – but a simple question should be posed. Where are the apologies to those who used their eyes and ears to observe Joe Biden’s decline and were labeled “cheap-fake artists” and conspiracy theorists for talking about it contemporaneously? Where are the book deals for journalists at the Wall Street Journal who reported on Biden forgetting names and faces behind the scenes? Columnist Karol Markowicz wrote in April 2022 at the New York Post, “Biden’s decline is obvious to everyone but the press.” Where is her book deal and Morning Joe media tour?

Journalists who chose to look the other way in service of making sure Donald Trump did not return to the White House do not deserve to be financially rewarded for revealing all the sordid details of Biden’s decline, if they deceived the American public and participated in a massive scandal and cover-up at the time. They should not be writing books. They should be apologizing to the rest of us.

Live look at leftist journalists at the start their “now it can told” interview segments:

A FEW MORE LIKE THIS SHOULD SEND THE RIGHT MESSAGE: Texas Tesla Owner Sues Vandal for $1 Million For Keying His Model X.

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: This Is Too Funny: Satanists Put Up Plaque in MN Capitol Thanking Gov. Walz For Supporting Them.

PAST PRAMILA IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

● Chaser:

With “Earth Day” just a few weeks off, it’s great to see yet more leftists declare “Mission Accomplished” on global warming.

Speaking of which: Rich should fly less so others can go on holiday, says climate chief.

Nope — if your side is burning electric cars after years of screeching “Just Stop Oil,” while attempting to deface timeless artifacts, you’ve just admitted it’s all politics, and the existential crisis doom-mongering was just a pose.

UPDATE: Anti-Tesla Agenda Obliterated with This One Question (Video).

HOLLYWOOD IN TOTO: Val Kilmer Never Shined Brighter Than in The Doors.

The boldest touch in Oliver Stone’s film “The Doors” is that it never glorifies its subject matter, rocker/poet Jim Morrison.

Rather than create an ode to the so-called “Lizard King” and celebrate his body of work, Stone’s film portrays Morrison as a vile monster, a wordsmith who tarnished every meaningful friendship he had.

Morrison fronted The Doors, one of the most influential bands of the 1960s. He left us with a lot of great music. Here’s a movie that gives fans what they want and expect but also depicts its key figure in the most off-putting manner possible.

Val Kilmer stars as Morrison, a free spirit whose filmmaker aspirations were cut short after he meets Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan). The two form a band (Frank Whaley and Kevin Dillon play the other members of The Doors) and create some groovy, poetry-driven rock.

Then, Morrison’s behavior, constant public intoxication and button-pushing actions on stage tarnish their image.

Kilmer’s monumental performance as Morrison is fearless, an uncanny embodiment that transcends mere impersonation. The movie doesn’t let us into Morrison’s personal head space but reflects his state of mind and the world he inhabited.

Still though, just imagine the crossover possibilities if Stone mashed up his two biggest movies from the early 1990s:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

I am so confused because here is Janet Yellen telling you last year that when Joe Biden put tariffs on retail goods, consumers would never see a price increase? pic.twitter.com/aIm3lFOiaa

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) April 3, 2025

2018. Chuck Schumer after Trump proposed tariffs on China.

Like many Democrats, he speaks a little differently when he's not on MSNBC or CNN.pic.twitter.com/NKwnp93hJg

— MAZE (@mazemoore) April 2, 2025

STACY MCCAIN: ‘A Dumpster Fire of Lies:’ Netflex Series Race-Swaps British Crime Trend, Journalists Treat It Like a Documentary.

So, there’s the set-up — “young male violence towards women” in a situation where the young man is not from a bad family — and then the suggestion of “incel subculture” as the motive. Take a moment to contemplate the rarity of such cases in the real world. The most famous “incel” case was Elliot Rodger, which happened in 2014, and since then, how many similar cases have there been? Good luck finding a number larger than you can count on one hand. Also, notice the stipulation that the parents are blameless. Although we can’t say Elliot Rodger was “a product of abuse or parental trauma,” his parents were divorced, which is a common enough problem, although seldom does it result in children growing up to be homicidal maniacs. And it is simply wrong to depict Elliot Rodger as a monster created by the “manosophere.” Rodger posted a few times on a Reddit forum called “PUAhate,” i.e., devoted to criticizing “pickup artists,” but if you read his “manifesto,” it wasn’t like he was quoting anything by leading “manosophere” voices to justify his actions. He was just a loser who turned self-pity into rage.

Let me repeat what I said about Elliot Rodger in 2014:

It is usually a mistake to generalize from the example of psycho killers. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and an assassin; should we start rounding up Marxists? Jeffrey Dahmer was a gay man and a murderous cannibal; should we start rounding up gays? Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard graduate and a terrorist bomber; should we start rounding up Harvard graduates? People who commit horrific crimes can be categorized any number of ways, but the key point is that very few people commit horrific crimes. There are probably quite a few gay Marxists at Harvard, none of whom are mass murderers.

The attempt to turn the deeds of a lone maniac into an example of an allegedly widespread trend is a sort of journalistic alchemy and, like so much of what’s wrong with journalism, it usually involves liberal bias.

Kier Starmer’s obsession with Adolescence allows him to ignore broader issues happening in England, but, to use a quaint old term, aren’t very politically correct:

Exit question from Old Blighty: Why are we still talking about Adolescence?

Manufacturing consent has a long and dishonourable history and this Adolescence episode is just the latest, maddest example. Most worrying is the determination of this government, and the other cheek of the uniparty before it, to reach for any pretext, real or imagined, for further clampdowns on social-media speech. This must be fiercely resisted. There is no more valuable, fundamental freedom than the freedom to speak our minds and speak as we find. Without it, we are damned to a state of permanent adolescence.

That’s a phase the left on both sides of the pond are determined to be trapped in for quite some time.

UPDATE: Netflix’s Adolescence Has Heart But Doesn’t Understand Its Subject Matter.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: “The Message” Is Dead — Snow White Was The Funeral.

Still though, plenty of great movies have had poor box office performances. Let’s check on how the movie’s rating is doing at IMDB:

That’s pretty brutal; just as a reminder, on the day after its debut on March 21st, Snow White had a 2.4 rating at IMDB. Naturally, IMDB is doing damage control for the movie: Disney’s Snow White Gets IMDb Disclaimer After A Wave Of 1-Star Reviews Makes Overall Rating Plummet.

IMDb has officially given Disney’s Snow White a review disclaimer after a slew of 1-star reviews tanked the movie’s rating. The live-action movie is a remake of the classic 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As in the case of most of Disney’s live-action adaptations, Snow White received significant backlash before the movie even came out. Now, the movie has partially overcome this negativity, opening to a respectable $42.2 million domestically and boasting a $142.7 million worldwide at the time of writing.

In response to the review bombing, IMDb has officially put a disclaimer atop Snow White‘s rating. When clicking on more information about the movie’s score, which currently has a 1.5 stars out of 10-star average, there is a pop-up box that says, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.“ The user ratings below display that 91.4% of those who rated it gave the movie a 1-star review.

What This Means For Snow White
These IMDb Ratings Do Not Reflect The Film’s Overall Reception

It is important to understand that Snow White‘s reviews overall are not as bad as what IMDb currently reflects. Critical scores have amounted to a 40% Tomatometer for the film on Rotten Tomatoes. ScreenRant‘s Rachel Labonte gave the movie 5 out of 10 stars, taking issue with the film’s “artificial sheen” while praising Zegler’s performance. The Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews are generally positive, with 74% of audiences giving the movie a favorable rating. The IMDb score may look bad, but it does not tell the full story.

Snow White had a 46% positive review from critics at Rotten Tomatoes when it debuted, so even largely left-leaning critics increasingly admit that the film is a dog.

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW: Germany ‘heading back to the 1930s.’

Germany is heading “back to the 1930s,” a top economist warned on Thursday in response to the US tariff surge, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz predicted there would “only be losers” from a trade war.

Some of Germany’s top economists have reacted with alarm to tariffs of at least 20 per cent announced overnight by Donald Trump on the European Union, which will have a particularly severe impact on German carmakers.

“The 1930s are back,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Germany, comparing the wave of trade barriers imposed by the White House to 1930s-era protectionist trade rules.

Mr Scholz, the outgoing Chancellor, described the tariffs as “fundamentally wrong” and warned that there “would only be losers” in terms of the global trade fallout.

“This is an attack on a trading system which has created prosperity all over the world,” added Mr Scholz, while his outgoing economy minister Robert Habeck complained of “US tariff mania”.

Germany is set to be one of the EU countries hit the hardest by the tariffs, along with France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Beyond Europe, developing or crisis-stricken nations such as Myanmar and Madagascar could be the worst affected overall.

Britain has been spared some of Mr Trump’s wrath, receiving tariffs of only 10 per cent as a result of being outside the European Union and able to negotiate its own trade policy.

The United States is Germany’s biggest trading partner for its juggernaut car industry, which is already struggling with increased competition from China and disappointing results in the electric car market.

The German car industry is worth an estimated half a trillion euros, with one German carmaker – BMW – selling one in five of its cars to the US market.

Mr Trump’s new trade barriers will impose a tariff of 25 per cent on German cars imported to the United States, a cost that will likely be passed on to US consumers.

Last year, the German left was racing to “deindustrialize” the nation with a self-administered Morgenthau Plan, so they should be thrilled that Trump seems determined to finish the job for them.

(Classical – and NSFW – reference in headline.)

TYLER O’NEIL: Police Report on Nashville Transgender Shooter Plays Into Left’s Narrative.

According to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, authorities didn’t release the manifesto … because there wasn’t one.

“Early in the investigation, it was suggested Hale left behind a ‘manifesto’ detailing her motives and intentions,” the police report noted. “This has elicited a great deal of interest from the public and had led to repeated demands this manifesto be released for public study and comment.”

“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the report claimed.

Oh, really?

Police were at pains to define the word “manifesto” to justify their refusal to produce the documents Hale did leave behind.

“By definition, a manifesto is a mission statement or other document written and disseminated by an individual or group to enumerate or expound upon the guiding principles and beliefs that inform their actions,” the report noted. “Regardless of length, a manifesto is a single document that outlines all the factors, intentions, and objectives of an individual act or a series of actions.”

“Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack,” the report added.

Yet police did discover a treasure trove of information about Hale, her motivations, and her mental state.

Police found 16 notebooks; “assorted folders and loose documents”; seven sketchbooks and composition books; a yearbook; three VHS cassette tapes; eight memory storage devices with a combined 379.6 GB of data; six cellphones; three laptops; two Google Drive data cloud accounts; and more.

The report notes that the seven composition books and sketchbooks included 520 pages of content Hale wrote between 2009 and 2022.

In other words, the police had far more than enough evidence to determine the shooter’s motivations. Yet they would not release those materials because they “required a careful review of the material to understand Hale’s motive.”

Read the whole thing.

Incidentally, now that we have new management at the FBI, will we ever learn the motive of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter?

HEH:

great val interview with @ELLEmagazine from 2006 pic.twitter.com/KpheODr0Gp

— brooke is crashing tf out rn (@verybrookie) April 2, 2025

Quentin Tarantino, call your office!

DOOMSDAY LOOPS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR SAN FRANCISCO ANYMORE! Hollywood’s Theatrical Business At Risk Of Entering “Negative Feedback Loop”, Wall Street Analyst Warns.

Hollywood is at risk of entering a “negative feedback loop” with fewer wide movie releases and a shrinking theater footprint combining to squeeze box office revenue, a veteran media analyst says.

In his annual assessment of the theatrical sector, billed as a “memo to Hollywood,” TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz notes that he has taken a “bearish stance” on the theatrical window for some time. Results from 2024, with total grosses slipping 4% from 2023 to $8.57 billion, the number of wide releases down 6% from pre-Covid levels, and other factors have only reinforced his view.

“We have said for several years now that the outlook for a sustained recovery looks questionable, and that we don’t think the existing global theatrical footprint can be supported solely by a handful of blockbusters,” Creutz wrote in the 20-page report.

The number of screens in the U.S. has declined to about 35,000 from 41,000 before Covid struck in 2020, with exhibition also facing big challenges in 2023 and 2024 due to the strikes. That smaller footprint might help theater owners in the near term, but it could end up hastening the decline of the overall business, Creutz believes. Downsizing “risks having more films skipping theatrical and going direct to streaming services…and now you have all the ingredients for a negative feedback loop.”

Creutz emphasizes that he is “not calling for a complete collapse of the theatrical window, but we think box office is more likely to decline than rise over the next few years, particularly as major studios continue to cut back on the number of films they make in favor of concentrating their box office efforts in fewer, bigger, established IP films.”

Found via Michael Walsh who adds, “The Industry must wean itself from its green-eyeshade addiction to comic books and wokism if it is to have any chance of salvaging the theatrical model — which thanks to streaming, it probably doesn’t.“

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: A Working Man Who Beat Snow White.

Related: Rob Long on The Good Psychopath.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At an average university, the average student is ‘functionally illiterate.’

The average college student is “functionally illiterate,” writes “Hilarius Bookbinder,” who teaches philosophy at a public university that attracts students with mid-range academic records.

Most students “could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” nor do they have “the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read and most certainly not the attention span to finish,” writes Bookbinder. They don’t read textbooks or primary texts, “even in upper-divisions courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest.”

Students write at the eighth-grade level, he writes. They submit the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

The alternative is a coherent answer written by a bot.

Combine lack of knowledge with safetyism (and institutional antisemitism), and you’ve produced Ben Rhodes’ next batch of journalists who “literally know nothing.”

MIKE SOLANA: Bad Ghibli.

Regardless of the quality, it was hard to argue the avalanche of AI-generated images we saw last week, grasping for attention in a kind of life-like mass beyond anyone’s control, wasn’t slop-like, and I alluded to as much that afternoon. Later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X, “One man’s slop is another man’s treasure.” Different strokes for different folks, case closed. But the conversation on slop, in keeping with its basic nature, was a bit of a distraction.

It was Sam’s following tweet that exposed a real — and in my opinion really fascinating — problem:

Obviously, he was alluding to the White House social media team’s Ghibli, now the most famous example of OpenAI’s new image generation by far. And the first really great, and really impactful, example of bad AI-generated art:

A bad Ghibli, we’ll call it. A piece of AI-generated art that is incredibly successful — at conveying something you didn’t intend to convey.

* * * * * * * *

While it’s hard to know exactly what the White House social media team was trying to achieve with its Ghibli (though my sense is probably nothing, and they were simply working from instinct as most of us are online), I think it’s safe to say they didn’t want to evoke a sense of pity in the average American for a deported fentanyl dealer. But that is what they achieved.

The moment their Ghibli went viral, and the first wave of backlash began, many hardline supporters of the White House were quick — naturally, correctly — to point out this was an AI-generated picture of a felon, almost certainly responsible for the death of Americans, who had already been deported once before. She was also, in real photos that emerged, (I am not being petty here, this is important) physically repulsive. Just look at her, the bad Ghibli defenders cried. And I understand the impulse. I mean, take a look yourself:

Who wants this person in their country? Nobody. Who cares if she cries on her way home? Not me. But, incredibly, in order to defend the cartoon, White House allies had to point to the real photo of an actual criminal, which the White House had already released at the time of the Ghibli. In this, we are not using imagery to massage or explain away reality, as we often see with propaganda. We are using reality to explain away an entirely generated controversy that happened, it seems to me, by mistake. Because someone who is not an artist generated real art he didn’t understand.

How did we get here?

Read the whole thing.

In his early days as creator/producer of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels once rejected a potential sketch by telling its writer that it suffered from “premise overload.” In 2022, Biden’s infamous nighttime Independence Hall speech rant was the result of his handlers trying to put him in a real-life “Dark Brandon” scenario, which thrilled his hyper-online far left base and left the vast majority of Americans confused and angered by the Leni Riefenstahl-like images they were seeing. Similarly, the Trump comm team’s confusing AI slop last week was premise overload as well. I didn’t make the connection with Basora-Gonzalez, and I initially pondered if the man in the cartoon was some sort of Tim Walz callback, given his rounded face and middle-aged appearance, and Walz’s comical obsession last year with camouflage-colored haberdashery.

Solana concludes, “Be careful what you prompt for.” I would argue, prompt away; ChatGPT’s ability to effortlessly spitout Ghibli cartoons is lots of fun, but a political comms shop needs to make sure that the vast majority of the people seeing the image will connect with it before deciding to hit the publish button on social media.

ROBERT SPENCER: It Was All Fake: Far-Left Billionaires Astroturfed the Tidal Wave of Early Enthusiasm for Harris.

Last summer, after Old Joe Biden was forced out of running for reelection and Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democrat candidate for president, the far left’s propaganda arm (that is, the establishment media) made a massive push to make this failed vice president and longtime party hack seem new and appealing. A key part of this effort was a gaggle of young “influencers” who took to Instagram and TikTok with an enthusiastic pro-Harris message. It was sincere, it was spontaneous, it was exciting — or at least that’s what it seemed to be. Now (I know, knock me over with a feather) it turns out that the whole thing was faked: the entire Harris bubble was the artificial creation of a bunch of leftist billionaires.

RealClearInvestigations blew the whistle on this astroturfing enterprise in a lengthy exposé on Monday, detailing concerted efforts to portray Harris as if she had “Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.” This involved “influencers” making “neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album ‘Brat’ released last year,” as well as flooding the interwebs with “memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy.” Yeah, not only did they create a fictional Harris, but they conjured up a fake opposition to her in the bargain.

The campaign went heavy on sexual excess, with a heavy helping of hysteria: “Digital creator Amelia Montooth, in one viral TikTok video, kissed a woman and tried searching for pornography, actions her sketch suggested would be banned if Harris lost the election.” Apparently presenting Harris as the porn candidate wasn’t enough, and so “another TikTok and Instagram series backed by the donors, called ‘Gaydar,’ featured interviews quizzing people on the streets of New York City about gay culture trivia with little election-related content,” but the pro-Harris subtext was unmistakable.

Then there was a caravan featuring “an inflatable IUD” that traveled to Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh, St. Louis, and elsewhere. “The tour, which featured content creators producing posts along the way, was designed to bring attention to claims that Trump would ban contraceptive devices.” Yeah, of course he would.

Harris never quite gelled as the front woman for twenty-first century amorality; RealClearInvestigations notes that she was “a career politician favored by the Democratic Party’s establishment,” and so “never quite fit the bill as an icon of activist movements.” But this wasn’t for want of trying: “the sudden influencer buzz seemed to transform the stodgy former prosecutor into an icon of the cultural zeitgeist.”

Harris’ campaign was the last gasp of Obama’s advisors attempting to run his playbook to advance a candidate who lacked his rock star 2008 appeal. And speaking of Barry: Obama was working against Kamala Harris behind the scenes, didn’t think she could win, new book reveals.

Reporter and author Jonathan Allen said Tuesday that former President Barack Obama was working against Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden dropped out, advocating for an open primary because he didn’t think Harris could win.

“President Obama absolutely did not think that Joe Biden should continue, according to our sources close to President Obama,” Allen told MSNBC. “And he also didn’t want Kamala Harris to be the replacement for Biden. He didn’t think that she was the best choice for Democrats, and he worked really behind the scenes for a long time to try to have a mini-primary, or an open convention, or a mini-primary leading to an open convention, did not have faith in her ability to win the election.”

Allen, a senior politics reporter at NBC News, and Amie Parnes, a senior political correspondent for The Hill, joined MSNBC to discuss their new book set to be released this month, titled, “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.”

“As it turned out, she didn’t win, but he was really working against her,” Allen continued.

But hey, his former advisors sure got to burn through lots of money trying: Democrat Megadonor: The Kamala Harris Campaign “Legally Stole” the $1.5 Billion They Raised from Donors.

OKAY, I’M SOLD — REPEAL THE 22nd AMENDMENT: Neil Young says he may be barred from returning to US over Donald Trump criticism.

Neil Young has shared his concerns of being barred from the US after his European tour later this year, thanks to his outspoken critiques of Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, on his website Neil Young Archives, the 79-year-old musician – who has dual Canadian-American citizenship – wrote of his fears after the recent spate of people being detained and deported upon entering the US. These incidents have been credited to vague or unspecified visa issues, but have frequently affected individuals who have criticised the Trump administration either publicly or in messages on their phone read by immigration officers.

“When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminium blanket,” Young wrote. “That is happening all the time now. Countries have new advice for those returning to America.”

Evergreen:

PRESIDENT KLAIN DISSEMBLES: Ex-Biden aide Ron Klain was alarmed by ‘out of it’ prez ahead of disaster debate, book says.

Ron Klain, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden known for his intense loyalty, is insisting he “never doubted” Biden’s mental fitness — as a new book describes Klain’s distress ahead of Biden’s dismal June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.

In “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” author Chris Whipple writes that Klain viewed Biden, then 81, as “out of it” and even “half-seriously” worried that Biden thought he was “president of NATO.”

“I never doubted the president’s mental acuity,” Klain told The Post Wednesday after a report on Whipple’s book was published by the Guardian.

“He had become singularly focused on foreign policy and detached from Democratic allies in the pursuit of GOP support on Ukraine and Israel,” Klain said of his impressions of the 46th president.

“He thought that being a great foreign policy president was enough.”

* * * * * * * *

Whipple writes that Klain, Biden’s White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was “startled” when he arrived at Camp David to help with debate prep.

“He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it,” the author relates.

I suspect former President Klain saw former (P)resident Biden exhausted and out of it on numerous occasions when he was part of the Democrats’ brain trust running the show in DC under Biden’s name:

BIDEN: "Ron, who am I turning this over to?"

RON KLAIN: "Thank you very much Mr. President, I think it's time for our friends in the press to leave though." pic.twitter.com/nv8YqIW1oH

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) March 24, 2021

More on Klain and Biden’s career ending debate with Trump: In a new book, top Biden aide describes ‘out of it’ president before Trump debate.

Ron Klain served Biden from 2021 to 2023, then returned to his side last June to run debate preparation as he had for numerous Democratic presidents before.

According to Klain, it turned out that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job”.

As described by Klain to the reporter Chris Whipple, at one point Biden had an idea.

“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”

Flashback:

What struck me instead as I read Leibovich’s slightly tongue-in-cheek profile was the distance between the bourgeois comfort of Klain’s personal and professional life and the facts, as they say, on the ground. One cannot finish reading the Leibovich piece without coming to the conclusion that, all in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.

Klain is the most powerful chief of staff in recent memory, the beating heart of Joe Biden’s White House, a man whose portfolio is so wide-ranging and whose boss is so (let’s face it) odd that Republicans on Capitol Hill refer to him as “Prime Minister Klain.” Like most Washingtonians, he is a well-degreed workaholic, a graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Law School who has spent decades rotating from positions in Democratic administrations to lucrative gigs at the intersection of law, technology, and finance. He calls his expensive home in Chevy Chase, Md., “the house that O’Melveny built,” after legal giant O’Melveny & Myers, where he was a partner from 2001 to 2004.

Among his clients there were AOL Time Warner and Fannie Mae. In 2004 the chairman of AOL Time Warner, billionaire Steve Case, invited Klain to join his D.C.-based venture capital firm, Revolution. Leibovich informs us that Klain’s salary in 2020 was some $2 million. That buys you a lot of hors d’oeuvres.

What Ron Klain actually did in the private sector—besides tweet—is no mystery. By the alchemical process through which influence is manufactured in Washington, he converted his relationships with Democratic power brokers into cash money. “At times,” wrote Michael Scherer in a November 2020 profile for the Washington Post, “Klain appears to have worked with every Democratic leader of the past three decades.” Such a network is worth something to the incalculable number of interests seeking out favors, damages, or relief from the federal government.

—“The Mark of Klain,” Matthew Continetti, the Washington Free Beacon, July 23^rd, 2021.

UPDATE:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

Corey Booker is speaking for 24 hours straight because he’s upset that Elon is taking social security away from DEAD PEOPLE. Gotta admire his commitment to the Democrat base.

— Jimmy Failla (@jimmyfailla) April 2, 2025

Here's what Cory Booker has been speaking out against:

1. Securing our borders
2. Deporting illegal alien criminals
3. Peace through strength
4. Rooting out fraud & waste
5. Unleashing American energy
6. Ending government weaponization

It's no wonder Democrats have 27% approval…

— Jim Banks (@Jim_Banks) April 1, 2025

Chaser:

The filibuster has been abused to stop reforms supported by the vast majority of Americans—from background checks to protecting the right to vote. We must stop this abuse of power. pic.twitter.com/UW2smGMraP

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) January 12, 2022