ACCIDENTAL STAR OF 2024 RETIRING TO SPEND MORE TIME WITH HER FAMILY: Ann Selzer leaving election polling after Iowa whiff.

THIS WEEK ON MAR-A-LAGO VICE:

And speaking of drugs:

Heh, indeed.™

UPDATE: Trump gives RFK Jr McDonald’s ‘poison’ to eat on private plane.

RFK Jr was highly critical of the modern diet during the election campaign, vowing to “Make America Healthy Again”, and even described Mr Trump’s diet as “really bad”.

“Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes on to [Trump Force One] is, like, just poison,” the 70-year-old told podcaster Joe Polish on Monday.

“You have a choice between – you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”

Reaction to the photograph was swift on social media, with users – including Mr Trump’s own son – pointing out the irony of RFK Jr posing with a McDonald’s meal.

RFK Jr. certainly doesn’t look happy in the above photo, a post-election rerun of when John Kerry and John Edwards posed stiffly at a Wendy’s during the 2004 campaign for a photo-op, but as Mark Steyn wrote in August of 2004, the Wendy’s meals were simply campaign props:

It then emerged that Wendy’s had just been an appetiser. The campaign advance team had ordered 19 five-star lunches from the Newburgh Yacht Club for Kerry, Edwards, Affleck and co to be served back on the bus: shrimp vindaloo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, etc.

I’m not sure whether Ben had the shrimp and Teresa the scallops, but, either way, it turns out John Edwards is right: there are two Americas – one America where folks eat at Wendy’s, another America where the elite pass an amusing half-hour slumming among the folks at Wendy’s and then chow down on the Newburgh Yacht Club’s specials of the day. The Elizabeth Edwards anniversary-at-Wendy’s shtick was meant to emphasise her husband’s authenticity, but it now looks as inauthentic as Kerry’s own blundering “regular guy” routine.

Just wait until RFK Jr. finds out what meals will be like during Trump’s second term in the White House:

AN EMPLOYEE OF JEFF BEZOS HAS SOME CALM AND RATIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE PRESIDENT-ELECT:

As Mark Steyn once wrote, regarding a 2006 blogpost by the late Kathy Shaidle:

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that’s one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

“I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?”

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

And over to you, Jen.

ONLY FOUR? WHY DOES MICHELIN HATE TEXAS? Four BBQ joints in Texas awarded coveted Michelin stars.

TATTOO YOU: Hegseth Once Flagged as ‘Insider Threat’ Over Christian Tattoo.

Pete Hegseth, who was picked this week by President-elect Donald Trump to be defense secretary, was once flagged by a fellow service member as an “insider threat” over a tattoo of a Christian motto that has been co-opted by white supremacy groups.

Retired Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, who was serving as the D.C. Army National Guard’s physical security manager and on its anti-terrorism force protection team in January 2021, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent on Jan. 14, 2021, warning Army brass of Hegseth’s “Deus Vult” tattoo on his inner arm, calling it “disturbing.”

“Deus vult” is a Latin phrase meaning “God wills it.” It was a rallying cry for Christian crusaders in the 11th century.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance accused the AP of “anti-Christian bigotry.”

“They’re attacking Pete Hegseth for having a Christian motto tattooed on his arm,” Vance said in a post on X Friday. “This is disgusting anti-Christian bigotry from the AP, and the entire organization should be ashamed of itself.”

Naturally, leftists on social media went all-in, once AP flashed the batsignal:

Wasn’t there a variation of this story in 2018? Yes there was: As Michelle Malkin wrote back then: Weapons of Mass Manipulation — The New Yorker’s fact-checker failed to check her own bias and smeared a military hero.

Impressively, [Talia] Lavin speaks four languages (Russian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and English). Her abdication of ethical reporting standards, however, raises fundamental questions not only about her competence but also about her integrity — not to mention the New Yorker‘s journalistic judgment.

With a single tweet, the New Yorker‘s professional fact-checker smeared Justin Gaertner, a combat-wounded war veteran and computer forensic analyst for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Lavin, the professional fact-checker, rushed to judgment. She abused her platform. Amid the national media hysteria over President Donald Trump’s border-enforcement policies, Lavin derided a photo of Gaertner shared by ICE, which had spotlighted his work rescuing abused children. Scrutinizing his tattoos, she claimed an image on his left elbow was an Iron Cross — a symbol of valor commonly and erroneously linked to Nazis.

The meme spread like social-media tuberculosis: Look! The jackboots at ICE who hate children and families employ a real-life white supremacist.

Only it wasn’t an Iron Cross. It was a Maltese Cross, the symbol of double amputee Gaertner’s platoon in Afghanistan, Titan 2. He lost both legs during an IED-clearing mission and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with Combat Valor and the Purple Heart before joining ICE to combat online child exploitation.

Lavin has had quite a wild ride since:

She resigned from her position [at the New Yorker] in 2018 after mistakenly comparing a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer’s tattoo to an Iron Cross.^[10] ICE released a statement via Twitter that the officer’s tattoo is a Titan 2 platoon symbol, accompanied by the Spartan Creed.^[11] Lavin had deleted the original tweet before the agency’s statement.^[12] In 2018, she was hired as researcher on far-right extremism by Media Matters for America.^[13] Within “several months”, she was no longer with Media Matters for America, and was hired at New York University where she was scheduled to teach an undergraduate course in the Fall semester called “Reporting on the Far Right”.^[14] The course was canceled by May 30, 2019 when only two people signed up for the course. The Wrap reported her faculty bio had been deleted “around April 20, 2019”.^[15]

Still though, she appears to have landed on her feet. Perhaps anticipating Trump’s win last week, Lavin released Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America in mid-October. It was declared one of “Esquire [magazine’s] Best Nonfiction Books of 2024,” and was published by Hachette Book Group, which after a 2020 struggle session by its uber-woke staffers, refused to publish Woody Allen’s autobiography, despite previously announcing its release. As Roger Kimball wrote at the time:

Hachette, as Oscar Wilde said in another context, can resist anything except temptation. Just so long as a book does not attract the ire of the politically correct establishment, the firm is all for publishing “challenging” books. (Item: Commandant of Auschwitz, a memoir by Rudolf Hoess, is published by Hachette.) But trespass on that PC orthodoxy and watch the capitulation, leavened by moralistic hand-wringing, begin. As Groucho Marx is supposed to have said, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”

As with Trump’s first term, expect leftists to find many more imaginary Nazis to be under the bed in the coming four years.

UPDATE:

MORE: Mark Judge: Vanity Fair, Which Made Me an 80s Brat Packer, Slimes Pete Hegseth.

IT’S SATIRE, BUT IS IT REALLY?

Ok, this is fcking funny 🤣 pic.twitter.com/7QlMaViHBR

— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) November 15, 2024

THE STIG HITS SPEED BUMP: Judge Blocks The Onion Bid for Alex Jones’s InfoWars to Review Bankruptcy Auction.

VDH ON DJT:

Trump, His Disrupters, and a Chance to Return to Normalcy?

Many of Trump first-round picks share some common themes.

One, many, who were in the past victimized by government bullies and cowardly bureaucratic grandees, or proved sharp critics of the administrative state, are…

— Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) November 16, 2024

ED MORRISSEY: Netflix Loses In Technical Knock-Out.

If you tried to watch it, and you weren’t able to, because of technical chaos and buffering standstills with the Netflix stream—instead of writing an angry letter to the clearly overburdened IT department, you might want to thank them for sparing your eyeballs, and perhaps, your soul.

As for the rest of us: what were we thinking? Actually, I know what we were thinking: this seems like a terrible idea—58-year-old Mike Tyson entering the ring against a beefy 27-year-old social media imp. Surely I have better things to do with my time.

And yet there we were, watching at an uncommon hour, as many millions surely did, as if history hasn’t repeatedly shown that well-intentioned humans are often capable of making the same, regrettable decision.

Of course they are. They also tune in to watch the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium in Arlington Texas, the venue for this fight. At least those games have some promise of drama, though. Tyson hasn’t fought in nineteen years prior to last night, which is still more recent than the Cowboys’ last division-round playoff win (1995). What did anyone expect from a fight between a 27-year-old current champion and a long-retired has-been?

A lot, apparently. Enough people tuned into the stream to knock it out, which is more than either boxer could do in the ring. The New York Times reports that “tens of thousands of Netflix users” complained about the stream, but that was just those on Twitter/X. Did anyone see the fight without interruption?

* * * * * * * * *

This lack of infrastructure investment for an event as heavily promoted as this is inexcusable. Netflix shelled out tens of millions for what turned out to be Dancing With the Boxing Stars and did nothing to ensure its subscribers could watch the routines. Will those viewers trust Netflix to provide a stable streaming experience for their next live event after this? Will they trust Netflix to provide a stable streaming experience for any service after this, or start looking for that from their competition?

Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football presentations have seemed much more viewable this year in terms of picture quality. At times last season, they could look like a TV signal being beamed in from the Soviet Union or East Germany. But clearly, the technology for streaming platforms to cover live events is very different and much more complex than that required to host lots of old movies on a server farm.

POST ELECTION, THE NEW YORKER’S DAVID REMNICK IS STILL FLUCKING THE “TRUMP IS A CRYPTO-NAZI” CHICKEN: It Can Happen Here.

The news of Trump’s reëlection did not come with the same shock as his first victory did. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative achievements, was a conspicuously unpopular President. At least fifty-five per cent of voters in the major swing states disapproved of his performance in office. And, by the time Biden came to terms with age and finally stepped aside, Harris, despite all her energy and appealing intelligence, had precious little time to run a campaign that could reasonably outdistance both that dissatisfaction and her opponent. Trapped between her loyalty to Biden and the need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark chaos represented by Trump.

Despite her thrashing of Trump in their one debate, and his campaigning at times as a disturbed man wandering from one rally to the next, the prospects of Harris winning were never more than episodically encouraging. When her aides were asked how they were feeling about the race, they would say, “Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump seems not only to have won the popular vote and all seven battleground states but to have made inroads with Latino and Black men wide enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its demographic advantages.

How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late start—was determinative. In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale, in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted toward him since the last election. Both major political parties are broken. The Republicans, having given themselves over to a cultish obedience to an authoritarian, are morally broken. The Democrats, having failed to respond convincingly to the economic troubles of working people, are politically broken.

Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.

Note Remnick’s title, with its callbacks to both Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, and perhaps unintentionally but ironically, Joe Conason’s 2007 book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Jonah Goldberg mentioned Conason’s book in passing in 2007’s Liberal Fascism, on the way to discussing the legacy of Lewis’s in depth:

“It can’t happen here.”

Any discussion of American fascism must get around this mossiest of political clichés. Most often used by leftists, it is typically also used sarcastically, as in: “George Bush is a crypto-Nazi racist stooge of the big corporations pursuing imperialist wars on the Third World to please his oil-soaked paymasters, but—yeah, right—‘it can’t happen here’” (though Joe Conason in typically humorless fashion has titled his latest book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush).

The phrase, of course, comes from Sinclair Lewis’s propagandistic novel of 1935. It Can’t Happen Here tells the story of a fascist takeover of America, and it is, by general agreement, a terrible read, full of cartoonish characters, purple prose, and long canned speeches reminiscent of Soviet theater. But it wasn’t seen that way when it was released. The New Yorker, for example, hailed it as “one of the most important books ever produced in this country…It is so crucial, so passionate, so honest, so vital that only dogmatists, schismatics, and reactionaries will care to pick flaws in it.”

The hero of the dystopian tale is the Vermont newspaperman Doremus Jessup, who describes himself as an “indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal.” The villain, Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, is a charismatic blowhard—modeled on Senator Huey Long—who is elected president in 1936. The plot is complicated, with fascist factions staging coups against an already fascist government, but the basic gist should be very appealing to liberals. A good Vermont liberal (a very different thing, however, from a Howard Dean liberal today), Jessup stages an underground insurrection, loses, flees to Canada, and is about to launch a big counterattack when the book ends.

The title derives from a prediction made by Jessup shortly before the fateful election. Jessup warns a friend that a Windrip victory will bring a “real Fascist dictatorship.”

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” replies his friend. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen…[I]t just can’t happen here in America.”

“The hell it can’t,” Jessup replies. And he is soon proven right.

The phrase and the phobia captured by It Can’t Happen Here have been with us ever since. Most recently, Philip Roth’s Plot Against America offered a better-written version of a similar scenario in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. But Roth’s was just the latest in a long line of books and films that have played on this theme. Hollywood has been particularly keen on the idea that we must be eternally vigilant about the fascist beast lurking in the swamps of the political right.

Peter J. Hasson of the Washington Free Beacon tweeted on Wednesday,  “People forget how truly insane 2017 was.” Including when leftists thought that the answers to their woes could be found in George Orwell’s 1984, which they bought en masse that year, but apparently never bothered to read, given their embrace, two years later, of AOC’s apocalyptic environmental ravings, out of which spawned her totalitarian Green Nude Deal proposals.

Followed of course in 2020, by Dr. Fauci’s actual totalitarian shuttering of the economy in March, which the left loved so much that Dr. Fauci action figures and bobblehead dolls can still be found on Amazon. At least they loved it until the spring, when Oceania declared it had never been at war with East Peoria, and decided large gatherings were perfectly fine, as long as they were happening in the name of “social justice.” Or as the Ministry of Truth NPR declared at the beginning of June: “Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. ‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,’ they wrote.”

It can happen here – and it did. (Just ask Shelley Luther.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF DYSTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION AND CRANKY POST-ELECTION LEFTY JOURNALISTS: Human composting offers an environmentally friendly alternative to burial and cremation. Here’s how it works.

—CBS News today.

Still though, points for timing:

BYRON YORK: Schumer to Republicans: Please don’t do to us what we were going to do to you.

When the Democratic convention took place in August, with new nominee Kamala Harris rising in the polls, Democrats were giddy with a sense of impending victory. In Chicago for the convention, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) visited with party officials and reporters to outline his plans for a glorious new age in Washington with Democrats in control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. 

Schumer’s top priority in the new Harris administration would have been to eliminate the legislative filibuster that has long protected minority rights in the Senate. That way, even if the Senate were tied between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, those 50 Democrats, with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Tim Walz, could enact far-reaching legislation without any input at all from Republicans. Washington would have true one-party rule, and the minority party would have no say in things whatsoever.

As York writes, Schumer “was not advocating whether this or that individual bill should or should not be filibustered. That goes on all the time. He was advocating changing Senate rules, on an entirely partisan basis, to eliminate the minority party’s ability to demand a higher standard of approval for controversial legislation. And then, when Schumer’s party loses, he instantly turns around and becomes Mr. Bipartisanship. For that, there should be a word that goes beyond mere hypocrisy.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

To be fair though, regarding their counterparts in the Senate, P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote, “The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.”

Increasingly, Congress is serving a similar purpose.

DEMOCRATS DON’T NEED THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN:

One of the new cliches of American politics is that progressives need their own Joe Rogan. The comedian turned podcaster has an audience that is four-fifths male and 51 per cent aged 18-34, and it has not escaped the Democrats’ notice that, while women aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris, men in the same age group went narrowly for Donald Trump. This tracks with pre-election research which showed a majority of Rogan listeners, regardless of sex or age, planned to vote Republican while only a quarter intended to back the Democrats. Rogan himself endorsed Trump, crediting Elon Musk for making ‘the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear’. Since Rogan is America’s most popular podcaster, with 14.5 million followers on Spotify, surely it makes sense that Democrats would want their own Pied Piper to the himbos and gymbros of Gen-Z.

Well, his name was Joe Rogan. Rogan is a supporter of abortion rights, socialised healthcare, gay and lesbian rights, and drug legalisation, a critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, and endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primaries. But he is also a believer in freedom of expression, which has led him to interview the likes of Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux, a disbeliever in gender identity ideology, and he discouraged young people from taking the Covid shot while talking up his self-prescribed use of anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. These heresies caused progressive activists in politics, journalism, academia and civil society to mount a campaign to get Rogan fired by Spotify. Oddly enough, Rogan didn’t take well to this attempt to destroy him professionally and financially and while it’s difficult to prove that this nudged him Trumpwards, it’s hardly a leap to guess that it probably helped.

In some ways, progressive handwringing over Rogan is just a 2020s re-run of liberal handwringing over talk radio in the 1990s. Until the 1994 ‘Republican revolution’, which ended four decades of Democrat control of the House of Representatives, liberals dismissed talk radio as a forum for obnoxious shock jocks, low-information listeners and bored truckers. Then Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million weekly listeners were identified as the culprits behind the Democrats’ congressional defeat, and talk radio became a liberal bogeyman, a production line of ‘angry white men’. There were even attempts to blame its ‘rhetoric’ for the Oklahoma City bombing. When liberals couldn’t beat conservative-dominated AM radio, they tried to mimic it and many a Democrat was hailed in newspaper puff pieces as the next ‘Limbaugh of the left’, among them Al Franken, Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo and Bill Press. But none could compete with Limbaugh, and even liberal talk’s breakout star, Rachel Maddow, only did so by switching to television.

The problem was one identified by Marshall McLuhan three decades earlier. As a medium, AM radio was ill-suited to a liberal message shaped by elite preoccupations with minority rights, political correctness, social justice, and scepticism towards American global leadership. Liberals were trying to use a format for Archie Bunker to sell the politics of Maude Findlay. They had misunderstood Limbaugh’s talent, which was not for converting his overwhelmingly white, male audience into conservatives but for drawing out the innate conservatism of this audience. Today’s progressives misunderstand Rogan in much the same way: he’s not making young men anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness – young men are, broadly speaking, anti-woke, sceptical of experts and fixated on physical fitness.

Leftists don’t need their own Rogan – but they do need a candidate with the ability to talk for three hours with him: Harris Lost Not Because She Didn’t Do Joe Rogan’s Show, but Because She Couldn’t Do Rogan’s Show.

Harris’s campaign staff are now at great pains to embarrass themselves by trying to come up with retrospective explanations that avoid the elephant in the room. Emhoff adviser Jennifer Palmieri put herself out there this week to explain to the Financial Times that Harris ditched the Rogan appearance because she feared the reaction of her own young staffers. “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash [if she did it].”

I weep tears of utter joy to read this. Watching Harris’s campaign crippled from within by unruly, upjumped, spoiled brat Zoomers who think they have a right to dictate the candidate’s political decision-making is like watching the glorious climax to a black political comedy. All I can say, after having written my piece about The Nation’s interns going to war with The Nation (over their endorsement of Zionist pig sellout Harris), is that I believe staffers on a presidential campaign have as much right to pilot the ship as the galley slaves of Ben-Hur. (You want to make campaign decisions, kid? Get a job as a campaign strategist. Otherwise shut up and get back to door-knocking.)

Even funnier, Palmieri later then tried to clean up the mess she’d made in saying this — suggesting a campaign so pulled around on a nose-ring by its own staff as to yield to their utterly irrelevant idle gripes — and went on to Twitter to claim, “VP didn’t appear on Rogan because of schedule (hard to get to TX twice in a 107 day campaign).” Is it really that hard to get to Austin, Texas? It’s not like trying to drive to Juneau, after all, and especially when Harris otherwise spent the day she would have taped the show doing no events in Washington, D.C.

Of course, the reason Harris’s people are falling back upon these explanations — the one humiliating, the other laughably false — is because they simply cannot (at least so soon after the election) admit the real reason Kamala Harris was never going to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast: because Harris would have given the most disastrously bombing performance in the history of campaign appearances. We all saw just how poorly her CNN town hall went. Now imagine her having to try and appear human and relatable to the Joe Rogan fanbase, for God’s sake; imagine how long it would take her to simply halt and catch fire the moment she’s asked an unusual or difficult question. (Which, given Harris’s talent level, would probably have been immediately — now imagine two hours and 55 minutes more of the interview.)

Harris’s campaign budget was one the largest in history; “Harris’ campaign blew $2.6M on private jets in final weeks of campaign,” the New York Post reports today. But there’s no way they could aim one towards Austin, because the candidate within it lacked the ability to talk fluently about her campaign’s goals in a podcast studio for three hours.

(Oh, and of course: Left-wing climate groups silent after Harris campaign drops millions on private jet flights since July.)

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Run and Shoot Offense Edition.

PELOSI SOON TO RIDE THE ICE FLOE CLOSELY? House Dems sick of Pelosi.

Recriminations are flying over Democrats failing to take the House, with some members airing their grievances in a caucus meeting this week.

• Jeffries told members that “the buck stops with me.”

The bottom line: Some Democrats are clearly frustrated Pelosi isn’t fading into the sunset like she promised when she lost the gavel two years ago.

• “My advice to my fellow Democrats is simple: Follow the leader. Hakeem Jeffries has done a great job,” Pelosi said in 2023.

• “I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not,” the member of the Congressional Black Caucus told us.

• “She needs to understand what her new role is.”

Flashback: The Democratic Party’s Ice Floe Politics. “The next time a Democratic politician makes an anonymous observation about the age or vigor of a colleague with whom they disagree, be skeptical. The remarks are made to reporters as if in sorrow, but the message is about as subtle as a shiv in the prison yard.”

DEMOCRATS OPEN UP SECOND FRONT IN ITS WAR ON BAKERIES: Staten Island bakery customers batter Whoopi Goldberg for dubious claim that she wasn’t served due to her liberal views: ‘Bulls–t.’

New Yorkers aren’t letting Whoopi Goldberg’s sourpuss act spoil their favorite spot for sweet treats, after she put a local bakery on blast on national TV, alleging they refused to serve her because of her lefty political beliefs.

“I think it’s ridiculous. Why would she come all the way to Staten Island for her cupcake? To make an issue? They’ve been here forever,” Deborah Bernaz, 68, said of the comic’s claims against the beloved 145-year-old Holtermann’s Bakery on Staten Island.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with politics. They’re a little Staten Island bakery. I think it’s bulls–t what she’s saying. Leave politics out of the bakery.”

Why are American leftists so obsessed with destroying the lives of bakers?

I don't think Whoopi survives this. pic.twitter.com/4G91QUSrlt

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) November 15, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Yale University offers new course on Beyonce’s ‘boundary-transgressing’ cultural impact.

SAVAGE ENTERTAINMENT: A new version of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious 1979 film Caligula provides a valuable record of one of the most fascinating disasters in cinema history.

Almost everybody involved with the production is made to look faintly silly, including the documentary’s narrator, Bill Mitchell, whose basso profundo voice makes him sound as if his vocal cords have been marinated in bourbon. His voiceovers, for all their florid verbosity, do not sound nearly as pompous as the monologues of Gore Vidal, who bullshits grandly on historical subjects he plainly knows nothing about in his magnificently resonant voice. Still, he maintains a certain sense of style throughout the proceedings.

The same cannot be said of Caligula’s director, Tinto Brass, who turns out to be a pudgy, hairy, and excitable yet melancholy little man with no obvious sense of the impression he makes on others. He often wears a floppy khaki-coloured fisherman’s hat that resembles a dead octopus or a piece of wet cardboard. He does not always seem to be in control of either himself or the production, but he clearly gets along well with the cast, including Malcolm McDowell, who appears in an even more unfortunate hat.

Nobody in the documentary looks more comical than producer Bob Guccione, who seems to be desperate to rival Vidal as a Serious Intellectual, despite his resemblance to a middle-aged divorcee who has decided to show everyone that he’s “still got it.” Clad in leather trousers and tight shirts unbuttoned to expose his gold medallions, he surrounds himself with Renaissance-style antiques to show off his taste and power. Guccione was no fool, though. By the mid-1970s, he was already one of the richest men in America, and Penthouse was selling over four and a half million copies a month.

The star of the documentary is Caligula’s production designer, Danilo Donati. His sumptuous sets and costumes steal the show, and look far more impressive here than they do in the film. Of course, this is thanks to the craftsmen caught on camera from time to time as they patiently transform Donati’s visions into something approaching reality. Admirably, they simply get on with their jobs, heedless of all the self-indulgence and bickering around them. Not everybody involved in this production was an unhinged egomaniac.

The most engrossing element of The Making of Gore Vidal’s Caligula is the palpable tension generated by the power struggle between Guccione, Vidal, and Brass. Each of these men had a radically different notion of who Caligula was and why he turned out that way and each had his own idiosyncratic views about how to make a movie and what the purpose of the production ought to be. There seems to have been absolutely no agreement on the point of the whole exercise, let alone on who was really in charge of it.

If you’re at all curious about how one of the biggest train wrecks in cinema history occurred (at least until Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which played in virtually empty theaters last month), read the whole thing.

CHRIS WALLACE IS CUTTING ALL THE CORDS:

On Monday evening, Chris Wallace, the veteran newsman, CNN anchor, and ultimate Washington establishmentarian, called the network’s talent chief Amy Entelis to inform her that he intended to leave at the end of his contract. Minutes later, to the consternation of his bosses and presumably their P.R. department, he gave a reporter at The Daily Beast the green light to publish a precooked exclusive about his departure. The piece asserted that the 77-year-old broadcaster was walking away from a seven-figure contract to find a new home in “streaming or podcasting,” which, as Wallace told the reporter, is “where the action seems to be.”

The story, with its Onion-worthy headline—Chris Wallace Quits CNN to Build Future in Streaming—described Wallace’s exit as a “watershed moment for cable TV,” a remarkably rare defection by a lifelong TV veteran who had determined he would rather forgo his lucrative salary and test new arenas than continue to suffer through the cable business’s slow but inexorable decline. Indeed, the piece seemed to portray Wallace as the news industry’s own Adrian Wojnarowski, the star ESPN NBA reporter who recently gave up his own $7 million-a-year gig to run the men’s basketball program at his alma mater in rural northwestern New York. As it happens, Wallace was also making $7 million a year at CNN.

And perhaps to offset that sudden lack of cashflow: Chris Wallace lists DC home for $6.4M mere days after announcing his shock departure from CNN.

THIRD OBAMA TERM WINDING DOWN NICELY: Israel destroyed active nuclear weapons research facility in Iran, officials say.

JIM TREACHER: Here’s Why I’m Quitting Twitter or X or Whatever.

No, I’m not quitting. That headline was just to get you to click. Ha ha, gotcha!

Once again, liberals are so stupid and insane that they’re forcing me to defend Elon Musk. Twice in one week! That’s how bad it’s gotten.

I don’t know if it’s a delayed reaction to the election, or Musk’s weird new job in the Trump administration, or what, but a bunch of libs suddenly decided to quit Twitter this week. And what’s the point of finally going away if they don’t make a whole big drama out of it?

In addition to the usual suspects, there’s a bridge too far, Treacher writes:

Hell, even inanimate objects are getting in the game. A suspension bridge in the UK has its own Twitter account, and it just collapsed. The account, not the bridge:

That’s a stretch! And so was that joke.

Surprisingly, given the poor communications from the front at the end of WWII, even Hitler quickly discovered that the Clifton Suspension Bridge has collapsed its Twitter account:

pic.twitter.com/pe9Rl8FBfj

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) November 14, 2024

Curiously, while individual leftists (and bridges) are leaving Twitter, corporations, including those that produce rather left-leaning media, are returning to promote their wares: Comcast, Disney, and IBM Are Among Advertisers Returning to X After Ad Freeze.

RIP: Shel Talmy, Who Produced Hits by The Who, The Kinks and Other 1960s British Bands, Dies at 87.

BURGMENTUM, BABY: Trump announces North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Department of Interior secretary.

“He’s going to be announced tomorrow…I look forward to doing the formal announcement, although this is a pretty big announcement right now, actually,” Trump said during his speech at the Americans For Prosperity Gala at Mar-A-Lago in Florida on Thursday. “He’s going to head the Department of Interior and he’s going to be fantastic.”

“We’re going to reduce regulation waste, fraud and inefficiency,” Trump said. “We’re going to clean out the corrupt, broken and failing bureaucracies. And we’re going to stop child sexual mutilation. We’re going to stop it because it’s time.”

The Politico, sounding a bit nervous that energy prices might come down, adds:

If confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would manage the more than 500 million acres of federal land as well as the fossil fuels and minerals that lie beneath the surface — making him a critical component in Trump’s promise to boost oil and gas output.

Heaven forfend.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: FBI arrests Houston man for alleged ISIS ties, terror plot on US soil.