THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Jennifer Salke Fired — Amazon’s Kathleen Kennedy And Her Legacy Of Failure.
So, to coin a phrase, does this mean that “James Bond will return” — as a British male?
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
March 31, 2025
PAY FOR PLAY: Al Sharpton Books Labor Bosses Who Pour Millions Into His Nonprofit on MSNBC Show.
Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has received millions of dollars from prominent labor unions whose bosses frequently appear on the controversial activist’s MSNBC show, often without any disclosure about their lucrative financial ties.
In the past year alone, Sharpton, who hosts PoliticsNation on the weekends, has interviewed the presidents of five unions that have given his nonprofit a total of $6.3 million: American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Government Employees, and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
In all, labor unions have given nearly $8 million earmarked as “gifts,” “grants,” or payments for “political activities” to the National Action Network, which in some years has paid Sharpton a $1 million salary and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for private jets and limo services.
To be fair, union bosses are likely clamoring to appear on Sharpton’s show due to its boffo, blowout ratings:
KURT SCHLICHTER: When Conservatives Refuse to Play Along, the Dems and Regime Media Lose.
One of the delights of the last couple of months has been watching the Democrats and their regime media adjuncts running their decades-old political playbook and seeing them completely outflanked by the Trump administration running its modern playbook. Check your calendars, guys. It’s 2025, and what used to work doesn’t work anymore. You guys haven’t changed, but we Republicans have. The fact that we are no longer reacting as you expect and demand us to, along with the revolution in media that has allowed us insurgents to evade the regime media gatekeepers, has made all your old go-to moves utterly useless. We’re winning, and you’re losing. It’s beautiful, man.
Take the ridiculous Signal onanism of last week. That pseudo-scandal is gone now, except in the dank recesses of the collective colon of MSNBCNN, where the regime media left attempts to wring a few more nutrients from it before it passes completely.
Why did what they portray as the biggest scandal of all human history sputter into nothingness in less than a week? Putting aside that no one outside of Washington, DC, or Twitter cared about it – I drove almost 2,000 miles across the country last week, met dozens of people, including military folks, and never once heard it mentioned – there’s another reason it vapor-locked. We Republicans refused to play along this time, and our refusal to do so killed it.
Exit quote: “Our cooperation is the key to perpetuating the scandals. They can’t win unless we help them win, and we’ve chosen not to help them win anymore.”
CLUTCH CARGO: THE NEXT GENERATION! First “visually dubbed” feature film hits US theaters this May.
Swedish sci-fi adventure flick Watch the Skies is using a technique called ‘visual dubbing’ to alter the cast’s lip movements and map them to dubbed English dialogue for international audiences – without reshooting a single scene.
That’s thanks to Los Angeles-based movie-making AI firm Flawless, and its TrueSync technology that analyzes the entirety of an actor’s performance, utilizes deep learning to create a volumetric 3D representation of their face, and then adapts their mouth movements in the footage in post-production.
TrueSync has actually been around for a few years, and was notably used to remove F-bombs from the PG-13 edit of the 2022 British survival horror movie Fall (which happened to have been directed by Flawless CEO Scott Mann).
* * * * * * * *
This time around, Flawless’ tech is being used to visually dub an entire movie. Watch the Skies, which debuted in its home country back in 2022 as UFO Sweden, follows a teenager searching for her missing (and possibly abducted by aliens) father with a UFO watchers’ club. The original actors dubbed their own performances into English at a recording studio, so their Swedish accents are intact.
Knowing that this effect was used, audiences will likely be staring very closely at newly swapped-in AI mouths, which may make selling the illusion a bit more difficult. And I hope the script wasn’t just run through AI for a quick and dirty translation into English. Very bad things can happen if the dialogue isn’t carefully reviewed by someone who actually natively speaks English, as I wrote in 2023: Springtime for AI.
But this technique has definitely made massive progress since the days of Clutch Cargo in the late 1950s:
(Via Justine Bateman.)
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: The Age of Le Pen.
Le Pen died in January at age 96, two weeks before Trump returned to office. Half a century ago, Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s Enoch Powell. Not all of his views have been vindicated—far from it. But his general vision, which passed through Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and Brexit on its way to Donald Trump, has triumphed. It is worth looking at what he got right and what he got wrong. By September 2021, when I spent an afternoon interviewing him at his house in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, he recognized that he had been mistaken in some of his most passionately held positions. The same, of course, can be said of his critics. Though certain of their arguments were well founded, others were opportunistic inventions of a power structure that despaired of besting Le Pen in debate.
Like other populists he was a has-been by the time he really hit his stride. It’s amazing what a combination of longevity and precocity will do. When Le Pen was born in Brittany in 1928, Raymond Poincaré was France’s prime minister and Calvin Coolidge the American president. Le Pen was a child studying classics with the Jesuits in the 1930s, a teenager when his fisherman father died after his boat struck a mine in the 1940s, and a member of the National Assembly—elected for the Left Bank!—in the 1950s. A soldier, he was shipped to Vietnam in 1954, just missing the catastrophic encirclement of French troops at Dien Bien Phu, and to Algeria later that decade. Suppressing the anti-colonial rebellion there became his passion. In 1972, he co-founded the National Front, the political party he would lead till passing it to his daughter Marine in 2011. In 1976, an attacker blew up his house—a crime that was never solved. In the 1980s he became a member of the European Parliament in Brussels and spent more than three decades there—the longest-serving French member of a body he loathed. He started regularly taking 15% or so of the vote in presidential elections at home, and in 2002 broke through to the second round. Though he was defeated by Jacques Chirac, the slap to the three big establishment parties—Socialists, Gaullists, liberals—is still felt today. And today, the National Rally, as Marine Le Pen renamed her father’s party, is bigger than any of them. It is more popular, in fact, than any party in France, commanding a solid third of the vote and kept out of office only by ever-more-elaborate deals between the establishment parties.
There’s a lot of that going on in Europe, to keep the grift going before the lights (possibly literally) go out.
HEY, REMEMBER BRAT SUMMER? THAT WAS FUN: Revealed: Pro-Kamala Social-Media Millions That Couldn’t Sync ‘Brat’ With ‘Democrat.’
The abrupt withdrawal last year of President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, followed rapidly by his replacement with Vice President Kamala Harris, irked many voters left out by the process. Yet social media seemed to ooze with enthusiasm and Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.
Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” released last year. The poppy rave videos, gushed journalists, showed that Harris embodied the confidently independent “brat” vibe conveyed by the music. Social media pages bubbled with memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy. 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.Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” released last year. The poppy rave videos, gushed journalists, showed that Harris embodied the confidently independent “brat” vibe conveyed by the music. Social media pages bubbled with memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy. 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.
Harris, a career politician favored by the Democratic Party’s establishment, never quite fit the bill as an icon of activist movements. But the sudden influencer buzz seemed to transform the stodgy former prosecutor into an icon of the cultural zeitgeist.
As it turns out, the tidal wave of enthusiasm was not entirely genuine. Much of the content, including Montooth’s videos, was quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters.
RealClearInvestigations obtained internal documents and WhatsApp messages from Democratic strategists behind the influencer campaign. Way to Win, one of the major donor groups behind the effort, spent more than $9.1 million on social media influencers during the 2024 presidential election – payments revealed here for the first time. The amount was touted in a document circulated after the election detailing the organization’s accomplishments.
The Harris campaign torched through a bonfire of money that would make even the Joker blush: “Questions have mounted over the campaign spending decisions from Harris and her supporting organizations. The Harris campaign and her SuperPAC spent over $1.5 billion in the last months of the campaign, with much of the money flowing to consultants and media advertising. Alex Cooper, who hosted Harris for an interview on her ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast, was baffled about why the campaign spent about $100,000 on a ‘cardboard’ temporary studio set that ‘wasn’t that nice.’ Others have raised similar concerns about payments to Oprah Winfrey’s production firm.”
HOLLYWOOD IN TOTO: The One Thing Conservatives Need in Today’s Hollywood.
Conservatives are the champions of complaining about (il)liberal movies, documentaries, television, award shows and art. But do you know what liberals do that we don’t?
FUND art.
They support the next generation of artists and storytellers. Who cares if the content they/them make is garbage? Liberals help out other liberals.
While you’re reading this, Netflix has already greenlit a live-action “Pokémon: Rings of Power.” And do you know who’s writing and directing it? The same progressives who made the 2027 $250 million-budgeted “Dirty Harry” reboot flop (star Chloë Grace Moretz refused to hold a gun).
Where’s our Tyler Perry? Where’s our Dream Collective? Where’s our non-woke Sundance Lab?
Who does the Right have? Mel Gibson? He’s just one man, and no one should bother him while he’s making “The Resurrection of the Christ.”
Zachary Levi? He’s a cool dude, and I want him to succeed, but he’s not a billionaire producer.
The Daily Wire? They’re just one company and most of their stuff is behind a paywall (side note: put your movies up for rent on Amazon; people will pay to see “Run Hide Fight” and “Terror on the Prairie” if made available to them).
The only thing that comes close to a conservative cultivation program is the Palladium Pictures Incubator, but it’s for short documentaries, not narrative film.
Also… have you even heard of this program before I told you? Has a single conservative influencer promoted it?
As a filmmaker who wants to tell traditional stories with heartland people, I feel s*** out of luck.
There are so many talented people who are passed over because we don’t want to tell tacky and exhausting Lefty stories. We don’t want to make crap like “Velma” or “Snow Shite” or “Shout Your Abortion: Electric Boogaloo.”
We want to entertain and enlighten.
But we need you conservative and moderate higher-ups to support the true underrepresented voices. We need non-diversity contingent fellowships, labs, film festivals and opportunities for traditional storytellers.
Read the whole thing.
Without conservative movies being funded, this is the career path for many conservatives, and even non-woke center-left Democrats behind the camera in Hollywood: Rachel Zegler’s Snow White flop sparks anti-woke U-turn: Hollywood whistleblowers reveal how trans actors and liberal films are being dumped in ‘crisis mode’ panic.
One woman who is white and in her late 50s could not get hired but was called in to rescue a DEI project, which ended up winning a slew of major awards.
‘The kids who had been handed the film had no experience,’ she says. ‘The budget was out of control, and they were off partying every night.
‘The studio sent me to oversee things and get them back on track. But when the movie won awards, I wasn’t allowed to go up on stage because they didn’t want a middle-aged white woman standing in the middle of the young African American cast members. I was told it wasn’t good optics.’
A male writer, who is 60, tells a similar story. He has worked on some of the most successful shows ever made. He says: ‘When DEI started, my phone stopped ringing. Then it started ringing again with big names at the studios asking me to take a look at scripts and rewrite them.
‘Their DEI hires couldn’t actually do the job. So, they had old white men like me re-writing things. The money was good, but I couldn’t get any credit. That’s the hypocrisy of Hollywood.’
As Conquest’s Third Law of Politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
UPDATE: Brian Stelter accidentally admits which ideology has been controlling Hollywood for the last half century: Try Not to Laugh: Brian Stelter (and Ben Folds) Lament MAGA ‘Authoritarianism’ In Entertainment.
HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT, BUT IT DOES OCCASIONALLY PEENEMÜNDE: Germany’s largest rocket since V-2 crashes and explodes seconds after launch.
March 30, 2025
“UPSETS:” Statham’s A Working Man upsets Snow White to take No. 1 at the box office. Complete with an “unexpectedly” moment in the lede from AP!
In an unexpected upset, the Jason Statham thriller “A Working Man” took No. 1 at the box office, besting the rapidly declining “Snow White,” according to studio estimates Sunday.
Even after a lackluster debut, the Walt Disney Co.’s live-action remake was predicted to remain the top film in U.S. and Canadian theaters over the weekend. Instead, “Snow White,” plagued by bad buzz and backlash, nosedived in its second weekend and dropped 66%.
As John Nolte writes: Weekend Two Delivers Even More Box Office Humiliation for Snow White. “It is now quite possible that Snow Woke could fail to hit $200 million globally. This means that after the theaters take their cut, Disney will see only $100 million in box office returns, which will add up to an incredible $270 million LOSS. Disney could conceivably lose more than a quarter of a billion — with a “B” — on this, making it the biggest box office bomb in history.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION:
Democrats, 2022: “Republicans want to ban interracial marriage!”
Democrats, 2025: “Black republicans with white spouses have been whitewashed.” pic.twitter.com/HilgT6vQfR
— Flyer (@bama_flyer) March 30, 2025
HMMMM: “Signalgate” is a Masterclass in the application of Useful Idiots.
Last week, The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg discovered that he had somehow been added to a group chat (GC) on Signal titled “Houthi PC small group” by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. This GC appeared to have top cabinet members of the Trump administration on its roster. Goldberg appears shocked to be included in this GC, especially as a journalist intensely critical of the current administration. His last article was titled, Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’, so he probably wondered why he was added. At first, he doubts the veracity that the GC he’s been added to is genuine. He writes:
“After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.”
Suffice to say, Mr. Goldberg stayed in the GC, only leaving it this past Sunday, March 23rd. He then wasted no time furiously banging out a 3500 word essay on his adventures in GC land, replete with accompanying screenshots of the chat. How he had time to do this between scheduling cable news interviews is a testament to this true American patriot. (sarcasm)
However, is that really the entire narrative? That a Progressive-Liberal journalist just happened to be accidentally added to a high-level chat group discussing policy positions and goals? One that includes some of the most powerful figures in the current administration? Which led to the inevitable story being leaked?
Occam’s razor
I lean towards a theory of “Signalgate” being intentional (1), starting with some of the members the chat.
Read the whole thing.
And now for this weekend’s latest attack on Hegseth: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Included Wife in Sensitive Meetings: Report.
The Edith Wilsons of the multiverse all smile.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Are Democrats Whitewashing Hitler with Lame Attacks on Trump?
I’m old enough to remember when Hitler personified incomparable, bottomless, merciless evil. These days he’s mostly used by the left as a cudgel to hammer, ineffectively, Donald Trump. In doing so, Democrats risk trivializing and even sanitizing Hitler.
What sets Hitler apart from other monstrous 20th century dictators — such as Mao Zedong and Stalin — was his all-consuming Jew hatred, his unprecedented Jewish murders, his factories of death and extermination that slaughtered 6 million Jews.
Mao and Stalin (himself an antisemite) each killed more people than Hitler, yet the German fuhrer is recognized as the worst tyrant. The reason is clear — the Holocaust.
There have been other genocides, such as those of Turkey against the Armenians and the Hutus against the Tutsis in civil war in Rwanda.
But in none was genocide as central to a regime’s core and purpose as in Hitler’s Germany. None of those other murderous campaigns erected a massive industrial complex of death camps devoted to the annihilation of one people.
You can’t separate Hitler from his pathological loathing and mass murder of Jews.
If someone is likened to Hitler, it’s inescapable that this person must be a rabid Jew hater.
To invoke Hitler without his murderous antisemitism is to homogenize him as another one of the 20th century’s dictators, just the most infamous.
In doing so, Democrats purge him of his singular crime against humanity.
President Trump is Hitler, shout progressives.
That would be the same Trump whose grandchildren are Jewish. The same Trump who is described by Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of the Jewish state, as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”
Some Hitler.
* * * * * * * *
We should never forget who Hitler was.
Volumes have been written about him. Among the most intriguing was Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil by Ron Rosenbaum.
Rosenbaum examined many of the theories and explanations about Hitler.
After doing so, he cautioned that explaining Hitler can carry a potential downside.
We should remember, he said:
“To resist the way explanation can become evasion or consolation, a way of making Hitler’s choice to do what he did less unbearable, less hateful to contemplate, by shifting responsibility from him to faceless abstractions, inexorable forces, or irresistible compulsions that gave him no choice or made his choice irrelevant.
“To resist making the kind of explanatory excuses for Hitler that permit him to escape, that grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh.”
Are the Democrats’ frivolous invocations of a Hitler without the Holocaust opening another avenue to grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh?
Also trivializing Hitler is that these same attacks are made by the left whenever there’s a president with an (R) after his name in the White House. In 2003, Jonah Goldberg responded to the left’s unceasing “Bush=Hitler” attacks:
I don’t say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example, during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things” that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)
Last year, the left was begging this former Hitler to endorse Kamala Harris, as Dick Cheney, Bush’s co-Hitler 20 years ago, did.
And if you missed it yesterday, Benjamin Kerstein on the Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis. “The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity. Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.”
OH HOW IT MUST HAVE PAINED THE L.A. TIMES TO WRITE THIS HEADLINE: California-Mexico border, once overwhelmed, now nearly empty.
MARK HEMINGWAY: America’s Librarians Became Militantly Political, And Now They Suffer The Consequences.
Churchill once said of John Foster Dulles that he was “the only case I know of a bull who carries his own China shop around with him.” Had Churchill miraculously lived another 60 odd years, I think he would agree that when it comes to this particular metaphor, Dulles has been outclassed. At the dawn of Trump’s second term, we even see that the bull has become self-aware and is deliberately trying to break as much of the federal crockery as he can get away with.
Last week, Trump issued an executive order proposing the shuttering of seven obscure federal agencies, notably including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Churlish former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went into high dudgeon, or in Reich’s case maybe just dudgeon, to let us know “Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.”
Well, I guess you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I’m no fan of tyranny, slavery, Nazis, or book burning. I have written tens of thousands of words opposing government censorship, I have made a living reading and reviewing books, and I spent 17 years on the board of a private school. I hope it is apparent I care about knowledge and education. And speaking as an ostensibly educated, literate, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump administration to follow through and please, please, please in italics, stick it to America’s librarians.
To be clear, I’m also excited by the prospect of any number of museums being collateral damage, but the issue of political insanity in museums, particularly the art world, has already been well noted. Indeed, you know most museum officials have anti-American politics the same way you know that someone is vegan, into astrology, or didn’t vote for Trump – they’ll tell you. Five years ago, the director of the Met actually said to The New York Times “There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy.’’ I had to read “its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as” a few times and got so turned around I didn’t know whether to object to the self-abasing radicalism or elocution lessons from Kamala Harris.
In contrast to the caricature of snobbish museum curators, librarians have been freeriding on a mostly positive cultural stereotype of old biddies who yell at kids to keep quiet but somehow also know how to help you find obscure information on local zoning laws if it comes to that.
The reality is that sometime in the last few decades the vocation of local librarian acquired a uniquely left-wing nimbus. It’s hard to say whether there was an organized takeover of the profession or it organically attracted a new generation that saw their primary vocational responsibility as agents of radical and unwelcome social change. Regardless, they’ve become a threat to future generations and are making us dumber.
Read the whole thing.
WE HAD TO HIDE THE TRUTH IN ORDER TO SAVE IT:
Now, with their party in the wilderness, Democratic heavy hitters are stepping up to admit that, well, the fake news was real. Here’s The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, in a widely shared recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s podcast, discussing the Kafkaesque regulatory structures that prevented Biden’s rural broadband legislation from ever being translated into reality:
And here’s Klein—currently touring to promote his book Abundance—in an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, admitting that none of the major investment initiatives from Obama’s stimulus package turned into anything:
Ezra Klein explains how it feels to be a Democrat in under 30 seconds:
Ezra Klein: "The stimulus bill under Obama, that had 3 big headline projects for reinvestment.
High speed rail, smart grid, a nation wide system of interoperable health records. 0 for 3"
Gavin Newsom: "I… pic.twitter.com/Rlq1z8fGRb— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 26, 2025
Meanwhile, Klein’s Vox cofounder, fellow “abundance” Democrat and author of One Billion Americans, Matthew Yglesias, wrote earlier this week that “Democrats can’t hide from immigration forever.” The headline is obviously true, but the article contained a fairly interesting passage about how the rhetorical sausage gets made in the upper reaches of Democratic politics and punditry. Yglesias quotes a 2021 article from Klein noting that in 2012, the Obama campaign realized that merely talking about the issue of immigration pushed voters to the right. Rather than come up with more popular immigration policies, the campaign staff concluded, it was better to simply duck the issue altogether while making up a fake story that immigration had hurt the GOP and selling that to their friends in the media. Yglesias writes:
It’s… important to remember what happened after Obama successfully ran this “don’t talk about immigration” reelection campaign—his team went out and told reporters that Democrats had won thanks to Hispanic backlash against Romney’s self-deportation rhetoric. The RNC then did an “autopsy” report on the election that concluded that Republicans needed to move to the center on immigration. And an immigration reform bill including a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Which is just to say that as far as I can tell, the Obama team fibbed about the role that immigration played in the 2012 campaign as part of a strategy to psyche Republicans into agreeing to an immigration deal—and it almost worked!
The problem with this comms strategy—creating a rhetorical hall of mirrors that not only bamboozles the electorate but baits the opposing party into acting against its own interests based on an entirely false premise—is that by “lying in politics,” you “trick your own supporters.” In this case, the Obama White House and allied pundits, in trying to trick voters, accidentally tricked the Democrats into thinking that immigration wasn’t something to worry about—a defensible “fib,” in Yglesias’ view, but one that now needs to be addressed for tactical reasons.
We’re glad Yglesias has at least discovered a utilitarian case against lying, since he doesn’t believe in the principled one:
Yglesias was publicly admitting that he was fine about lying to advance the socialist cause since at least 2010:
Meanwhile, last night governor turned professional podcaster Gavin Newsom told Bill Maher: ‘The Democratic Brand is Toxic Right Now.’
Gov. Gavin Newsom continues to make news by pushing back on the far left of his own party. In a conversation last night with Bill Maher, he said a few things which are likely to rile up the extremists on his own team.
First up, he made the case for talking to people on the other side of the aisle. “These guys are crushing us,” Newsom said. He continued, “The Democratic brand is toxic right now. We had a high water mark two weeks ago, that was a CNN poll at 29% favorability. It’s dropped in an NBC poll down to 27%.”
Those who are hyper-online have no doubt seen the hot-dog meme guy many times over the years on social media, which Know Your Meme defines as:
“We’re All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This” is a quote from the Netflix sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. The quote originates from a sketch where an unnamed man in a hot dog costume tries to pretend he is not the one who has crashed a hot dog-shaped car. The image of the man in the costume was widely used as a reaction image on Twitter and other websites in 2020 and early 2021, typically in response to complaints about problems from the people responsible for those problems.
Newsom is determined to live out that meme, as he prepares his 2028 presidential bid, though he’s far from alone on the left.
March 29, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Heaven Confirms Resurrected Bodies Of The Saints Will Be In The Style Of Studio Ghibli. “At publishing time, Hell announced it would also be updating the look of their residents, but that they’d be using the animated style of that HBO Velma show instead.”
UP IN SMOKE: Instead of Improving Movies, Variety Wants to Allow Pot and Texting in Theaters.
Can you imagine spending $65 for tickets, popcorn, and soda to suffer through three hours in a room filled with the stench of something called the skunk weed (for good reason) and idiots texting? Plus, Variety thinks movie theaters should become pot dispensaries.
“Imagine how much better Barbie or Deadpool & Wolverine would be if you could see it” while smoking a joint, asks Variety rhetorically. “Selling weed could bring fresh revenue and new customers to theaters.”
What?
Both of those movies were monster hits, the top grossers of their respective years. Who in their right mind believes allowing pot smoking and texting in the theater would have improved their box office?
Granted, Variety’s idea is to have exclusive screenings for potheads and texters. Nevertheless, the entire theater will still stink of that crap.
Here’s Variety lobbying for texting: “Although cinephiles might object, if movie theaters want to attract younger audiences who refuse to give up their devices during the two-hour running time of most films, they might need to stop banning phones.”
Meanwhile, the New York Post suggests booze and/or pickleball will do the trick: Movie theaters are trying everything to bring audiences back — from pickleball to cocktail bars.
One owner of a smaller Midwest chain isn’t waiting around for the crowds to magically reappear.
“The pandemic made us realize that we need to diversify,” says Bob Bagby, CEO of family-owned B&B Theaters. “We can’t just depend on studios to provide us with what we need to drive our business.”
That means pickleball games and cocktails in the lobby, even bowling — all designed to get people to see the theaters as more than just a place to screen the latest flicks.
People now refer to seeing movies on the big screen as essentially annual events. “Yeah, I saw Oppenheimer that year.” “I watched Top Gun: Maverick in the theater.” “I saw the big Spider-Man multiverse movie Christmastime 2021.” It’s hard to believe that people once went to the movies weekly — and that Hollywood created watchable product to fill that demand instead of hectoring its audiences to have politically correct opinions and utter the latest bespoke pronouns.
Related: A Twitter thread on J.R.R. Tolkien versus Disney concludes:
HOW COULD THEY TELL? Harris Staff And DNC Drew Up Contingency Plans In Case Joe Died In Office.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WATCH: Scott Jennings Humiliates Another CNN Talking Head.
On Friday evening, Lulu Garcia-Navarro made the laughable attempt to convince viewers that this situation was somehow worse than Secretary Lloyd Austin’s catastrophic failures—such as the one that left 13 American service members dead, or the time he went AWOL while his deputy lounged on vacation, cocktail in hand. With a straight face, she actually suggested that if this had happened under the Biden administration, someone would have been held accountable.
“If this was a Democrat or a democratic administration who had foolishly, unconscionably created a group chat to have discussion about a military operation that was top secret, I think, Scott, you would have been the first person to call for those people’s resignation,” Garcia-Navarro argued.
She then insisted that accountability should not be a partisan issue. “Accountability is actually something that normally happens in a well-functioning administration,” she said. “This isn’t, you know, cowboys and Indians and calling for scalps. This is actually what most people would think was, if someone has behaved in a way that puts American lives at risk, they should be held accountable for it.”
“You don’t have to make up hypotheticals, Lulu, about if this happened in a democratic administration,” Jennings countered. “Let me take you back in time. In a Democratic administration, the secretary of defense oversaw a disastrous military operation in which 13 servicemen died in Afghanistan. Then to try to make up for it, they vaporized like seven children in a drone strike. Then later, the secretary of defense went AWOL and didn’t even tell the commander-in-chief.”
Garcia-Navarro quickly interrupted. “This is a completely different thing,” she insisted.
Now, let’s get real for a moment. She’s right; they are different situations. What happened under Lloyd Austin’s watch was so much worse. The incompetence of the Biden administration not only resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers, but also the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, who now had access to billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment that was left behind by Joe Biden.
Related: My theory about who’s really behind the war plans leak that could trigger a White House coup.
BENJAMIN KERSTEIN: Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis.
The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity.
Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.
* * * * * * * *
The reason is that, whatever their pretensions otherwise, progressives do not own anti-Nazism. In fact, they have no claim to anti-Nazism whatsoever. Genuine anti-Nazism can only lie with those who oppose genocidal antisemitism, because if Nazism is not genocidally antisemitic, then it is not Nazism. You cannot be anti-Nazi while defending genocidal antisemites. It is impossible.
Moreover, by claiming that antisemites are somehow victims of Nazism, progressives are engaging in an act of monstrous blasphemy. They are defaming the millions of Jews who died at antisemitism’s hands and appropriating the generational trauma of those who survived.
Historically, this is par for the course. Antisemites have always been happy to appropriate whatever they wish from the Jews and then spit in our faces. But it is no less disgraceful for its great age.
This is offensive enough, but progressives dig the hole even deeper: They claim that the Jews are Nazis. This blood libel is a staple of progressive rhetoric and wildly popular among the campus antisemites. In many ways, it has become part of “legitimate” discourse in academia. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fully convey the depth of the sadism and cruelty inherent in it.
Related: The World After Gaza: turning the Holocaust against Israel.
LAS VEGAS JUDGE DECLINES TO RELEASE SUSPECT IN TESLA ‘DOMESTIC TERRORISM’ ATTACK:
A federal magistrate judge declined Friday to immediately release the man accused of setting fires at a Tesla collision center, citing her concerns of returning him to the community without his mother’s supervision.
Las Vegas Metro police arrested Paul Kim, 36, on Wednesday night on charges including arson and possessing an explosive device, the 8 News Now Investigators first reported. U.S. Marshals later took Kim into custody on federal charges.
The fires, which involved Molotov cocktails, happened Tuesday, March 18, around 2:45 a.m. at a Tesla center located at 6260 West Badura Avenue near Jones Boulevard and Warm Springs Road.
License plate readers, cameras, social media tools, DNA and other technology directly led to Kim, LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Thursday.
During a detention hearing Friday before Magistrate Judge Elayna Youchah, prosecutor Jacob Operskalski called Kim a “flight risk” and said the Department of Justice considered his alleged actions “domestic terrorism.”
Operskalski noted there was no federal charge for domestic terrorism and highlighted the determination could lead to enhancements during sentencing.
Why aren’t there federal charges for domestic terrorism? Last Wednesday, ABC reported: Attorney general calls Tesla arson attacks ‘nothing short of domestic terrorism.’
MAKE APPLE GREAT AGAIN: Siri, explain how you became Apple’s most embarrassing failure.
According to Bloomberg, Apple executives told staff that the delays were “embarrassing” and “ugly”, and said the company had promoted the Siri revamp before it was ready.
Robby Walker, a senior director at Apple, pointed the finger at the company’s marketing team for seeking to promote the features ahead of time. A week later, Giannandrea was reportedly sidelined, with Mike Rockwell, the head of the Vision Pro headset, put in charge of Siri.
The uncharacteristic own-goal led to a wave of criticism. John Gruber, a long-time Apple follower, said that “something is rotten” at the company, while Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-connected analyst, said Cook should apologise.
Apple is now facing a false advertising lawsuit from customers who said they bought new iPhones on the premise that they would receive features such as the new Siri. Apple has not yet responded to the lawsuit.
Mr Chatterjee, of Forrester, says: “There is cause for concern but not for panic.”
He says the company has plenty of loyal customers, but that the company’s recent challenges have dimmed hopes of an upgrade “super cycle” to boost sales.
The problems getting Siri to work might be understandable in isolation, but they come amid a series of Apple initiatives that have missed the mark.
The company invested billions of pounds into an electric car project that it eventually scrapped a year ago.
Its Vision Pro headset – the company’s biggest new idea since the iPhone – has disappointed, with plans for an upgraded model reportedly in flux.
But ChatGPT 4o can now make Ghibli cartoons at the drop of a text prompt – isn’t that enough of a bleeding edge 21st century high-tech breakthrough for one week?!
