On Monday, Axel Rudakubana – the 18-year-old Brit who murdered three young girls, and tried to kill many more, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July – suddenly changed his pleas to guilty.
Today, we found out just how guilty, how depraved, how evil, he is as he was handed down a 52-year minimum sentence at Liverpool Crown Court – for murder, attempted murder, possession of terrorism materials and production of the biological toxin, ricin.
Having at least spared the victims and their families a lengthy trial, Rudakubana offered them a final insult. He had to be ejected from court for disrupting proceedings, screaming that he was unwell and needed medical attention. He killed defenceless kids, then couldn’t stomach facing their families. Utter scum.
He was 17 when he walked into the Hart Space studio in Southport last summer, pulling out his knife as the girls made friendship bracelets. His age at the time of the attack has spared him a formal ‘whole life order’ – which is reserved for the most hellish crimes, provided the perpetrator is over the age of 18. Nevertheless, the judge reassured a reeling public that Rudakubana would likely never be released from prison.
That felt like a welcome reminder that the system can, on occasion, deliver some semblance of justice, common sense and peace of mind, after a trial that exposed one catastrophic state failure after another.
* * * * * * * *
Whenever there is an ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘sensitive’ dimension to an alleged crime or potential perpetrator, officials become even more crippled. A state that allows child-rape gangs to proliferate for fear of stoking ‘community tensions’, or grants asylum to a convicted sex offender before feigning surprise when he acid attacks a refugee woman and her kids, can no longer claim to care about the safety of ordinary people.
Britain’s media invariably has a similar reaction as well:
An image that sums up the entire Liberal establishment of the West
ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump is a Great Man of History. Is he defining the Zeitgeist, or merely riding it? You might as well ask the same question of Napoleon or Caesar.
Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.
There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.
Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a recent column tells us, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”
The title of that column is revealing. “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” The charge that has most often been levelled against Trump is that he is a man of “bad character”. Even the patently absurd claims that Trump is a “fascist” (General Mark Milley reportedly called him that) or “literally Hitler” follow from the judgment that Trump is just too naff for words, an aesthetic determination that quickly shades into moral obloquy.
I think there are two things to be said about this. Let me turn to Horace Walpole for the first. “No country was ever saved by good men,” Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary”.
You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.
Actually, it is acceptable @mariashriver. When Obama conditioned federal funding for schools, including lunch for students, only to states and counties that followed his protocols of allowing non-gender bathrooms, I don’t recall you expressing such indignation. He prioritized… https://t.co/9ip99W99lm
Much of the action of the clever and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.
It cleverly evokes the Bohemian, faintly squalid, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of ‘protest’ anthems such as the ghastly, cliched and mindless The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan himself got sick of singing it, and who can blame him?).
But the film misses the true importance of the folk superstar Pete Seeger and of Suze Rotolo, though it spends a lot of time on the way they helped the young Dylan to fame.
Seeger, later famous for his liberal ‘peace’ songs, had at one time belonged to the tiny, ultra-Stalinist US Communist Party.
He wasn’t quite as keen on peace in those days. When most sensible people were very much in favour of fighting the Nazis, in from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been a sort of pacifist.
Worse, he and his folk-group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made a record of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Whoops!
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.
They pulled the record from the shops and went round those who had bought it (fortunately not very many people) asking them to give it back. By 1942 they were banging their drums and twanging their banjos for war.
At UnHerd, David Samuels adds: How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke –he refused to be a Leftist prophet. “In other words, as [James] Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.”
President Donald Trump on Friday is visiting North Carolina — a state he said “has been abandoned by the Democrats” as it rebuilds from Hurricane Helene’s flooding — with questions about disaster relief taking center stage in his first days back in office.
Trump will then travel to California, where wildfires have ravaged the Los Angeles area, as Republicans on Capitol Hill begin to navigate between conservatives’ desire for spending cuts and Trump’s pledges to help both places rebuild.
The trip is Trump’s first outside Washington since his inauguration on Monday.
By visiting North Carolina, a swing state he’s won three times, the president is seeking to draw clear contrasts with former President Joe Biden, whose administration’s management of the flooding he called “so bad,” and Democratic leaders in California, whose handling of the wildfires he has repeatedly lambasted.
In a Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is “getting in the way of everything” in North Carolina, and — without explaining how — claimed that Democrats used the agency “not to help.”
Meanwhile, Trump is letting hurricane victims speak at the podium during his press conference, something that would have been inconceivable with Biden and his phalanx of handlers:
President Trump has handed his press conference over to victims of Hurricane Helene and is asking them on national television to name the insurance companies that have stiffed them. Absolutely epic stuff. pic.twitter.com/ay9EtUiOsB
CNN said it would cut about 200 roles focused on its TV operations.
The news organization also plans to hire about the same number in digital-focused positions.
CEO Mark Thompson said last year that he wanted to “future-proof” CNN.
CNN, the cable-news giant owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said it would cut about 200 TV-focused roles as part of a digital pivot.
The company also said it would hire about the same number of staffers in digital-focused roles and aim to fill 100 of them in the coming months.
The cuts would affect about 6% of CNN’s workforce, though the new roles mean total head count is unlikely to be significantly affected.
WBD is providing $70 million in funding as part of a drive to reach $1 billion in digital revenue by 2030.
Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN, told staff in a memo on Thursday that he aimed to “shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
CNN also said it planned to introduce a streaming-news product accessible on devices in the US and elsewhere.
In October, CNN brought in a paywall, charging some of its most loyal readers $4 a month for access to digital content.
John [Bickley]: There are some questions about whether their existing staff is even willing to go in these new directions. I think you commented in your piece about Trump’s second inauguration, the coverage from CNN lost a fifth of its viewership from the Biden inauguration, but also just the way that the anchors and hosts appeared in it – their demeanor, their mood. Are they going to have to completely just revamp all of their key staff?
Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was far worse. They didn’t lose a fifth. They had a fifth of what they had four years ago. So they went from 10 million to less than 2 million, in terms of viewers, which is drastic and reflects not only a sort of partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might’ve voted for Trump might’ve watched on Fox News anyway. It’s not just about that. It’s that they have completely alienated the audience of people who usually came to television for big news events. They have lost that audience. And that is an existential challenge for them.
In terms of the staff, yeah – again, you can have different theories of the case for what a news organization like CNN should do. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.
Carville briefly mentioned Biden’s repeated claim that he could have beaten Trump in November if he’d remained in the race, and made it clear that he wasn’t buying it: “No one f***ing believes that at all!”
“And then fighting with Jill Biden and Alexandra Pelosi,” Carville continued. “I mean, just look, guy — you had a noble career. Your last act was terrible. Just get out of the way. The party’s moving on. I mean, they’re really moving on, and it’s very sad, but that’s just where we are. And he created this himself. He has nobody to blame but himself. Nobody.”
It’s a typically epic Carville rant, but also typically for Carville, rather disingenuous. Those who propped up Biden, virtually the whole of the Democratic Party, including their news media, should share in the blame for four years of deceiving the public. Actually, at least five, given that signs of Biden’s decline were quite evident on the 2020 campaign trail.
The Trump administration is beginning to fly criminal illegal aliens out of the country after rounding them up as part of the long-promised mass deportation program.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Friday that deportation flights have started and shared two pictures of what appears to be group of illegal immigrants walking into a military aircraft.
“Deportation flights have begun,” Leavitt said on X.
“President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”
No word yet if excursions to Martha’s Vineyard will also be an option for what at least one Newsweek scribe has suddenly dubbed “unauthorized citizens:”
Jesse Kelly tweets, “The point has been made by others but just consider for a second that ICE is snatching up all these animals within 72 hours of Trump taking office. Meaning Biden knew exactly where all these people were and they let these barbarians stay here to prey on you. Democrats are evil.”
Well, there certainly were an “unexpected” number of “crises by design” during the past four years.
Israeli hostages released as part of the recent ceasefire with Hamas have claimed they were held in a U.N. camp in Gaza.
Hostages Romi Gonen, Emily Damari, and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released from Hamas custody on Sunday, reported that they had been held in a U.N. refugee camp at some point during their captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13. Details were not given as to what camps they were held in, when, or for how long.
The revelation is the latest blow to the position of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has faced attacks against its credibility throughout the war in Gaza.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the UNRWA for comment.
To be fair, this all sounds pretty on-brand for the UN.
President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination on July 7, 2021, upended the nation, exacerbating the crisis that began in July 2018 with a furious outbreak of protests over fuel prices. In the aftermath, ongoing protests coincided with gang warfare to overwhelm the country. The capital of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas fell, for the most part, into the hands of gangs. Warlord Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who leads the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, now dominates most of Haiti’s capital in his bid to topple the government.
The Haitian government risks completely losing control of the country. Widespread attacks on institutions and infrastructure paralyze Haiti. Gangs assault police stations, hospitals, ports, prisons, and even airports. In March 2024, gangs besieged prisons to release thousands of inmates and struck the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, preventing the acting prime minister, Ariel Henry, from returning after a visit to Kenya. With local airports not spared from the havoc, the Federal Aviation Administration placed a ban on US flights to Haiti until March 2025 because gangs continue to fire upon commercial aircraft.
Described as “apocalyptic” by William O’Neill, whom the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed its expert on Haiti, the country has suffered thousands of homicides as well as kidnappings, with rape a common occurrence. In addition to the violence, Haitians experience a constant lack of food, shelter, water, and medical services. All the necessities of a functioning state remain in disrepair. The humanitarian catastrophe has displaced more than five hundred thousand Haitians, a majority of whom are seeking entry into the United States, legally or not. More than three hundred thousand Haitians have been granted safe haven through the Temporary Protected Status program, as the Biden administration expanded program coverage last summer.
The political instability shows no sign of abating.
Rubbish — Conan O’Brien assures me that Haiti is the jewel of the Caribbean:
Few of you could recognize the name ‘U.S. Agency for Global Media,” but you surely know their products. Don’t feel bad for not knowing the specifics of the agency, by the way. I couldn’t have named it until I looked it up. Here are the names you do know:
Voice of America
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Martí)
Radio Free Asia
Middle East Broadcasting Networks
The agency also runs the Open Technology Fund, which is supposed to enable free speech in places where it is not allowed. Imagine how useful that wasn’t under Joe Biden and how useful it will become under the new Trump administration. I suggest targeting Western Europe first, since free speech is on the wane there.
German luxury car maker BMW was trolled on Thursday after its UK unit abruptly announcing that it was “no longer posting” on X — a move attributed by many users as a bizarre way to protest the social media site’s owner Elon Musk.
“We’re no longer posting on X,” BMW UK wrote on its official X account — without providing a reason for its decision.
“Don’t worry though, our Customer Support team is still here if you need us. You can also see all the latest BMW news by following us on Facebook and Instagram at BMWUK.”
The company was quickly lambasted by X users, who pointed to BMW’s own fraught history with Nazi Germany.
‘Well, he’s wrong,’ Homan shot back in an appearance on Fox News. ‘He’s going back to Haiti.’
Footage of the Haitian migrant resisting his deportation made the rounds on social media Thursday as bystanders captured the moment he was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement during a deportation raid.
The migrant, who reportedly has a lengthy criminal record, shouted ‘f*** Trump, Biden forever!’ as he was hauled into custody.
It’s taken us since 2020 to find him, but finally, a man willing to go on camera and issue a full-throated, passionate support of Joe Biden!
NEW: Haitian man says “F*ck Trump, Biden forever,” gets arrested by ICE’s elite Boston unit to be deported.
The ultimate FAFO.
The arrest was part of a Boston raid on the “worst of the worst” criminal illegal aliens, as reported by @BillMelugin_.
‘WTF is up with that s**? I know the orange meglomaniac [sic] you want to appease wants to erase him, but you’re losing ALL credibility here.’
Many liberals pointed out that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was at Trump’s inaugural celebrations on Monday.
‘You would think since Google sent an employee to celebrate the inauguration, they could get this one right,’ wrote one X user.
The Google error upset so many that the issue was trending on the BlueSky app, where many liberals have fled to after disavowing X because of its Trump-loving owner Elon Musk.
A Google spokesperson told DailyMail.com on Thursday that ‘There was a brief data error in our knowledge graph. We identified the root cause and resolved it quickly.’
Google fixed the issue by Thursday morning, as Biden is now included in the results for the search ‘US presidents in order.’
Given that Biden was simply an MIA figurehead for four years while a group of Obama retreads ran the country, Google’s algorithm got it right the first time:
Even Snopes, which fancies itself an objective fact-checker, refused to debunk the claim that Musk gave a Nazi salute.
During his brief speech — available in full on YouTube — Musk said to the crowd gathered in honor of Trump’s victory, “And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.” He then briskly extended his right hand from his heart to the crowd in front of him. He repeated the gesture for the people behind him. Then, in a moment omitted from the users’ videos, he said, placing his hand over his heart, “Thank you. My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured, thanks to you.”
[…]
We emphasize that as of this writing, Musk has not explained the gesture, nor can we read his mind to learn precisely what he intended by it. It’s possible it was a purposeful Nazi salute; it could also have been entirely innocent. The available evidence is too scant to draw a solid conclusion.
While Snopes wouldn’t debunk it, despite clearly recognizing the gesture was not a Nazi salute, the Anti-Defamation League did debunk it.
This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.
It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on…
It’s really sick that at a time when the mainstream media has been raising alarm bells about disinformation, they continue to actively engage in it to serve their agenda.
Pages of writings from the alleged shooter at Antioch High School showed a layout of the school, the weapons he wanted to use and his thoughts about why he wanted to commit a shooting.
The Metro Nashville Police Department identified the shooter as Solomon Henderson, 17. He is accused of killing Josselin Corea Escalante, 16. MNPD Chief John Drake said in an afternoon press conference that there were materials on the internet the department was looking into as part of the investigation.
[…]
In his writings obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, Henderson showed a layout of Antioch High School, photos of a handgun, a lock picking kit and cartridges to load the handgun. He wanted to livestream his attack in the cafeteria. The writings were connected to a social media account that was purportedly Henderson’s. He posted the writings on the account before the shooting in the cafeteria.
In one of his first sentences, Henderson wrote he “was ashamed to be Black.” He was anti-Semitic in his writings and posted a flyer from the Goyim Defense League, which is a neo-Nazi white supremacy group that visited Nashville this summer.
[…]
His writings showed that he had been thinking about violence for a few months. He wrote his final remarks on Nov. 18.
“I was so miserable. I wanted to kill myself. I just couldn’t take anymore. I am a worthless subhuman, a living breathing disgrace. All my (in real life) friends outgrew me act like they didn’t f—ing know me. Being me was so f—ing humiliating. That’s why I spend all day dissociating.”
Henderson’s writings also showed a photo of The Covenant School shooter who died in 2023 after attacking the private Christian school. Three children and three staff people died that day in addition to the shooter.
He wrote he didn’t intend to kill law enforcement and that he didn’t consider himself the victim of bullying.
We’ll keep you updated, but black Nazis cannot be weaponized to attack Trump or push a gun control narrative, so expect this story to once again be buried by the media.
Metro Nashville Schools (MNPS) Director Adrian Battle has resisted metal detectors in Nashville schools, and even after today’s tragedy, she is still skeptical of their effectiveness.
“I know there are questions about whether additional steps like stationary metal detectors should be employed. While past research has shown they have had limitations and unintended consequences, we will continue to explore emerging technologies and strategies to strengthen school safety,” said Battle.
Former school board member Fran Bush spent two years fighting for metal detectors and fighting with the MNPS director. She says today never should have happened.
* * * * * * * * *
But see what Director Battle had to say on metal detectors one more time:
“While past research has shown they have had limitations and unintended consequences.”
We didn’t get a chance to ask her what she meant by “limitations” or “unintended consequences” and we are not the only ones who want her to explain herself further.
Here in Germany there has been a knifing, killing a two-year old, in a place called Aschaffenburg by an Afghan (motive, of course, “undetermined”) and in Tel Aviv another brutal multiple knifing by a Moroccan with American papers (motive all too obvious) who somehow slipped through the notoriously tight Israeli airport security. Of course back in Nashville there was a high school shooting..
There’s a reason “safe travels” has replaced “bon voyage” as the familiar good-bye greeting these days.
Both the above knifings are getting play on the two large TV screens in front of me, one tuned to Germany’s Die Welt and the other to CNN,
Even more coverage though is devoted to the latest doings of one Donald J. Trump. It should not surprise that our new president is being dealt with more sympathetically or at least more even-handedly, by the German network. CNN has endless palaver by Christiane Amanpour, the British-Iranian journalist who has been pouring snide vitriol on anything American, particularly if it is to the right of Trotsky, for decades, another case of if-you-hate-us-so-much-why-are-you-here.
This doesn’t matter too much inside the USA where audiences are deserting CNN only slightly slower than the speed of light, but in the rest of the world it is a different story. The airports, railroad stations and hotels, as well as cable networks, of countries across the globe feature CNN far more than any other American media outlet. The network maintains this by paying for airport placement and similar means. CNN International is generally more extreme than the domestic variety as well.
And how. The late Roger Ailes had CNN International’s number decades ago:
There was a debate today on a subreddit about classical architecture, agonizing over the administration’s return to its previous position, which was, well, RETVRN. All Federal buildings will now be constructed in traditional styles. No more concrete monstrosities, no more deconstructed alien embassies, just nice sober structures with columns and porticos, connecting the present to the past. The group is predisposed to approve, but there are worries that the style will now be stained with Fascism.
It is also not surprising that Trump the architecture critic has no love for FBI HQ, one of the most reviled examples of the maligned Brutalist style. In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalism—the postwar fad named for béton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete forms—tends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed. As Julia Gatley and Stuart King write in Brutalism Resurgent, a 2016 anthology, brutalist came to be “a pejorative term used to describe monolithic buildings of raw concrete construction that impose themselves on their surroundings.” In the New York that shaped Trump’s aesthetics, that description would have suited affordable housing projects like Waterside Plaza, River Park Towers, Chatham Towers, and Tracey Towers—the antitheses of Trump’s new brand. The far right appears to be leading a broader backlash against architecture self-evidently built with 20th-century technology. Such structures, in addition to their perceived deviance from the “Western traditions” venerated by American fascists, represent the tastes and lifestyles of America’s treacherous urban elite.
It takes chutzpah to defend with a straight face soul-crushing architecture such as this:
Headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, The J. Edgar Hoover Building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Thursday, March 23, 2017. Construction finished in September 1975, and President Gerald Ford dedicated the structure on September 30, 1975. (AP Photo photo and caption.)
Is it that time of awards season already? Time for the sudden and unexpected snowballing of negative media stories about an Oscar frontrunner that may, or may not, have a deleterious impact on its chances of winning one or more Academy Awards?
Step forward this year’s Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist. The film is a stunning historical epic about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, played by Adrien Brody, who becomes a celebrated architect in postwar America. Brody is hotly tipped to win the best actor Oscar, having bagged a Golden Globe, while the film’s equally lauded director, Brady Corbet, is considered a shoo-in for the directing and writing Oscars at the ceremony in March.
There’s just one snag. This week an article, originally published by the tech website Red Shark News on January 11, became the focus of attention online because it revealed that the editor of The Brutalist used AI software to correct some of the pronunciations of Brody and his co-star Felicity Jones during the few moments in the movie when they speak Hungarian.
In the interview David Jancso said: “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce … We also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.
“If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. We first tried to ADR [automated dialogue replacement] these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”
The social media frenzy (typical post: “This is a disgrace!”) became so intense that the detail-obsessed Corbet was forced to issue a clarifying statement where he explained that the AI software was used “specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed.”
RX, Izotope’s long-running audio cleanup program, is popular among Hollywood backroom boffins because of all of the ways it can digitally tweak an actor’s vocal performance, long after the shooting’s stopped, and he can’t be bothered (or isn’t contractually obligated) to return to the dubbing stage to loop his dialogue. It’s but one of numerous tools in a sound designer’s arsenal to manipulate dialogue when editing a movie or TV show.
Everyone in Hollywood knows this. All the people freaking out on social media about voices being replaced in a Hollywood movie then went onto YouTube to watch clips of Star Wars, where this actor’s voice was not only replaced, the replaced voice was tweaked electronically as well:
Incidentally, this detail about Hollywood’s Oscar wars is a riot as well:
Bradley Cooper, for example, was the obvious frontrunner for last year’s best actor Oscar. His performance as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro was extraordinary, and arguably more complex and demanding than that of the award’s eventual winner, Cillian Murphy, for Oppenheimer. But Cooper’s decision to wear a prosthetic nose was deemed antisemitic by moral guardians online. The charge was nonsense, rubbished by Bernstein’s own children. But it hung around the movie like a crazed, Oscar-killing, one-word summation.
Related: Actors wearing fake noses? You ain’t seen nothing yet, Hollywood!
There should be no outrage on the right. Let this dude take home the best actress trophy. The actual female actresses who get robbed deserve it. None of them have the courage to speak out. All of them supported this madness. Now the monster turns against them. Poetic justice. https://t.co/ej5vsAUXNj
Mirabile dictu, the people who spent the last eight years trying to destroy Trump are outraged, outraged that the president of the United States should take a jaundiced view of their activities. John Brennan, one of the most egregious anti-Trump fanatics, whined about the unfairness of it all to left-wing talking-head Andrea Mitchell. It was a pathetic performance, but also revelatory in a minor way. I especially liked it when Brennan described Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as a “American hero.” In my view, Milley ought to have been stripped of his rank and court-martialed when he insinuated himself into the chain of command and contacted his Chinese counterpart to say that he would let him know if Trump was planning to initiate any military action against China.
One of Joe Biden’s last acts as president was to immunize Milley against future federal prosecution by issuing a proleptic get-of-of-jail-free-card, aka a presidential pardon. Milley should be grateful for that benison, but I am not sure it will prove to be the absolution he craves. Remember, we are only two days into the new Trump administration. The shock and awe is just beginning.
Well, good. It’s interesting to see the New York Times suddenly discovering a strange new respect for the English language as well:
Quite the shift from the usual birthing people, fetus and clump of cells terminology pic.twitter.com/Kr3FvZAoph
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