A Supreme Court justice by any other name still acts horribly. If there were a Tony Award for worst Broadway performance, Supreme Court justice and all-around joke, Ketanji Brown Jackson would be taking home a trophy. Yes, the ultimate DEI hire took to the stage in a one-time appearance Saturday in the Broadway musical “&Juliet.”
Appropriately, Jackson made a fool of herself in a play that is a gross insult to Shakespeare, butchering his “Romeo and Juliet” and transforming it into a nightmare of radical feminism, LGBTQ perversion, and woke ideology. Modern people must always pretend that heroes of the classics should have behaved like 21st century wokies, and both Shakespeare and the Founding Fathers would be horrified. How did we get to the point in America where a Supreme Court justice dances around in a sparkly costume on stage? Even more importantly, how did we get to the point where media will glorify an unqualified DEI hire for performing badly in a DEI play? Oh dignity, dignity, wherefore art thou, dignity?
One of the songs reworked for “&Juliet” is “F[*]ckin Perfect,” and while the word perfect has nothing to do with KBJ gyrating and screeching on stage, the first half of the phrase is disturbingly descriptive. When you watch Jackson tittering “female empowerment — sick!”, I think you’ll agree with me. I certainly felt sick listening to her. At least she now seems to be able to identify what is a woman. Putin and Xi would no doubt laugh their pants off at the unserious Democrat Party if they saw this embarrassment.
Fair is fair — when does Bernadette Peters or Patti LuPone sit in for a day in Jackson’s place on the Supreme Court?
“I’m Lily Phillips and today I’m getting ran through by 100 guys.”
So begins the YouTube documentary about OnlyFans star Phillips, 23, and her bid to have sex with 101 men in a single day.
Yes, eww.
She did it for the money and the weird glory — but what about the other part of the equation: the men?
While other porn performers have completed similar stunts, the Phillips story went viral because the film she made about the experience put its tearful aftermath on public display, inspiring near-universal disgust.
But setting aside the revulsion, this is a story about broken people. Phillips, certainly, most observers realize — but far fewer care to extend the same compassion toward the men.
* * * * * * * * *
It’s rare for the internet to come to an overwhelming consensus, yet few if any voices are defending Phillips or arguing that what she did was positive. The mass recoil came because we got to see the repercussions of our “every choice is valid” culture up close.
And indeed, many critics sought — and found — a villain: the men.
“Any man involved in the torture of this woman should be locked up,” Julie Bindel, founder of The Lesbian Project, posted on X. Suddenly the old feminist cries of “my body, my choice” didn’t matter.
The men did this to her, went this strain of online discourse. The woman who planned it, set it up, participated in it willingly and profited from it bore no blame — no, those 101 men should have refused to join her.
But why the belief that women are the only ones who are damaged from soulless interactions like this? And why do only men have agency here?
Like Evel Knievel in the 1970s, trapped into a never-ending routine of dreaming up bigger and more dangerous stunts for the public’s consumption, Phillips is doubling down on her pneumatic lifestyle: Lily Phillips Says She’s Ready to Sleep With 1,000 Men in 1 Day.
“My parents knew straight from the start what I was doing,” Phillips, 23, said in the YouTube documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day via The Mirror. “I was very upfront about it. Obviously, at the start, they were a bit apprehensive because they wanted me to be safe and they wanted me to make good decisions and stuff like that. I just think I can’t hold myself back because I’m scared of what other people might think.”
Earlier this year, Phillips completed her challenge to sleep with 100 men in 24 hours. Her new goal for January 2025 is to have sex with 1,000 guys in one day.
“They don’t need to know the logistics,” Phillips said, referring to her parents’ knowledge of her activities. “I do feel a little bit embarrassed. … I guess because it’s not what my parents would have chosen for me to do. Doesn’t mean my parents are going to disown me or hate me or anything like that. I just don’t want them to think less of me.”
With that last quote, Peter Hitchens’ next update to the Abolition of Britain continues to write itself.
ABC News agreed to fork over $15 million for falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had been found “liable for rape” of E. Jean Carroll, it was revealed in a settlement agreement publicized on Saturday.
“Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury. Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury,” ABC host George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace in March. He was referring to a case in which writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, made loads of money selling a book about it, and then sued Trump for defamation when he insisted on his innocence.
In the civil lawsuit, for which the standard of proof is “more likely than not,” the jurors explicitly found that Trump had not raped Carroll but punished him for “sexual abuse.” Carroll herself has publicly declined to use the word “rape,” and told The Hollywood Reporter that it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock” to press rape charges against Trump.
Stephanopoulos had no such reservations about the term, and ABC is paying a pretty penny to the Trump presidential library for it. But he’s not the only one who used the defamatory phrase on-air. Here are three times CNN hosts and guests aired the same phrase, and five times it happened on MSNBC.
As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.
Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.
It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library!
If the Stephanopoulos standard holds in additional lawsuits, Trump’s presidential library could see itself entirely funded by the DNC-MSM (which somehow seems uniquely appropriate.)
Gee, for some reason a Snow White remake that wants to gaslight us into believing Rachel “The Unibrow” Zegler is more attractive than Gal Gadot is finding itself downvoted by more than ten-to-one.
The Disney Grooming Syndicate’s live-action remake of Snow White is scheduled to dead-cat-bounce into theaters this March. The teaser trailer for this much-delayed boondoggle has now been viewed 11 million times. Still, only 100,000 have upvoted it, while 1.4 million — million — have downvoted it.
Gotta keep pumping that quantity of downvotes up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket, to paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf on Wall Street:
Click to enlarge.
Nolte adds:
We’ve already gone over all the dumb and smug things Snow White star Rachel Zegler has said to undermine her own $350 million movie. No need to do that again. Still, Zegler and the movie have another problem: Rachel Zegler is neither likable nor appealing. She has a smug face when Snow White should be the picture of innocence, someone we root for, worry over and care about. Zegler is so busy girlbossing, there’s nothing vulnerable about her, and it’s Snow White’s vulnerability that should pull us into the story and gives it its stakes.
And since it was seven years ago yesterday when Disney released Star Wars: The Last Jedi, here’s a look back at one of their earlier efforts at shoehorning maximum woke into a genre: The Last Jedi: A Masterpiece of Esoteric Art.
Detractors of The Last Jedi reproach him with having “killed Star Wars“. But a thoughtful analysis such as we have undertaken makes it plain that if he did, it was quite deliberately. The main target of Johnson’s demolitions is J.J. Abrams’s vision for Star Wars. All of the plot threads introduced in The Force Awakens are ruthlessly torn apart: Snoke is dead, Rey’s mysterious parents are useless, Finn reverts to impotent cowardice, and the Resistance itself is utterly destroyed. Even Leia’s coma can be seen as a rebuke of her implicit inaction while the First Order was establishing itself in the interbellum decades. What remains in the aftermath of The Last Jedi is so shattered as to positively require that future installments cannot merely repeat what has come before.
In ye olden days, a director handed a sequel, such as Irvin Kershner being tasked by George Lucas to direct The Empire Strikes Back,Nicholas Meyer by Paramount to make Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, or even the myriad of James Bond directors in the pre-Daniel Craig days, went out of their way to understand what made the original great and preserve that essence, while stamping their own unique talent on the new film at hand. But Disney’s creatives invariably seem absolutely determined to destroy the legacy of whatever product they’ve been given tens of millions to create, whether it was George Lucas’ or even J.J. Abrams’ vision of Star Wars, or Walt Disney’s beloved original Snow White of 1937.
As Ed Morrissey wrote last month after Zegler first muttered “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace,” and then issued a Disney-ordered walkback, “I doubt this apology will do much to ameliorate it, which raises the question of whether Disney will release Snow White at all. The added costs of distribution and marketing will make this a $500M release, with almost no hope of recouping much. Is it better to Batgirl it and get the insurance payout?”
As everybody knows, the Irish Times is about as close as it gets to being the house journal of official Ireland, which makes this paragraph of its breaking news story this afternoon about the Israeli decision to close the Dublin Embassy particularly hilarious:
“To date, Israel has not applied similar measures to other countries, including Egypt, Spain, and Mexico, which also joined the petition accusing Israel of genocide..”
The subtext is obvious: The perfidious Israelis have unfairly singled out little old Ireland again. Why, we’ve been unfairly treated!
In reality, the reasons why Ireland would be treated differently to those three countries are obvious and self-evident to anybody with a working brain.
In the case of Egypt, the public hostility of the Egyptian dictatorship towards Israel is matched only by its private determination to work with the Israelis towards shared goals. Egypt is the only other country on earth to share a border with the Gaza Strip, and has assiduously kept that border sealed for years, including via the construction of a massive wall. Egypt might protest in public to keep the Arab street quiet, but throughout the current war it has persistently refused to allow its territory to be used as an escape valve by Hamas. It knows – though Ireland does not – that the people who run Gaza are as much a threat to Egypt as they are to Israel.
Then there’s Spain: Spain undoubtedly has a Government that is hostile to Israel. But that Government, the most left-wing since the civil war, is unpopular. It is likely to be replaced in time by a Government of the Spanish right, which will take a very different approach to relations with Israel. The Israelis are happy to wait out the natural course of democracy. In Ireland, by contrast, the hysterical hostility to Israel is so great that at a recent debate every single political party committed itself to sanctions on Israel. We might also mention here that Spain is larger and more geopolitically relevant.
And Mexico? Like Spain, it has just elected a radical leftist as President. But like Spain, there is a wide network of opinion in Mexico that is much more friendly to Jerusalem. There is value to a diplomatic outpost there, in the long term.
In Ireland, the Israelis have clearly decided that there is no value whatsoever to maintaining a diplomatic presence. Further, they have decided that there is value in publicly denouncing Ireland and severing diplomatic relations. These decisions are not emotional, but logical and a direct response to the policy choices of the Irish state. The Israelis know what too many people in Ireland appear to have been willfully blind to: That we have much more to lose from this than they do.
With Syria suddenly accessible, CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who has been something of a lightning rod herself, hot-footed it back into the country she had reamed the Obama administration for abandoning to the younger Assad.
In 2021, CNN's @clarissaward boasted that she stopped looking at US policy in Syria as a journalist: only as an activist.
After hooting it up in the streets, Ward somehow made her way over to a ‘secret facility’ in Bashar al-Assad’s infamous prison system. She and her crew were on the hunt to see if they could find traces of Austin Tice, the young American kidnapped some 12 years ago and not heard from since, although his family had recently gotten word he was alive.
‘Are you serious?’: He spent months in a Syrian prison. CNN’s camera caught the moment he’s freed
While searching a secretive prison in the belly of the Assad regime’s legacy of torture for American journalist Austin Tice, CNN’s Clarissa Ward made a startling discovery when a rebel fighter uncovered a hidden prisoner still unaware of Assad’s ouster.
It was almost, like, ‘too good to be true’ television.
At the moment, it’s looking very much like it’s “too good to be true television.”
UPDATE: The rump Biden administration has 35 days left in office, and they’re determined to make the most of them:
How sick to put an incoming president in this position. To foment a major panic over national security, keep its nature a secret from the electorate, & muzzle the leader who burns to tell the truth about the matter but is a few weeks short of having the power to do so
One could argue that the 2024 election sent the message that Americans have had enough of woke, politically correct nonsense.
This was on full display recently when Jill Biden, during her appearance at the White House’s annual Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots campaign, faced an unexpected rebuke from the most unlikely critics: children.
As the lame duck first lady addressed the audience, she offered the typical leftist-friendly, seasonally generic and “inclusive” greeting of “Happy Holidays.”
But the kids in the crowd weren’t having it. Several shouted back, “Happy Christmas!” and “Merry Christmas,” making it clear they weren’t about to let the holiday’s traditional greeting be swept under the rug.
Forced to respond, Biden corrected herself, saying, “Happy Christmas, yes.”
For someone used to carefully scripted events, it must have been a humbling moment. Being publicly corrected is awkward enough, but when it comes from children—and on something as simple and traditional as saying “Merry Christmas”—it’s hard not to see it as a real blow to your pride. The kids’ reaction wasn’t rude or disrespectful; it was honest, and it reflected the kind of unapologetic pride in tradition that so many Americans feel.
While it’s easy to be full of schadenfreude watching the above clip, I do have a bit of sadness seeing any Trump 2024 voter being humiliated, especially during the holidays Christmas season.
Up in the air. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Biden administration’s final bit of credibility on fire in the form of giant mysterious drones over New Jersey.
As President Joe Biden limps away from one of the worst presidencies in American history, these unidentified flying objects, whatever they are, serve as a reminder that the general attitude of this White House towards the American people has been, “you don’t need to know that.”
We didn’t need to know that the president of the United States was suffering severe mental decline, we didn’t need to know that he was actually open to pardoning his son Hunter while swearing he never would.
Even back in 2021, when breakthrough COVID cases among the vaccinated that weren’t supposed to exist were popping up all over Washington DC, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked then Press Secretary Jen Psaki how many had been detected at the White House.
“Why do you need that information?” was her incredible reply.
In other words, you don’t need to know.
For four years now, it has been the Biden administration and the Biden administration alone that has deigned to decide what Americans do and do not need to know, and even in the case of the former, half the time these people just seem to be lying.
Setting aside Sundown Joe’s role as John Gill, the Chinese spy balloon debacle absolutely destroyed any credibility his staffers might have had when it comes to playing it straight with the nation over our enemies spying on us. As Steve wrote last year: Confirmed: That Chinese Spy Balloon Made Fools of the Biden Administration.
Seventy-seven years ago, on the 16th of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar (annually November 29 on the secular). By a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, the United Nations passed Resolution 181, approving the partitioning of British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states (back then, Jews living in the Holy Land were called Palestinians).
It was the Zionist dream. After 1,900 years of prayer, the Jewish nation, the indigenous people of the Holy Land, could again have a sovereign state in its eternal homeland.
Despite what you might have heard, there was never an Arab state called Palestine. The Arabic tradition grew with the establishment of Islam in the early 7th century, approximately 500 years after the Jewish State of Judea was destroyed.
The widespread fawning over Luigi Mangione, the man charged with the murder of US healthcare boss Brian Thompson, is as bizarre as it is nauseating. You would have thought that we were beyond victim-blaming by now. But no, a consensus has emerged from ‘progressives’ that Thompson ‘had it coming’, and that his alleged killer can be excused for his apparently good motives. Worse still, he can even be indulged on account of his good looks.
The latter response has been the most deranged aspect of this episode. Just when you thought our society couldn’t become more superficial, witness how this ‘hot assassin’ has been lusted over by legions of pervy half-wits. In other circumstances, the actions of a lone nut armed with a gun and violent fantasies would have had progressive Americans in paroxysms of moral panic, usually about gun laws or the threat posed by the far right. But no. It’s different this time, it seems. This killer meant well, we’re told. And aren’t his looks just to die for, too?
Some have sought to dress up their fawning as politically motivated. The former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz seemingly spoke for many when she said her initial reaction to Thompson’s death was one of ‘joy’. Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian spoke of Thompson as ‘the face of an unfair system.’
* * * * * * * *
In recent days, it has emerged that Mangione is no left-wing radical, but instead seems to be enamoured of America’s lunatic fringe and its icons. ‘He was a violent individual’, he once wrote of the Unabomber, a terrorist who murdered three people and injured 23 others with nail bombs. ‘While these actions tend to be characterised as those of a crazy Luddite, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary’, Mangione added.
Plenty of young people are alienated from both sides of the political spectrum, and trying to create their own patchwork philosophies. They’ve seen little meaningful reform from either political party in their lifetime, get their information from a wide range of sources of varying reliability and take pride in forming their own opinions.
So what do you say to a young person who has come to admire Mr. Kaczynski? I share many of the same frustrations over the state of the world as those of the college students I teach — how we are bound up in and complicit in horrors across the globe without a viable political alternative to chart a new way forward. How do we maintain our humanity in an inhumane system, where people die unnecessarily every hour on the streets of the richest country in the world?
I did give an answer to the teacher’s question, the best one I could. I told him to tell his students that Mr. Kaczynski was cruel, that he tortured dogs and took pleasure in imagining the suffering of others; to read not only his manifesto, which he polished for public consumption, but also his diaries. There they would see what kind of man he was. I told him that the Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone, and urged him to teach his students about their work.
I hope my words reached them. And I hope they understood that what Mr. Kaczynski represents is not a new way forward or an answer to the injustices of the modern world, but another turn of the wheel of violence that brought us here.
Finally, Justine Bateman spots the dog that didn’t bark in the wake of Mangione’s coldblooded assassination of an insurance CEO:
My younger self would be appalled by the person I’ve become around the holidays. Gone are the tasteful decorations of my youth—the popcorn garlands, homemade ornaments on Popsicle sticks and a stitched Mark Twain doll in place of a Christmas star at the top of the tree.
Now my house is filled with fluorescent red and green bulbs, Paw Patrol-themed sirens and foot-long candy canes covered in tinsel.
My embrace of Christmas maximalism is fairly recent, but I now see that the seeds of this aesthetic were first planted in 1996, when my father saw the classic holiday film “Beavis & Butt-Head Do America.” My dad, Tom Wolfe, an otherwise polite Richmond gentleman, spent the next six months singing at the top of his lungs, “Fly with me, lesbian seagull!” At 16 I was only just noticing my father’s taste for the absurd.
Although my dad was always proper and impeccably dressed, I grew to see how much he enjoyed the occasional silly flourish. Every July 4 since I was a toddler, he’d attend our town’s parade in his usual summer outfit of a white linen Oxford shirt, white linen suit and white boat shoes, but with a red, white and blue tie—an ensemble that already turned heads. Then, as we stood among the crowds waiting for the procession to begin, he’d press a button that made his tie loudly sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The shock on everyone’s faces sent him into paroxysms of laughter.
Our holiday decorations may have been elegant, but dad always injected some quirkiness. On Christmas mornings, he’d come downstairs in beige slacks and a sweater, then pull up his pant leg to reveal bright green socks with red Christmas trees. After a breakfast of pancakes and bacon—the one day a year he allowed himself this indulgence—he’d cackle at the stocking-stuffer toys that screamed at the press of a button, “Shut up!” or “Whaddaya think you’re doing?!” An unexpected connoisseur of singing pop-up greeting cards, he may have laughed harder at their robotic lyrics than at anything else all year.
After he died in 2018, Christmas got quieter. Gone were the sounds of his wrapping gifts until 4 a.m., his feet shuffling up and down the steps from the tree to his study, where he wrote our names on cards in colorful calligraphy. Gone was his Christmas greeting, “Good morning, Breakfast Clubbers!” He was so hard to shop for that I couldn’t help buying that first year something that I knew he would’ve liked: a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like white shoes.
Despite his penchant for white suits and faux-spats and the humor throughout his writing, it’s tough to picture Wolfe acting so goofy in person, based on the courtly southern gentleman persona he developed when speaking and doing interviews. Certainly, this side of him doesn’t really come across in the otherwise must-see recent Netflix documentary, Radical Wolfe, and would have been a welcome addition.
“Trump had a good year, man,” Rock said. “Trump survived an assassination attempt. Won the presidency again by winning the popular vote. Was just named Time ‘Man of the Year.’ You know?”
“It could happen to a nicer guy.”
That may have been the worst of it, as Rock immediately ripped anti-Trump liberals for saying the president-elect’s return to the White House would shatter norms and etiquette.
“A lot of people are scared. Like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to be so undignified,'” he mocked. “When I say a lot of people, I’m talking about the nine New Yorkers that didn’t vote for him, okay?”
He then eviscerated Clinton.
“Come on, man, this is not the most dignified job in the world,” Rock said of the presidency. “We’ve had presidents show up to the inauguration with pregnant slaves, okay? And I’m just talking about Bill Clinton.”
Rock continued with some jokes about the Menendez brothers getting out of prison just in time to get deported by the 47th President and teaming up with the world’s “richest African-American,” Elon Musk.
“Trump is not playing. He’s got Elon. They’re going to put them in a rocket ship — call it SpaceMex,” he quipped.
At one point, the former SNL regular addressed Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden, joking that the president might not have all of his mental faculties, but he can still stick it to people.
“I gotta hand it to Joe. He don’t move as fast as he used to, he don’t talk as fast as he used to,” Rock laughed. “But that middle finger still works.”
The comment elicited some good laughs. Not laughing, however, were leftists on X who suggested Rock needed to be slapped by Will Smith again for daring to make jokes across the political aisle.
“Normalizing the felon will never be funny,” one BlueSky woman wrote. “Love Chris Rock but oof.”
The Ayatollah Khomeini was famously quoted as saying, “An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.” And even he’d probably be wondering today why doctrinaire leftists are such humorless scolds.
Anytime a Republican wins a presidential election, we hear about celebrities who threaten to leave the country. Few of them ever follow through, and we’ve learned that the most recent examples moved before the election and are using Donald Trump’s victory as an excuse to virtue signal.
We rarely hear about someone in the entertainment industry moving out of a left-wing country and seeking somewhere more conservative, but Irish-born British comedy writer Graham Linehan announced that he is moving to the U.S. because the UK is too restrictive on free speech.
In a broadcast on X, Linehan told his followers that he is moving to Arizona to form a production company with Rob Schneider, Andrew Doyle (the genius behind Titania McGrath), and Martin Gourlay of GB News. He announced:
I am happy to announce that I’ve written three episodes of a new sitcom which we’ll be hoping to shoot in the next year. And to that end, I’m going to be leaving the UK and we’ll be moving to Arizona where I will be setting up a production company with Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay and Rob Schneider. We have an idea for a sitcom that I think is pretty damn good.
The premise is strong. It’s not anti-woke comedy, which I think many people would be expecting, because I think that’s going to be as dead an end as the woke movement itself is because all of this nonsense is going to seem out of date in a couple of years.
Linehan is the mind behind one of my favorite British shows of all time, “The IT Crowd.”
“I personally would refuse to serve any person in office who I know of as being a sex trafficker or trying to deport millions of people,” Suzannah Van Rooy, a server at Beuchert’s Saloon on Capitol Hill, told the Washingtonian this week. “It’s not, ‘Oh, we hate Republicans.’ It’s that this person has moral convictions that are strongly opposed to mine, and I don’t feel comfortable serving them.”
“People were a lot more motivated the first time around to do those kinds of shows of passion. This time around, there is kind of a sense of defeat and acceptance,” Van Rooy said, according to the Washingtonian. “But I hope that people still do stand up to this administration and tell them their thoughts on their misbehavior.”
According to a review of her LinkedIn page on Friday, which has since been taken down, Van Rooy listed her duties as doing daily operations, messaging strategies for the restaurant, developing relationships with influencers, and managing in-house events for political figures and VIPs.
Her page also said she worked as an organizer for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s failed run for governor in 2022.
Beuchert’s Saloon told Fox News Digital that Van Rooy’s remarks were “reprehensible” and she had been fired for violating their “zero-tolerance policy on discrimination.”
We’ve come a long way from the heyday of the now departed Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan, when Julian Niccolini, the restaurant’s maître d’ and eventual co-owner was quoted by food and wine journalist John Mariani in his 1994 history of the restaurant:
Nicolini became known for his ability to joke with even the most powerful of his clientele; it was reported that he once told the hawkish Henry Kissinger and the more dovish Cyrus Vance, “We have a lovely breast of pheasant today. Will that be the right one for you, Dr. Kissinger, and the left one for you, Mr. Vance?”
But then, “safetyism” wasn’t a known word in the 1970s and ‘80s.
The end of the show, during which they played clips of Clark’s remarks, featured a sort of face off between Jennings and Cari Champion, whom host Abby Phillip quipped “might also be our Caitlin Clark correspondent.” Jennings and Champion have gone up against each other for panel discussions before. And, just like when Jennings was reminding Champion of key facts about CNN’s own reporting on the political balance of X, there were some fireworks.
Just before Phillip called upon Jennings, Champion herself implied that Clark was being treated so well because she’s white. “She has a privilege. She has been in this league for so, what, a year? And she makes more money than the people who built this league? And she understands there’s a reason, not because she shoots the ball well,” Champion claimed.
As Champion and Phillip both wondered, then, why it was that Clark was supposedly “bullied,” Jennings launched right into dismantling the nonsense that is “my truth.”
“Number one, you know, whether you’re an athlete or anyone else, if I hear you use the phrase ‘my truth,’ I immediately then discount everything else you say. Because there isn’t my truth or your truth, there’s just the truth,” he aptly pointed out. Jennings barely got much further before Champion repeatedly insisted that “that’s not true.” When he was able to complete his sentence, though, he pointed out that “when you start using phrases like that, it tells me that your brain has been captured by something that I don’t really respect.”
It’s quite a niche that Jennings has carved out for himself in recent weeks: the only sane person left at CNN.
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