WORST. HITLER. EVER: 

● Shot: Trump’s media ban shows steady slide of his regime into outright dictatorship.

—The London Independent*, Tuesday.

● Chaser: CNN, M-SNOW, Politico reporters back at White House after federal judge blocks Trump ban.

—The New York Post, today.

* Yes, that London Independent.

POKER WARS: Philip Guitar Talks ‘Poker Wars,’ the Bloody Battles that led to the World Series of Poker.

My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com. 

THE MEMORY-HOLING OF MITCHELL AND WEBB TELLS US THE BBC ARE THE BADDIES:

To mark the 20th anniversary of David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s classic sketch show, the BBC has restored all four series to the iPlayer, but 11 of the classic sketches have been censored. These include sketches in which a burqa-wearing Muslim is invited on to a makeover show, an indigenous tribe is discovered in a garden centre, and a civil-war re-enactment society gets bored of playing Roundheads and Cavaliers and decides to re-enact a conflict in Congo instead.

While these sketches play on what might loosely be described as racial themes, anyone mildly observant will quickly recognise the real targets are racism, racial stereotypes and the liberal middle classes’ awkwardness around race. In the civil-war sketch, an awkward-looking Webb, dressed in blackface as a Sudanese tribesman, continually breaks character to ask: ‘Are we sure this isn’t racist?’ The burqa sketch quickly transitions to Mitchell and Webb playing themselves, with Webb asking Mitchell if they’ve taken things too far. ‘Aren’t we just taking the piss out of people’s sincerely held beliefs?’, he says.

Only the most literal-minded, humourless scold could possibly conclude that these sketches are racist. Yet it seems that this is precisely the kind of person who works in the BBC’s comedy department these days. As a Beeb spokesperson, justifying the censorship of these sketches, put it to The Times: ‘This is a 20-year-old sketch show. We have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t.’

Which brings us back to the question of who are ‘the baddies’ in this scenario. The BBC has a statue of George Orwell outside New Broadcasting House, its London HQ. Yet it seems none of the Beeb’s higher-ups has digested the message of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps the BBC suits really believe Big Brother and the Party are the good guys. Perhaps they think the memory-holing of old news articles to reflect the Party’s views in the present is actually a jolly good thing to do, keeping ‘the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t’.

To put things into visual terms:

https://t.co/979u6LrNmT pic.twitter.com/UuVztuQp4q

— Aonghas Curran. (@Anguscurran) September 22, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM CERULEAN BLUE STATES: Will Anna Wintour survive the Galliano debacle?

This has not gone well. A source told Page Six that “Anna singlehandedly thought she could willfully get [Galliano] back in [fashion]. She’s been at it a long time, and she really misjudged it, and she made him vulnerable while doing that… she’s not reading the fucking room… she really overplayed her hand. They really need to take a beat, take a year off, because people don’t have time for this shit right now.”

Wintour’s loyalty to Galliano was first demonstrated in 2013 – a mere two years after he was fired from Dior for the aforementioned comments – when she wangled him a residency with Oscar de la Renta, and then again the following year when she was instrumental in his becoming creative director of Maison Margiela, a role that he held for a decade. Wintour specifically asked, in 2014, for Galliano to present her with the award for Outstanding Achievement at the British Fashion Awards, and wore a Margiela by John Galliano design to receive it.

Vanessa Friedman wrote on the New York Times’s “On The Runway” blog at the time that “as fashion world blessings go, it was about as unambiguous as anything I’ve seen.” Wintour, it seems, was uninterested in Galliano’s private life or personal wrongdoings. For her, it was about the fashion.

Now, it seems as if the savviest woman in the industry might have made a misstep – and embarrassed the Met in the process. Wintour would have been aware of the unfortunate precedent being set – no Met honoree has had to quit before and no exhibition of this stature has been canceled – and the humiliation that all this involves. She will doubtless have bristled at an admonitory statement put out by Zohran Mamdani’s office: “John Galliano’s repeated use of anti-Semitic language is vile. The Mamdani administration recognizes that the Met’s decision to honor him has caused pain and anger among many Jewish New Yorkers. The Met is an independent institution and its decisions – and how it responds to the many Jewish New Yorkers appalled by this choice – are ultimately its own. But independence does not mean insulation from criticism.”

When even the anti-Israel Mamdani administration is hesitant about mainstreaming an (alleged) antisemite, attempting to rehabilitate Galliano may have been a step too far for someone whose magazine previously referred to Mrs. Bashar al-Assad as a “Rose in the Desert:”

FINALLY, A “WE ONLY HAVE FIVE YEARS TO SAVE THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT” WARNING THAT MIGHT ACTUALLY COME TRUE:

What this ultimately means is that Los Angeles has five years to prove it really wants movies made here. Otherwise, everyone (and I mean everyone) is moving out. Remove oppressive regulations, fees, and bureaucracy and make it cheaper to do business in Hollywood. https://t.co/IvZSe0gdIm

— Alan Ng @ Film Threat (@mypalal) September 23, 2026

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s the Best Line in the Boston Globe Lesbian Bar Story?

Here is Charlie Cooke’s favorite:

Noire [one of the bar’s critics] spends the hours after the meeting posting furious Instagram stories about Matellian and Last Ditch. Matellian (who uses she/they pronouns) had been shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS,” he writes. The bar was not “a safe environment not interested in revolutionary praxis.”

Yes. The bar was not a great venue for the pursuit of “revolutionary praxis.” That’s because it’s a bar.

Here is Jeff Blehar’s:

. . . [a patron] wonders aloud about holding a Lady Gaga themed night, but [the bartender] Mixxy demurs. “Gaga is canceled, she says. “Gaga is Zionist.”

That right there is gold.

Can the story get any better weirder? You bet it can!

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: We Love Mr. Rogers and Want You Dead.

When they say they want to see Trump die on television, when their rank and file celebrates the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s brutal livestream assassination, it’s just a proxy for Republicans more generally. Given the opportunity, they’ll fill the gulags with Wrong Thinkers like you and me, take our wealth, and give it to an army of third world immigrants.

I don’t think Curtis Yarvin was even slightly exaggerating when he forecasted what a 2028 loss to Democrats would look like during a recent appearance on the Michael Malice podcast.

“Number one, they’re going to do a full January 6 assembly-line prosecution of everyone. There will be some random bullshit charge,” he said. “Everyone they can find, just massive, massive prosecutions.”

“And then you’re going to see mass migration,” he continued. “8 figures and up. Per year. Very very easy to work the system so they’re allowing 20 million third worlders in every year.”

“Of course they won’t be citizens right away, but then the Democrats are going to be doing everything possible to facilitate ballot stuffing and all of their favorite little, undiscoverable things.”

Think 2032 will save you? Think again.

So if you don’t get your property confiscated, and if you don’t get investigated and imprisoned, and if you don’t get assassinated on live TV, we’ll pump foreign violent criminals into your communities and the problem will solve itself.

Perhaps the funniest little detail of all is that, as far as 2028 goes, the famed Mr. Rogers polls higher than their leading presidential candidate.

We love Mr. Rogers but want to see you die on live TV. Ladies and gents, the mental illness of the modern Democrat Party.

Earlier this year, Tod Lindberg of Commentary explored “The Assassination Fan Base.” These days, even the comedians are taking the expression “knocking them dead” a bit too literally: Is Bill Burr Still on Team Luigi?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD REMAINS AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Update: 'The Babylon Bee' Now The Only News Outlet Left In America With White House Credentials https://t.co/ebgYAL2fGi

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 23, 2026

UNEXPECTEDLY: 60 Minutes Airs Misleading Report on Trump Pardons.

The findings that felons had hired both Bill and Hillary’s family members to lobby the Clinton White House for pardons were widely covered by news outlets, including reporters at CBS News. Stahl joined the CBS News Washington bureau in the early 1970s and moved to “60 Minutes” in 1991, almost a decade before the Clinton scandal became national news. So it’s hard to understand how she missed these details of the Clinton pardon scandal to now claim the Trump administration has created a new “pardon economy,” as “60 Minutes” calls its news segment.

More Trump Probes

Although Stahl’s “60 Minutes” segment did not support its claim that Trump has created a unique new system for pardons, it is already prompting fresh partisan attacks against the president. In an online story that followed the “60 Minutes” piece, CBS News reported that Democrats were alarmed by the undercover video: “Senior Democratic lawmakers vowed Monday to investigate the new market that has sprung up around President Trump’s pardons, citing CBS News video of lobbyists offering to ‘put pressure on the president’ in exchange for a hefty fee from a convicted felon.”

Now the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jamie Raskin will likely lead these investigations. Raskin told CBS News that pardons are “kind of an underground market because not everybody knows how to get to it.”

CBS News failed to report, however, that one of the people who benefited from this underground market was Raskin himself, who Biden pardoned along with Liz Cheney on his final day in office.

Read the whole thing.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN SENTENCED TO 15 YEARS AFTER SEXUAL ASSAULT CONVICTION.

THE QUIET DISSIDENCE OF THE BOSTON GLOBE: 

Mastio notes that the fear-mongering about a nonexistent trans murder “epidemic” is being driven by queer activists. He doesn’t call this out for the cynical power politics and moral blackmail that it is, but he does note, “What LGBTQ rights groups are doing to these folks with this unrelenting message that death is waiting for them around every corner is not healthy. They have their constituents living in fear when the best numbers we have show that the supposed ‘epidemic,’ ‘onslaught,’ or ‘genocide’ against trans people is not as potent as they suggest and is, in fact, lessening.”

The second Globe piece is a dispatch from a western Massachusetts lesbian bar, detailing how the recent(!) relaxation of the establishment’s N95 mask mandate led to a complete meltdown among the regulars. The pleasures of the piece are many, from one patron’s accusation that management is “complicit in a mass disabling event” to another’s that the move could “kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” to a third’s more simple wish that the bar be “firebombed” for its policy toward the immunocompromised. Distressed by the backlash and the bar’s struggling finances, one of its founders has, I jest you not, enrolled in clown college.

What both pieces have in common is understatement and restraint as editorial strategy. They both simply take the left-wing milieus they examine seriously, present the claims these people make in their own terms, even sympathetically, and then apply only basic empirical scrutiny to them, unladen by invective or antagonism. The results are nevertheless devastating, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a whole worldview, the way many see the HBO show Girls as in fact subtle critique of a lifestyle it superficially valorizes.

I wonder how these articles are playing to the Globe’s core subscribers? Are they shocked that there isn’t an “epidemic” of anti-trans violence? Are they shocked that there’s still a bastion of mask obsessives even in 2026? But kudos to the Globe for exposing their perilously left-leaning readers to a fair amount of cognitive dissonance.

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: What a Limited Russian Incursion Into Estonia Might Look Like: A Narva Scenario.

Too much of the European defense discourse today focuses on options that would amount to escalation, particularly long-range strike, rather than on rapidly developing the kinds of symmetrical capabilities that Ukrainian forces have, although there are European efforts along those lines, to be sure.  NATO member states must internalize the reality that, unattractive as escalation scenarios are to Putin, they are likely to be much more challenging for NATO states themselves from a political perspective.  Russian cognitive warfare efforts will go all out to dissuade one or more states from voting to support long-range strikes into or air campaigns against Russian territory in such a scenario, and NATO should not rely on winning those fights in every member capital.  The ability to defend against low-level scenarios such as those described above with tactical capabilities whose use does not require either the mobilization or the permission of the entire alliance is an essential component of deterrence as well as of defeat mechanisms.

But NATO must also internalize the challenges of moving such tactical capabilities to forward positions after the Russians have initiated attacks at a moment of their choosing.  Russian drone units are highly effective at interdicting ground lines of communication unless their own operators can be regularly and rapidly located and eliminated.  Front line states must not only rapidly field their own drone and counter-drone capabilities, but must also deploy them to their borders even in the face of the inevitable Russian accusations of NATO aggression and threat.

NATO must deter and, if necessary, defeat a limited Russian incursion such as this one at both the political and the military levels.  If military conditions are properly set and necessary preparations are made in advance, then success in the political arena becomes much more likely.  Clear statements that NATO will honor its defense commitments even against such limited attacks are needed, but so are clear preparations to do so at levels that do not impose massive political costs and risks on the alliance.

Earlier: Uh-Oh: BBC features white male soldier in warning about impending war.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCHADENFREUDE: CNN Mood ‘Like a Funeral’ as Paramount’s Warner Bros. Win Casts New Haze on Next Steps.

A new corporate parent, Paramount Skydance is set to take the reins of CNN in October, and with that change of control could come entirely new goals — and means of executing them.

Even Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN, seemed to not know much about next steps. “Over the coming days you’ll hear much more about what this means for CNN, including the date of the close,” he told staffers Monday.

The mood at CNN is “like a funeral,” says one person familiar with the operation.

CNN personnel have reason to worry. Paramount’s management of CBS News has been controversial, and has not been good for the business of the news unit. Changes made under Bari Weiss, installed last year as editor in chief, have brought unnecessary scrutiny to news reports, and anchors have made public entreaties on Instagram when people post notes suggesting that Weiss’ background as a digital entrepreneur and provocative opinion writer have muddied the newsgathering at the network. Tweaks made at “CBS Mornings” and “CBS Evening News” are still too nascent to make final judgement, but both shows continue to lag their rivals in the ratings, with the morning show suffering significant erosion. Weiss’ decision to overhaul “60 Minutes,” widely considered the jewel of CBS and of TV-news overall, has left the venerable newsmagazine open to criticism and backlash.

Gentlemen, this is the newsroom— how dare you expose us to scrutiny, criticism, and backlash! And note that this report is in Variety, the Hollywood trade paper, which has its own axes to grind.

And while CNN and Variety are melting down over this news, a big portion of the country is thinking:

UPDATE:

It’s the end of CNN as we know it. https://t.co/0uAscN0dGW pic.twitter.com/ntygUtcg9r

— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) September 22, 2026

NOTE THIS IS A HEADLINE FROM TODAY. IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2026: A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.

The August 31 Instagram post from Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue, a lesbian bar in Greenfield, was upbeat, teasing a new DJ lineup and a volunteer meetup. But partway down the rainbow-hued post labeled “UPDATES!” was a sentence that would splinter the queer community in this small Pioneer Valley city and beyond. “It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional,” wrote Last Ditch.

Previously, patrons were required to wear a well-fitted KN-95 mask “or better” at all times.

The new policy was not received with love.

“Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with,” wrote one commenter.

“people like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” posted another.

“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic],” wrote a third.

Well, now we know where perma-masked Taylor Lorenz hangs out these days. As for the rest of us:

Everything starts making a bit more sense when you realize that there’s a sizable contingent of the political Left that functionally lives on an entirely different planet from the rest of us https://t.co/CmHHPmQfnp

— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) September 22, 2026

Speaking of which:

The Boston Globe has just published a shockingly sober article about the nonexistent genocide supposedly targeting the transgender community.

In it, they cite a report I coauthored showing that the murder rate is actually lower for trans-identifying people than the general… pic.twitter.com/MocnjrwDVh

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 22, 2026

GOOD LUCK, I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW WE’RE ALL COUNTING ON YOU: Film Directors Are the New IP.

This is awesome for Hollywood. It’s a beckoning call to get viewers to engage with movies theatrically and the people who make them. There has never been a better time to be an auteur with an idea; people are coming to see them.

Imagine how much money the next Curry Barker movie is going to make.

Want more proof than just a feeling?

Look no further than the recent box office receipts.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey took over the cultural landscape and became the event film of the summer. Everyone went to see it, many of them in 70MM IMAX.

The trend isn’t isolated to Nolan. Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi event Disclosure Day was sold almost entirely on his name, legacy, and direct return to original sci-fi.

As I said above, Ryan Coogler’s original supernatural thriller Sinners proved that when a filmmaker builds an original vision, audiences will follow them anywhere.

We’re seeing trailers for a Shyamalan movie, and we know what that brings.

With name recognition like this and movies being sold on actors, it kind of feelsl like the ’90s again.

As Lynda Obst wrote in her 2013 book, Sleepless in Hollywood, in the 21 century, the industry replaced stars with franchises, to the point where there aren’t that many bankable stars left, and those who remain today are in their 60s or older. While stars are unreliable (see also: Gibson, Mel, Rourke, Mickey, and Sheen, Charlie), franchises such as James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, Batman, and the Marvel Universe seemed bulletproof. But then Hollywood went woke and began to hector its audiences rather than entertain them. Then came 2020, and Hollywood decided to close movie theaters and concentrate on streaming. Thus endless streaming series based on the aforementioned IP, culminating in slop such as She-Hulk, The Acolyte, and Starfleet Academy. And then superhero fatigue began to set in among audiences, at least until Spider-Man: Brand New Day made bank this year.

Roger L. Simon once wrote that Woody Allen was the only true auteur among American directors — the only filmmaker who both writes and directs his movies. Every other director needs writers to draft the blueprints of their projects.

But those directors considered “auteurs” in Hollywood’s past (such as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Coppola, and Welles) usually had the final cut on their movies. Unlike Spielberg and Nolan, which modern-day “auteurs” will be granted final cut by nervous studios?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, KIDS:

This Halloween scare the hell outta them little beggars pic.twitter.com/bXalVJ13SH

— The Waco Kid (@TheWacoKid8) September 22, 2026

UH-OH: BBC features white male soldier in warning about impending war.

And just like that, white men are back in adverts. pic.twitter.com/Md1JCCTv6u

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) September 20, 2026

I can remember earlier, more carefree times in Old Blighty: An Army of Snowflakes: The British Army wants to recruit snowflakes to its ranks. What is it thinking?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

CNN Sues Trump For Violating Its First Amendment Right To Fabricate News https://t.co/CndvJGvykw

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 21, 2026

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No cheery time for election pollsters in run‑up to US midterms.

Pollsters approach this year’s midterm elections dogged by high-profile misfires in recent elections while facing challenges from brash rivals intent on reshaping the landscape of political forecasts.

There are no guarantees that polling’s troubles – and persistent popular skepticism about the dependability of election polls – will be alleviated anytime soon.

In fact, it hasn’t been very cheery for pollsters for the better part of 10 years, since Donald Trump confounded poll-based expectations to defeat Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency in 2016.

In 2020, pollsters turned in their worst collective performance in 40 years by overestimating margins of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. It’s an outcome I discuss in “Lost in a Gallup,” my book about polling failure.

Polling in the 2022 midterms was more spotty than spectacular. In 2024, pollsters overall underestimated Trump’s popular support — for the third successive election. That outcome prompted The Atlantic to describe the 2024 polls as “quietly still bad.”

Read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE:

If you’d told me a few years ago this is where we’d be on Iran, I’d have said you were high:

1. Nuke program set back years. Enrichment and reprocessing gutted, weaponization sites destroyed, Fordow inoperable, Natanz in ruins, a generation of senior nuclear scientists…

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) April 24, 2026

JOHN FRANKENHEIMER DIDN’T INTEND FOR SEVEN DAYS IN MAY TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE: This Poll of Liberals Is Absolutely Terrifying.

Ask a Democrat how far he or she would go to get rid of President Donald Trump, and the honest answer, according to a new poll of self-identified liberals by the Center for Strategic Politics, is further than anyone should be comfortable admitting out loud.

But let’s start with the numbers that shouldn’t shock anyone.

As you might expect, 87% said they’d feel positive if Trump were impeached, convicted by both houses of Congress, and removed from office. Another 84% said they’d feel positive if Trump’s Cabinet invoked the 25th Amendment and forced him out, with 70% landing on very positive. Fine. That’s politics.

But it gets worse from there. So much worse.

According to the poll, 55% said they’d feel positive if Trump simply died in his sleep, compared with only 17% who’d feel negative and 28% who were neutral. The poll also found that 59% of liberals, a majority, said they’d feel positive if U.S. military leaders removed Trump from power and took control of the country, and 43% of them landed on very positive about a literal military takeover of the United States government.

More here: Poll: 59% of Dems support military coup against Trump, 32% support assassination.

Republicans have spent the last week calling a fellow Republican racist because he thinks there are too many Indians in Texas.

We polled five routes for Trump to leave office before the end of his term. A plurality of Dems support four of them, including a military coup and death by natural causes. The only one underwater, an assassination, is still supported by 29%. pic.twitter.com/C3qb2H0R8j

— Center for Strategic Politics (@StratPolitics) September 21, 2026

Let’s see what the Democrats are thinking about in the meantime:

Oh.

Here’s one Democrat reaction to the news:

What’s the issue?

23% is very nice in a country founded on the concept of Revolution against authoritarians like Trump

— Kyle Velez (@KyZyVz) September 22, 2026

Oh.

The pollsters framed the military coup option as one that would “safeguard the Constitution,” because nothing says constitutional order like tanks in D.C.!

With Trump sitting at 32% approval, are we really surprised that even more liberals want him dead now than before?

As for the rest, here’s Glenn’s 2016 paper on military coups in the United States.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Hollywood Is Dying — And These People Killed It.

OUT ON A LIMB: ADHD is over-diagnosed, say doctors.

UPDATE: 23 Percent of American 17-Year-Old Boys Have an ADHD Diagnosis.

OR, YOU CAN DRILL, BABY, DRILL:

Funny https://t.co/6XRurW0qfx

— Adam Carolla (@adamcarolla) September 21, 2026

IT’S MORNING IN ARGENTINA:

Javier Milei – The Proof of Concept.

The long march took a century to build. Milei has been dismantling its Argentine expression in real time, with a chainsaw, on television, while calling the central bank a criminal organization. This is not a metaphor. The chainsaw was a… https://t.co/F7UgeCbsrz pic.twitter.com/Ens9OdUt7o

— Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 (@Kristof_Poland) September 21, 2026