IT’S COME TO THIS: Black day? Guinness runs dry in UK pubs amid online craze.

At her London pub, landlady Kate Davidson has taken to issuing Guinness ration cards, but still the beer has run out amid a UK shortage of Ireland’s national drink.

Bars across Britain, even Irish ones, have reported limited supplies of the black stuff since Guinness owner Diageo announced earlier this month that it was experiencing “exceptional consumer demand”.

“I’m a bit shocked because it’s Christmas,” said Davidson, co-owner of the Old Ivy House, where an empty upside down Guinness glass signalled that its tap had run dry.

“I wouldn’t have expected them to run out at this time of year,” the 42-year-old told AFP at the cosy boozer in the Clerkenwell area of central London.

A number of factors have meant that Diageo has become a victim of its own success.

Earlier this year, Diageo chief executive Debra Crew said Guinness consumption was up 24 percent among women, as the company shifts its marketing strategy to attract new consumers.

So-called “Guinnfluencers” online — including Kim Kardashian, who has posted a photo of herself with the beer on Instagram — have been credited with fuelling the stout’s appeal among Gen Z.

As P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote, “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.” And now apparently, you can’t get Guiness in England.

THE LEFT’S DEMAND FOR HATE IN AMERICA VASTLY EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: Racist messages found on Tennessee college campus were ‘fabricated,’ school says.

A Tennessee college revealed that racist messages found written on campus were fabricated by a student in an apparent attempt to make Donald Trump supporters look bad.

Rhodes College confirmed to Fox News Digital that a student had admitted to leaving the messages strewn about campus that were found over Thanksgiving break and were being investigated as a hate crime. Instead, it turned out to be yet another race hoax.

“Thanks to the tireless efforts of our Campus Safety officers and the Memphis Police Department, the investigation into the hate crime that occurred recently on our campus has ended with the identification of the perpetrator and the conclusion this incident was fabricated. This individual has admitted responsibility,” the statement read.

Earlier: The Top Seven Most Ridiculous Hate Crime Hoaxes.

You’re gonna need a much bigger blog.

THE SWINGINGEST OHIO FUNERAL HOME SINCE FERRYMAN’S! Columbus funeral home to be first in Ohio to operate with a liquor license.

A north side funeral home could soon serve mourners in a new way: alcohol.

‘Evergreen Funeral Cremation and Reception’ is set to open next year. They applied for a liquor license and could soon be serving people during services.

Owners tell WSYX that this is a unique twist to a celebration of life, and they want to change how people view an average funeral.

The mission is to make the process of a very difficult time a little easier.

“My role in this position is to kind of be a party planner for the dead. Be more of a celebration of life than more of the multi-day traditional services, which cost a lot of money,” Hunter Triplett told WSYX.

Classical reference in headline:

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! White House Biden health cover-up blown wide open in bombshell report: Joe was senile from day one of presidency.

A bombshell report details how President Joe Biden‘s White House hid from the public his rapidly diminishing mental and physical condition for his entire presidency.

Biden’s team hired a vocal coach, put other officials into roles usually occupied by the president and neglected to share with him negative news stories, according to an explosive report in The Wall Street Journal.

This exposes an extensive and thought-out cover-up that included the administration repeatedly gaslighting those who dared to claim the president was no longer the same man who served as vice president.

But Biden’s decline was hard to overlook – especially after Special Counsel Robert Hur last year released a report in the classified documents case depicting a forgetful and frail then-81-year-old.

Hur decided not to charge Biden because he ‘would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ and ‘it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him.’

The WSJ notes how Biden couldn’t even repeat back to his staff lines they fed him while preparing for his interview with the special counsel.

And staff was worried about the comparison between President Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden, who is eight years his junior and held an energetic, packed schedule that only highlighted her husband’s more mild pace.

Charles Cooke adds: Contrast the WSJ Piece on Biden’s Senility with Kamala Harris’s Lies about It.

VP Kamala Harris rips the special counsel’s report into President Biden’s handling of classified documents:

“The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.” pic.twitter.com/DO1M4ompYs

— The Recount (@therecount) February 9, 2024

Look at her. Just look at her. She knew. She was in on it. And yet, despite knowing, and despite being in on it, she said all that. Listen to the righteous indignation she spins up! Listen to her moralistic language! It will never cease to amaze me.

And no, before someone says it, this wasn’t because Biden “deteriorated later on.” The Journal places the start of the decline in 2021. It also confirms that Biden was a mess during the preparations for his meeting with Hur — which apparently took three hours per day for a week:

In the fall of 2023, Biden faced a major test when Hur, the special counsel, wanted to interview him. The president wanted to do it, and his top aides felt that his willingness to sit down with investigators set up a favorable contrast with Trump, who stonewalled the probe into why classified documents appeared at Mar-a-Lago, according to people familiar with the sessions.

The prep sessions took about three hours a day for about a week ahead of the interview, according to a person familiar with the preparation. During these sessions, Biden’s energy levels were up and down. He couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him, the person said.

Astonishing.

“Now They Tell Us Joe Biden’s Not Up For This Job,” Generalissimo Duane Patterson writes at Hot Air:

As recent as June, there was only one narrative coming out of the Democratic-abetting Manhattan-Beltway media complex – Joe Biden is fine. He’s better than fine. He’s never been better. All this nonsense being peddling on right-wing sites and talk radio is disinformation. The videos we all saw were not real. They were cheap fakes.

The New York Times on June 21st ran a headline that read, “How Misleading Videos Trail Biden As He Battles Age Doubts.” It parroted the White House line that videos showing Joe Biden addled and disconnected on trips abroad were “cheap fakes.”

Back in July, Drew Holden cataloged a plethora of examples of the media actively working with the Biden administration to hide Biden’s failing mental acuity: The Media Helped Cover Up Biden’s Cognitive Decline. Parroted claims of “cheap fakes” were just the latest in a long series of press deceptions about Biden’s mental shortcomings.

Just this Tuesday, the Democrats’ “Politifact” opinion site used Trump’s “They’re eating the cats” riff as their choice for lie of the year, rather than risk highlighting that they were covering up for Sundown Joe as well:

Still though — assuming he makes it to January, Biden’s husk got four years in office. I was about to end this post with an “Edith Wilson smiles” joke, but actually, she’d be quite jealous — Jill got to be de facto president for twice as long as Edith.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Oscar Mayer taking applications to drive ‘Wienermobile’ around U.S.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Amy Wax Threatens To Sue Penn for Race Discrimination, Breach of Contract.

DISPATCHES FROM BLUESKY:

I look at all four of these screenshots and think to myself, we are all better off now that these particular accounts don't post here anymore. They must love being in the tightest bubble possible. https://t.co/2wP0sfLNZY

— Kris Kinder (@kris_kinder) December 19, 2024

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record notes:

Dems Explain They Don't Want Billionaires Controlling Our Media Unless They're Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bloomberg, Buffett, Or Soros https://t.co/spWWsEUkBp pic.twitter.com/VHl1hGhxvs

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 19, 2024

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

So you’re telling me a bunch of Leftists ran to a new platform and all the sudden there’s an uptick in child s*xual abuse material and death threats there?? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/9R28vMzDCR

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 19, 2024

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The truth about Ireland’s hatred for Israel.

Is there a politician more sanctimonious, more smug, than Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins? His pompous scolding of Israel this week after it had the temerity to call out the anti-Israel animus of the Irish elites was a truly unedifying spectacle of false virtue and cant. Shaking with fury, every word bitterly spat out, he said it is a ‘gross defamation and slander’ to ‘brand a people’ anti-Semitic just because they ‘criticise Benjamin Netanyahu’. He seemed to be in the grip of a paroxysm of pique. I’ve never seen him quake and froth like this over anything else: not poverty, not homelessness, not war. Well, unless it’s a war being fought by Israel.

It’s hard to decide what was most grating in Higgins’s theatre of fury, which, as he knows, will have been lapped up by every scribe at the Irish Times, every patron of the wine bars of Dublin 4, every rich kid in a keffiyeh at Trinity. Let’s start with the fact that his windy invective was in large part misinformation. Israel has not accused the Irish people of anti-Semitism. It has accused ‘the Irish government’ of pursuing ‘extreme anti-Israel policies’. That’s why it took the decision to shut its embassy in Dublin: not because it thinks every Irishman is a Jew-hater but because it thinks Ireland’s ruling class is possessed of a curious abhorrence for the Jewish nation. Imagine accusing Israel of ‘slander’ even as you wilfully twist its words.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Israel’s Irish Goodbye. “Do you know when Israel’s embassy in Ireland was established? 1996. So please, Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Simon Harris, spare us the feigned offense and the community-theater histrionics and the supposed shock in reaction to Israel’s announcement that it would close its embassy in Dublin. Ireland’s history with Israel is uniquely shameful among supposed Western democracies…Ireland has always treated Israel with special contempt. Decades after Eamon de Valera offered Germany his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, the country he helped found seemed permanently stuck in time. Ireland had to be dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing the Jews. The Israeli embassy barely predates the Good Friday Agreement.”

LUIGI MANGIONE TO FACE FEDERAL CHARGES OVER KILLING OF UNITEDHEALTH BOSS:

Luigi Mangione, the suspect indicted on murder charges in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, will now face federal charges that could attract the death penalty, the New York Times reported late on Wednesday.

It was not immediately clear what charges the suspect would face in the federal case but they will be in addition to the New York state murder indictment, the report added, citing people familiar with the matter.

Federal charges would potentially allow prosecutors to pursue the death penalty, which has been outlawed in New York for decades, it said.

Related: Christopher Rufo: Luigi Mangione and Left-Wing Nihilism.

What’s interesting about this manifesto is two things. One is that for a very smart person, he’s reduced it to very simplistic, left-wing narratives, and it was only a few hundred words. He didn’t even actually think through why he was committing the crime in detail. In fact, he says at one point, “I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument about the corruption of America’s healthcare system”—and yet he felt he was educated enough to plot and execute a plan to murder this company’s CEO.

Beneath this admittedly surface-level, left-wing rhetoric, what is really happening here? It’s something that I have witnessed over the last few years and documented in various capacities, but it really comes into sharp focus here. It’s a form of left-wing nihilism.

Typically, the left likes to present itself as left-wing progressivism. “We’re going to make the world better. We’re going to provide more healthcare. We’re going to get a public option. We’re going to have the Affordable Care Act. We’re going to have a single-payer system that will provide care and value each human being.” That’s the narrative in a traditional left-wing progressivism. But once that wears off—certainly the failure of Obamacare contributes to this, certainly the failures of the Sanders-Warren wing of the party have contributed to this—as those narratives have been sloughed off and abandoned as impractical (more accurately, as counterproductive), you see a new form of left-wing nihilism, which is the other side of the coin of left-wing progressivism. “If we can’t build a healthcare system, let’s destroy the existing healthcare system”—and perhaps out of this catastrophic destruction, something better will emerge.

The reason for this is quite simple if you look at it from the outside honestly. Building a society and building a national healthcare system for 340 million people is hard. Assassinating an unsuspecting individual on the streets of Manhattan is relatively easy. So the energy gets directed into that direction because the energy seeks opportunity, and then whatever psychopathology that is living inside these individuals—and certainly, Luigi Mangione had some psychopathology living inside of him—can then use those narratives as an intellectual rationalization. He’s a smart person. He was seeking some rationale for what is likely a complex mix of ideological and personal reasons why he wanted to commit this crime.

What’s the big problem with this is obviously the murder. You should not murder people for no reason on the streets of Manhattan. This is obvious, although not as obvious as it should be. Some people are really struggling with that. But the second problem, and the deeper problem, is that it reveals the extent to which madness and nihilism have been baked into our culture. Someone who is an Ivy League graduate, someone who has a strong family network, someone who has wealth and health and opportunity ahead of him decides to go down this dark path. That’s why there’s a fascination about this case. If it was an unknown, anonymous vagrant who stabbed someone in the street, it’s a blip. But we’ve raised the stakes, because what this shows—and for those of us in the media who share the same kind of educational background as this individual, as both of these individuals—it creates this window that America’s elite is simultaneously failing to restrain the psychopathologies of too many young people, and that the elite ideologies—both the elite ideologies that are more conventional and the elite ideologies that are even more radical—offer no path of constructive action. In fact, they are preying on people who, for their own reasons, are feeling a sense of rage, a sense of destructiveness, a sense of passion. It gives them the keys and the language to act on that in highly symbolic ways, but nonetheless extremely destructive ways.

And how: Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable.

STEPHANOPOULOS BEING EASED INTO BACKGROUND AT ABC?

Coincidentally, an ABC News spokesperson told me today that Stephanopoulos has just signed a new, multiyear contract with the network, unrelated to the timing of the settlement. Several insiders speculated that Stephanopoulos’s new deal includes a pay cut, and noted that he is likely to eventually take on a more limited role, after already ceding pole-anchor position on special event coverage to David Muir. Disney is trying to lower costs across its linear portfolio, including at ABC’s Good Morning America, where Stephanopoulos and his co-anchors Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan have historically made around $25 million a year—a gross misalignment of funds, given the declining audience for morning television, generally, and particularly in light of GMA’s ratings slide since Almin Karamehmedovic became president of ABC News. Presumably, Stephanopoulos’s heir apparent, Whit Johnson, would deliver similar ratings and cost a lot less.

Indeed, that is where things seem to be headed—albeit with the discretion and diplomatic finesse befitting a revered network veteran who, despite his slip-ups, has earned the right to an elegant exit. Also, as you all know, television news is a business wherein executives and talent air kiss each other at lunch but complain ceaselessly about one another in private—their own version of being “electronically sloppy.” George may be headed toward his next act as a public figure, but no one wants to be the person responsible for it.

Why, it’s as if: Mainstream Is Now Fringe, and Fringe Is Mainstream.

JUSTINE BATEMAN SAYS THE LAST EIGHT YEARS OF CANCEL CULTURE HAVE BEEN “UNBEARABLE:”

“I don’t remember a time in my career where there was an absence of criticism of me,” Bateman said.  “So I’ve always been, there’s always been somebody, at least one person, and I say that sarcastically, like more than one person, who’s got a problem with me or something about my presence pushes their buttons or they don’t like that I haven’t done anything to my face. I mean, so any quote blowback I would be getting from anything I’m saying now is in the same bin. In other words, it’s no different now than it’s ever been. So I don’t care. And all I’m saying now is I’m glad that that mob mentality momentum is over because the last eight years, and most acutely last four years, were f*cking unbearable. Unbearable. I never wanna go through anything like that again in my life. I truly don’t. It was the most un-American situation I’ve ever been in. And I’m 58, I think, I’m 58, you know?”

“To say that people can’t say, can’t ask questions, can’t say what they think, can’t ask that there be some research on this or that. It was absolutely awful. It was just like revenge of the hall monitors. It was the f*cking Debbie Downers, the Party Poopers.”

MEGYN KELLY, HOST: Yeah, totally agree.

JUSTINE BATEMAN: To say that people can’t say, can’t ask questions, can’t say what they think, can’t ask that there be some research on this or that. It was absolutely awful. It was just like revenge of the hall monitors. It was the f*cking Debbie Downers, the Party Poopers. And one of the things, you know, the social media video critiques that I’m doing. I mean, I’m not doing that many anymore ’cause it’s, you don’t have as many, you know, people getting all crazy about it. But I will do it for subscribers for a Christmas present, for if they want a Christmas present for someone, they could like send me their mom’s or their sisters or whatever’s, <laugh>, you know, I mean, it’s a good Christmas present. Right. And I’ll do a critique for them.

Bateman’s critiques of leftist meltdowns worked both because of the unexpected source, and the contrast between conservatives’ views after losing a presidential election, which boil down to “Well, that sucked, but we’ll get ’em next time,” compared with the left’s performative apocalyptic meltdowns whenever they lose. (At least since 2000, which the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger once compared to 9/11):

For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives occurred a year earlier—the Florida presidential recount. The 2000 election ended only when the Supreme Court resolved it in favor of George Bush. Republican and independent voters moved on, but many Democrats never did; they were now being governed by an illegitimate president. The chances that any Bush policies would retain their support were minimal, with or without 9/11.

Bush himself would be declared first Hitler, and then an unperson by the left until late September of this year, when, with an increasingly fevered tone, Kamala supporters such as Liz Cheney began to beg him to endorse her.

MARK FELTON: Building Band of Brothers’ ‘Fake’ German Tanks (Video).

INSIDE DISNEY’S CYNICAL, SOUL-SUCKING REMAKE MACHINE:

This week’s Mufasa was directed by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning maestro of Moonlight, who has been tied up in its production for the last four years. There’s a Hercules coming from Guy Ritchie – Aladdin was also one of his – as well as a photorealistic Bambi, to which at one point Women Talking’s Sarah Polley was attached. (She stepped down in March; the gig’s still up for grabs.) The Greatest Showman’s Michael Gracey is on Tangled. Hip-hop multi-hyphenate Questlove is tackling The Aristocats. Robin Hood, Moana, Lilo & Stitch: the IP cupboard raid continues apace.

But that could all change – or at least pause sheepishly for a bit – in the light of one impending release. Disney’s Snow White, coming to cinemas in March, will offer a contemporary spin on the studio’s 1937 legacy-making masterpiece. But exactly how contemporary appears to have been the cause of much backstage panic.

Since it was initially filmed in early 2022, three rounds of reshoots have ensued. These were reportedly to revise the dwarf characters completely – the original human actors, of diverse races and statures, have now been replaced by unsettling CG avatars – as well as make the new version of Snow White more likeable, both by toning down her girlboss braggadocio and expanding the more sympathetic childhood flashback scenes. The budget is said to have ballooned to approximately $250 million.

Rachel Zegler, the star of West Side Story, has also proven a controversial choice as lead, partly for her Colombian heritage (a nonwhite Snow White feels deliberately agitational in a way other racially diverse casting picks have not), and partly for her unfortunate tendency to poke fun at the original film during interviews.

On its release, the trick the film has to pull off is the same one as always: recapturing the vibes of the original film while smoothing over its less PC features. (Hence the lack of underage smoking and boozing in Pinocchio and the crow no-show in Dumbo.) But the unique problem presented by Snow White is the solutions are just as problematic as the problems. Is casting no shorter actors more or less progressive than casting seven, albeit in stereotypical roles? Perhaps this is why Disney took so long to revisit Snow White in the first place: it’s certainly why the thing has taken so long to come out.

The question we’re left with isn’t why does Disney keeps remaking their films – it’s because they still pay – but what will happen once they’ve remade them all. There are arguably only seven left in the canon that would make sense as live-action/CG hybrids: The Sword in the Stone, Oliver & Company, Pocahontas, Tarzan, The Princess and the Frog, Frozen and Encanto. (With the

best will in the world, they’re not doing Chicken Little.)
And the likeliest answer can also be found in 1944. They’ll wait a few years, then do it again.

Hopefully future remakes won’t have as many down votes as Snow White currently has: Disney’s Woke ‘Snow White’ Trailer Nears 1.4 Million Downvotes.

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE? Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable.

A poll found 41 percent of adults under 30 consider the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson acceptable, more than the 40 percent in that demographic who consider it unacceptable.

Anger over health insurance companies has been in the spotlight after Thompson was fatally shot Dec. 4 in New York City.

Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old, was arrested last week in Pennsylvania and faces charges in Thompson’s killing.

The survey from Emerson College Polling found 68 percent of all respondents found the actions of the person who shot and killed Thompson unacceptable.

But a startling 24 percent of those aged 18-29 found it “somewhat acceptable,” and 17 percent of that group found it completely acceptable.

Since Thompson was shot, first in the back and then again as he fell to the ground, a number of social media posts from people saying they do not have sympathy for his death have gained popularity.

Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said 22 percent of Democrats said they found the killing acceptable, compared to 16 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans. He said the overall findings underscored “shifting societal attitudes among the youngest electorate and within party lines.”

And then there’s the violent rhetoric emanating out of lefty-dominated BlueSky: Jesse Singal: Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and The Economist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

“Honestly?” responded one user. “[G]un.” Another user then replied, lamenting the absence of technology that would allow them to shoot me via the internet:

Anyway, I joined nonetheless. I figured these messages were coming from a small group of disturbed people. There’s no lack of disturbed people on X—albeit ones who usually have very different politics—and I really did want an alternative to X.

When I arrived, I was bombarded with messages from people telling me to kill myself, or expressing their opinion that I should be killed. When a Change.org petition signed by 25,000 people failed to get me booted off the platform—likely due to my having never come close to violating any rule—the anger only spread further.

The 21^st century – and the party of tolerance for diversity – is not turning out as I had hoped.

ED MORRISSEY: How Very Meta: Journalists Leaking to Journalists in ABC News Meltdown.

Want to know why Americans trust the media less than Congress and used-car salespeople? Greta Van Susteren highlighted one key manner of manipulation reporters and news orgs employ, even when reporting on the news industry itself.

Late yesterday, the New York Post reported that “Furious George” Stephanopoulos felt humiliated and betrayed by ABC News for shelling out $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s defamation claim. As John wrote last night, Stephanopoulos has made himself scarce on social media for the last few weeks as this percolated between the lawyers. In retrospect, ABC’s decision to have David Muir moderate the debate rather than Stephanopoulos might have been a hint that they had lost confidence in Stephanopoulos’ judgment — although Muir turned out to be a disaster anyway.

Now, this kind of story is why we use the “Too Good to Check” label. Of course we want people who falsify the news to feel “humiliated” as a result. But if Stephanopoulos has gone silent and ABC’s only offering press releases, how do we know that Stephanopouls feels humiliated and betrayed? Because several people inside ABC News want us to know it — although they don’t want to put their names to it.

* * * * * * * *

This is exactly how mainstream media orgs — and yes, even the NY Post falls into that category, as much as we enjoy their work otherwise — use Anonymice to manipulate readers and promote bogus narratives. Media orgs insist that anonymous sourcing is critical to their ability to report on malfeasance by people in power, and that may well be the case, but … how exactly does that apply to this story? Or for that matter, practically any story published these days on the basis of Anonymice?

Back in 2003 Virginia Postrel explored “Press Pathologies:”

Each national press corps seems to have its own pathology. For the American press, it’s the giant campaign swing, as applicable in military campaigns as in electoral contests. First the front-runner can’t lose. Then he’s a total disaster. Ditto the U.S. military in Iraq. The audience, reporters seem to believe, will reward drama.

The British press corps serves its market, in turn, by passing on every rumor someone tells a reporter in a bar. The result are lots of juicy stories, some of them true. As a former U.S. news editor told her editors after 9/11, when asked why her paper wasn’t getting the great stories in the British press, “They’re great stories. But they aren’t true.”

The fever swamp dreams the DNC-MSM conjured up in the wake of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 in an effort to sink his presidency have rendered so much of their output as radioactive. Though it is fun in the wake of his second victory to see them devouring themselves.

WHY THEY HATE KASH PATEL:

The congressional committee for which Patel served may have stopped the Russia Collusion Hoax from prematurely ending Trump’s first term. So naturally, he’s familiar with many of the individuals involved in the conspiracy. While the statute of limitations has likely lapsed for most or possibly even all of these figures, it’s still a victory for truth if Patel can expose their dark deeds.

We cannot allow Wray to be replaced by another “highly qualified” company man who will continue business as usual. Replacing him with a more suitable successor will require disruption. But this kind of change is exactly what is necessary for our political health.

Read the whole thing.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: The Democrats’ Anti-Israel Future. It all changed with Barack Obama.

More alarming for Israel was the change Obama made in American policy toward Iran. The Iranian regime has sworn to wipe “the Zionist entity” off the map. And it was with this regime that Obama sought closer relations as he pulled the U.S. away from Israel.

Some background. In 2002, an exiled opposition group revealed the existence of two nuclear facilities that Iran had kept secret, despite Tehran’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although Tehran insisted that these were intended only to generate electricity, neither clandestine site was connected to the electric grid.

The embarrassment of exposure, and the intimidating implications of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, prompted Iran to suspend much of its nuclear program; subsequently, a leaked U.S. intelligence report implied that Iran had abandoned it entirely. This was false, but it made President Bush feel he could not resort to military action, which may have been the ulterior motive of those who wrote it and leaked it. Although Washington and our European allies agreed on various sanctions and inducements, the problem remained unresolved when Obama took office.

Within a month of his inauguration, Obama sent a secret letter to Iran’s ruler, Ali Khamenei, seeking “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations.” In his memoirs, Obama reports that “Khamenei’s answer was blunt: Iran had no interest in direct talks.” Obama claims that this is what he expected. But he writes, “I’d sent the letter anyway because I wanted to establish that the impediment to negotiations was not America’s intransigence—it was Iran’s.”

Hey remember when the New York Times claimed during the 2008 campaign that:

Senator Obama has said he would do anything in his power to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and has spent much of the campaign defending his willingness to negotiate with Iran. He argues that a big mistake the Bush administration made was being unwilling to talk to enemies. When Mr. Bush finally relented in the case of North Korea, he has said, the United States began to make some small progress.

But Mr. Obama has also said he would keep “all options on the table,” the code words for possible military strikes, and he has said that at the end of a negotiation, Iran should not be producing any nuclear fuel on its own territory. His aides stress the need to make clear to Iran how it might benefit by abandoning its nuclear ambitions and ending its support for terrorism.

Good times, good times.

WATCH: SYRIAN ‘MODERATE REBEL’ REMOVES ISIS PATCH AT PROMPTING OF AMERICAN JOURNALIST.

Video footage has recently emerged taken by journalist James Longman advising ‘rebels’ in Syria that the ISIS logo on their uniforms will be misunderstood by Western audiences. Longman, who is ABC News’ Chief International Correspondent, demonstrates a trend of American journalists going to war zones to essentially coach combatants on how to better present themselves to the outside world. Mainstream media has for many years pushed the myth of “moderate rebels” in Syria seeking to topple Assad, which they finally did this month.

Shades of “The Mao Tse Tung Hour” segment in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network, where television executives haggled with a Symbionese Liberation Army-inspired revolutionary group over the best way to portray their terrorism on network television. Chayefsky thought he was writing satire; he instead gave American network television an endless catalog of ideas for shows.

TODAY IN HISTORY: The Wright Brothers’ First Flight: A 12-Second Leap That Changed the World Forever.

On December 17, 1903, on a cold morning in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the world changed forever. What began as an improbable dream, the obsession of two brothers who built bicycles for a living, culminated in 12 historic seconds. Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved what no one else had before: powered flight.

Though the first flight covered a mere 120 feet, humanity crossed an invisible threshold between the possible and the impossible. This was not just a technical achievement—it was an act of unwavering determination and faith in the future. It was the moment humanity took its first step into the skies.

Indeed.

Incidentally, while employing language that at one time couldn’t be said on terrestrially broadcast television, the popular Super ’70s Sports Twitter account also recently described the enormity of the risks the Brothers Wright undertook.

ROBERT SPENCER: Elizabeth Warren Demands Conflict-of-Interest Rules for Musk, and Trump Camp’s Response Is FIRE.

Heap big trouble for Trump and Musk, eh? No. Not only is Warren’s demand patently one-sided and politically motivated, but Trump’s team is not disposed to take it lying down. Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Monday sent Warren a teepee-shaking response: “President Trump,” Leavitt wrote, “has assembled the most impressive and qualified team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and geniuses to advise and staff our government. Pocahontas can play political games and send toothless letters, but the Trump-Vance transition will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible—a standard unfamiliar to a career politician whose societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk’s.”

This statement should be preserved as an example of how patriots should fight back against the left. “Pocahontas,” of course, was Trump’s unforgettable nickname for Warren after she was unmasked as a fake, having claimed for decades to be a Native American while not having any actual native ancestry. Leavitt’s statement that Warren’s “societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk’s” was a riotous reference to Warren’s disastrous decision in 2018 to prove Trump wrong with a DNA test, only for it to show that she was no more than 1/1024th Native American, at best.

And note that the Democratic Party operatives with bylines at the Washington Post are far angrier at Trump’s spokeswoman referring to Warren as “Pocahontas” rather than Warren having used a fake ethnic identity to advance her career:

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018 in “The Blackface Party:”

Senator Warren is the main offender of the moment, a significantly-whiter-than-the-average-white-woman white woman who has for years been masquerading as a Native American, telling transparent bumfodder stories about how her parents had to elope because her mother was part Cherokee and part Delaware, an obvious attempt to claim some of that victimhood juice secondhand. She allowed herself to be advertised as a woman of color by Harvard, happy in the coincidence that “her major professional advances — to the University of Pennsylvania and then to Harvard — came after she began formally identifying as Native American, a distant descendant of Cherokee and Delaware tribes,” as the Boston Globe put it.

(She is a woman of color: Pantone 11-0602.)

Warren, previously a mostly obscure academic and an author of dopey self-help books — The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan — needed a little extra kick to stand out from the crowd of sanctimonious white ladies who rest like a dollop of low-fat sour cream atop the nation’s educational institutions. And so she went all in on her fictitious Indian ancestry: You’ll remember the recipe for “Pow-Wow Chow” and other “Indian” dishes plagiarized from the New York Times.

The Cherokee Nation is not buying it, denouncing Senator Warren’s extraordinarily tenuous claim to native ancestry as “a mockery,” “dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens,” “inappropriate and wrong,” etc. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage,” Cherokee Nation secretary of state Chuck Hoskin Jr. wrote.

Identity politics is generally goofy and often trivial, but this is no trivial thing: The Cherokee Nation is a separate sovereign nation, with the rights and dignity that implies. It deserves to be treated with respect, not used as a prop by an ambitious low-rent hustler from Oklahoma.

White people did some pretty rotten things to the Indians over the years. But making them take Elizabeth Warren on top of it? That’s just mean.

Incidentally, some of us on the right are also extremely angry with Trump’s spokeswoman referring to Warren as “Pocahontas.” It’s Fauxcahontas, dammit — Fauxcahontas!

14 DETAINED IN ARMED AURORA, COLORADO HOME INVASION ARE LIKELY ILLEGAL GANG MEMBERS: POLICE.

Police in Aurora, Colorado, say the overnight armed home invasion at a local apartment complex that resulted in 14 suspects being detained was “without question a gang incident.” victimized their own race and their own ethnicity.”

Just before 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, police were called to The Edge at Lowry Apartments in the 1200 block of Dallas Street for a reported armed home invasion in which victims were kidnapped and assaulted, the Aurora Police said.

Aurora Police Department Chief Todd Chamberlain said during a Tuesday news conference that 13 to 15 people, mostly males with some females, entered an apartment where two people were inside. Police say the suspects took the migrant victims to another apartment at the same location, where the victims were “threatened and bound.”

As always:

Martha Raddatz hardest hit.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: While KBJ Enjoys Broadway, Her Constitution-Loving Supreme Court Colleagues Can Barely Leave Their Homes.

Still, it’s nice that Jackson can appear on Broadway to rapturous applause from left-wing audiences. It’s a notable contrast to her conservative colleagues on the court, who remain under constant threats to their physical safety from left-wing activists.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer famously took to the steps of the Supreme Court itself to threaten violence against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh if they didn’t rule on a case the way he wanted to. During the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, mobs took over Capitol rooms and buildings and pounded on the doors to the Supreme Court shouting, “Burn it to the ground!”

Prior to the release of the Dobbs decision, which returned abortion law to the people and their legislatures, an anonymous affiliate of the court leaked the decision, creating an incentive for assassination. Had any of the justices who signed onto the decision been killed before it was officially released, it would have prevented the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Left-wing activist groups posted the private addresses of justices’ homes and offered financial incentives for sightings of the justices in public. If the information were given to the mobs in time for them to show up and harass the justice, the financial incentive quadrupled. Although federal law prohibits demonstrating in front of a justice’s home in order to influence a decision, President Biden and his Attorney General Merrick Garland gave the protests a green light and claimed there was nothing they could do.

Some justices had to wear bulletproof vests to protect themselves from assassination attempts by left-wing activists. One such attempted assassin used the information posted online by pro-abortion activists to fly across the country and locate the home where Kavanaugh lives with his wife and children. He was stopped before he could kill the Kavanaugh family.

At the Free Press, Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute explores the history of political violence in America and writes: Political Violence Happens Because We Let It.

As the political scientist and gadfly Edward Banfield observed, the riots of the ’60s and ’70s eventually went away, even without massive social reform. Banfield argued that rioting—or any goal-directed violence—is a product of opportunity, as much or more than structural conditions. In other words, if people can get away with it, they will do it. Excusing political violence turns it into a bargaining tactic, making it a more attractive option.

Even if fewer people want to do it, and those who do fear getting caught, they can still be motivated by a sense that the violence’s message will be taken seriously, even respected.

All of this suggests that political violence is downstream of public support, and that political violence happens because we let it. Conversely, it implies that every time someone utters the line “violence is never justified, but. . . ” they are increasing the rewards for engaging in exactly the violence they are nominally condemning.

Such a situation is unsustainable, because political violence cannot coexist with a functioning democracy. Democracy depends on peaceful liberation, allowing each person to have her say, while violence replaces the ballot box with the bullet. If we want the former, we must be unambiguous in our condemnation of the latter.

Which isn’t something to be expected from Chuck Schumer.

JAMES O’KEEFE RELEASES SHOCKING VIDEO OF NSC ADVISOR ADMITTING BIDEN IS FAR WORSE OFF THAN WE KNOW:

James O’Keefe dropped an undercover video on Monday in which one of President Joe Biden’s National Security Council advisors explains that the cognitively declining president is far worse off than the public knows.

The video should not be shocking — given the countless number of times we’ve seen Biden’s brain malfunction, the confused president shake hands with the air or wander around aimless on a stage after he finishes speaking, and other clear signs that his dementia is rapidly progressing — but it is.

National Security Council (NSC) advisor Henry Appel spoke frankly about the current state of Biden’s deteriorating state, unaware that he was being filmed. Appel began with a shocking statement (emphasis, mine).

“Joe Biden is, like, dead. Not literally. Like, he, like, can’t say a sentence,” admits Henry Appel, advisor at the National Security Council (NSC), about the current state of the President’s health. Appel, who works in the Intelligence Programs Directorate, noted his team’s responsibility for providing senior policymakers with top secrets, stating, “We give all of the senior policymakers all of the secrets.”

He went on to describe Biden’s deteriorating communication skills as a concern, adding, “[Biden] can’t say a sentence.” Recalling a phone call in which the President struggled to understand the simple phrase, “novel phenomenon,” Appel shared “He [Biden] was just like, ‘What do you mean, like a book?’ when my boss [Jake Sullivan] used the word ‘novel.’”

It gets worse.

Looking back upon an election year in which the White House and its party operatives with bylines did everything they could to hide Biden’s decline until his disastrous presidential debate and then afterward staged a Sunday afternoon coup-by-Twitter to remove a sitting president from his reelection bid, Democrat opinion site “PolitiFact” finally rose to the occasion to condemn not just this year’s gaslighting by the administration, but Biden’s entire term in office.

Nah, just kidding, but you probably knew that as soon as I uttered the P-word:

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE:

You can’t make this up. Doug Emhoff at the White House Hanukkah party gives a whole speech discussing how successful the Biden administration was at combating antisemitism.

To be abundantly clear, antisemitism has exceeded historic highs in America. pic.twitter.com/T4osvpbCoz

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) December 17, 2024

No word yet if Josh Shapiro attended the party.

SCOTT ALEXANDER: Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House.

A prophet is without honor in his own country — or, to put it another way, a disease rarely goes pandemic in the area where it evolved. You need a naive unexposed population before ideas can really explode. Enter the United States.

In the early 1900s, the US still had a colonial inferiority complex. Europe ­­­automatically had the best and classiest of everything: the best intellectuals, the best food, and definitely the best art. A few bold Americans tried to blaze their own cultural trail, but they were overwhelmed by the power of elite Europhilia.

After World War I, some Americans visited Europe and brought back reports that the Bauhaus was pretty cool. Some modern art museums did exhibitions on the Bauhaus. Everyone agreed that they were cooler and better than we were, but nothing really came of it.

Then the Nazis took power in Germany. The socialist Bauhaus architects fled the country. Many came to America, where we colonial yokels responded with star-struck awe. Wolfe, writing before political correctness limited our stock of acceptable metaphors, says:

The reception of Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses – who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant: The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!

The worshipful colonials immediately gave them every prestigious architecture position in the country. Gropius got the department chair at Harvard. As for Mies, the last director of the Bauhaus collective in Germany:

[He] was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago. And not just dean; master builder also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all, as the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute of Technology. Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come almost to a halt in the United States – for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career – o white gods! Such prostration! Such acts of homage!

And so:

The teaching of architecture was transformed overnight. Everyone started from zero…all architecture became nonbourgeois architecture, although the concept itself was left discreetly unexpressed, as it were. The old Beaux-Arts traditions became heresy, and so did the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, which had only barely made its way into the architecture schools in the first place. Within three years, every so-called major American contribution to contemporary architecture . . . had dropped down into the footnotes.

I found this part of the book sudden and jarring. Okay, Americans have always had an unhealthy fascination with European culture – but, really? Everyone abandoned all previous forms of architecture within a three year period just because some cool Europeans showed up? I was left to hunt down hints to the broader story. Some of these come from elsewhere in the book, and some are my own speculation.

Modernism was one of the first examples of what became known as “political correctness.” As Wolfe noted in From Bauhaus to Our House:

As for the compound taboos concerning what was bourgeois and nonbourgeois, these soon became the very central nervous system of architecture students in the universities, as if they had been encoded in their genes. There was a bizarre story in the press at the time about a drunk who had put a gun to the head of an upland Tennessee footwashing Baptist and ordered him to utter a vile imprecation regarding Jesus Christ. The victim was in no mood to be a martyr; in fact, he desperately wished to save his own hide. But he was a true believer, and he could not make the words pass his lips, try as he might, and his brains were blown out. So it was with the new generation of architects by the late 1940s. There was no circumstance under which a client could have prevailed upon them to incorporate hipped roofs or Italianate cornices or broken pediments or fluted columns or eyebrow lintels or any of the rest of the bourgeois baggage into their designs. Try as they might, they could not make the drafting pencil describe such forms.

O white gods.

The near universalism of PC architecture is what led to what Alexander described as “my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria:”

Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.

Of course, putting blinkers on architects would be far from the only example of political correctness to emerge from academia, alas.