GOODER AND HARDER, LA: The depressing decline of America’s most glamorous city laid bare… and the final straw that sealed its fate.

It was a pop culture paradise in the early 2000s, with throngs of fans lining the streets every night in the hope of spotting their favorite stars.

But the glitter is gone in Hollywood, according to one expert who says the City of Angels is officially dead.

‘In the year 2000, It was just a utopia. Everybody wanted to come to LA. Everyone wanted to party in LA,’ Real Estate Agent and native Angeleno, Makan Mostafavi told the Daily Mail.

‘The economy was great, everyone had money. Nobody complained about rent or payments or bills or any kind of headaches. Everybody was well off. Everybody was happy. Nobody had any kind of stress and everybody just had a great time.

‘[Now], when you do go out, everyone around you is so stressed out from rent bills, just stressed of everyday life, with everything that’s going on – the homeless, the crime, the high taxes, the just terrible road conditions.

‘It’s just not as fun anymore.’

And yet, they’ll continue to vote for politicians who advocate for more homelessness, more crime, and more terrible roads. (Actually, in California, fewer roads, but the ones that remain will be very terrible indeed.)

Earlier: Seen The Lights Go Out On Sunset. “The Movie business, like the Rock business, has always existed as a delicate balance between art and commerce… too much of the former and you get a bohemian artists colony that struggles to connect with an audience and where no one is making any money… too much of the latter and you get the modern ‘content’ business, where no one is having any fun… I’ll leave it to you to decide which problem has turned out the lights on Sunset Boulevard.”

JONATHAN TURLEY: In Munich, Democrats pledge a return to wealth taxes and climate hysteria.

This week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) joined the many Californians now seeking their fortune elsewhere. The difference is that Newsom is planning to come back to California, even as billionaires, investors, and companies flee his state for greener pastures.

Newsom and Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) were selling a brave new world that looked a lot like the broken old world. It was an ironic moment. They were addressing countries at the Munich Security Conference that had previously destroyed their economies through socialist and far-left policies.

The rush of liberal Democratic officeholders to Europe was telling. A new poll shows that a record 58 percent of voters believe their party is “too liberal.” But Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez found a welcoming audience in Europe.

The global elite gushed over Ocasio-Cortez and sat enraptured as she rattled off socialist platitudes. That included New York Times correspondent Katrin Bennhold, who thrilled the audience by treating it as a given that Ocasio-Cortez will run for president.

Both Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez spoke of returning the U.S. to the good graces of the global elite. Newsom assured the Europeans that Trump’s reign is temporary, and that the U.S. will soon enough dismantle the “wrecking ball” that the administration has taken to the EU.

Newsom offered his leadership and his state as the model, proclaiming that “California is a stable and reliable partner” for Europe. The model includes high taxes, massive spending programs and greater bureaucratic regulations — precisely the policies that have driven the European economy into its current stagnation. In other words, Democrats were in Europe to offer precisely what Newsom outwardly condemned: “doubling down on stupid.”

When not fumbling with security questions about issues such as Taiwan, Ocasio-Cortez was demanding that wealth taxes be implemented in the U.S. “expeditiously.” Such a tax on billionaires’ wealth, including unrealized gains, is currently being pushed in California. The predictable result is that billionaires and other wealthy citizens are rushing to leave the state and taking their investments and companies with them.

As Turley concludes, “Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez certainly found their element in Munich, and the EU certainly found the ‘reliable partners’ it has longed for in creating ‘a new World Order with European Values.’”

To be fair, this isn’t the first time that an anti-democratic regime has used Munich as the launching point to create a “new world order” with, alas, quite European values.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:

Still kinda hot tbh pic.twitter.com/cp8HdAxK0w

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2026

QUESTION ASKED:

One of the most important questions too few people asked.
But @NickJFreitas asked it.
Because Nick is bloody brilliant.

“How did they know?”pic.twitter.com/rE5o7wguE4

— Chaya’s Clan (@ChayasClan) February 1, 2026

How did they know? For the same reason that Ted Kennedy knew that same media had his back when he was smearing Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings/show trial in 1991:

I liked political theater, so I watched that initially rooting for Clarence Thomas to be taken down. By the very end, I believed the seeds of my future were planted right there when I realized that Ted Kennedy knew something. What did he know that he could ask Clarence Thomas these questions of a man who came from humble beginnings as an African-American? What did he know about the media? What did he know about the political process? What did he know about Hollywood? That they would side with a known Lothario with Chappaquiddick, you know, in his background. That they would allow for him and his allies in the Democratic Party to ask this man in the realm of privacy have you ever rented any pornography. Do you know who Long Dong Silver is? It was so obvious that this was a takedown that eventually I started to see things through what I called the Democrat Media Complex.

—Andrew Breitbart, in conversation with Peter Robinson, April, 2009.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Get Clean for Gene!”

The New Hotness?

Obama said Democrats need to start cleaning up homeless tent cities.

Hillary is now saying mass migration needs to end and we need secure borders.

The memo has gone out.

Democrats are trying to moderate for the midterms. https://t.co/1c0OgEkeyc

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 15, 2026

More details here: Hillary Clinton says migration ‘went too far’ and ‘needs to be fixed in a humane way.’

While in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Hillary Clinton participated in a panel titled, “The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values.”

During the panel, Clinton appeared to take a stronger approach to her previous stance on border security.

“There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” Clinton said.

“It went too far, it’s been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people and how we’re going to have a strong family structure because it is at the base of civilization,” she added.

Elián González has entered into the conversation:

There were zero riots and zero protests and zero media claims of authoritarianism over this. https://t.co/qLc8DyIoXI pic.twitter.com/Nla0dKt2fK

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 15, 2026

Media claims of authoritarianism? On the contrary, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times famously wrote in 2000:

I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: ”America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that.”

And I was also warmed by the picture of Elian back in his father’s arms. Some things you can fake — like a 6-year-old wagging his finger on a homemade video and telling his father to go back to Cuba without him — and some things you can’t fake. That picture of Elian and his father illustrated the very parent-child bond that our law was written to preserve.

Hats off to Janet Reno for understanding that the Elian Gonzalez case was about both of these pictures: the well-being of a child and the well-being of our Constitution, on which all good things in our society rest. But hats off twice to Ms. Reno for understanding that these two noble virtues are not equal. The fear of causing some trauma to Elian by rescuing him could never outweigh the need to uphold the rule of law.
One only hopes that this affair will remind the extremists among the Miami Cubans that they are not living in their own private country, that they cannot do whatever they please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more than they love the U.S. Constitution — but that doesn’t apply to the rest of us.

One also hopes that now that Ms. Reno has ended the kidnapping of Elian by the Miami Cubans, the other hard-nosed lady in the cabinet, Madeleine Albright, will end the Miami Cubans’ kidnapping of U.S. Cuba policy as well. Ms. Albright could start by relaxing the embargo on Cuba.

Fortunately, Albright didn’t take the advice of a columnist even further to her left, and as a result, as Glenn asked last week at his Substack: Will Cuba be Libre soon, and if so what happens next?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

The Babylon Bee Ranks Humanity's Worst Inventions https://t.co/0chyKQi4Gy pic.twitter.com/i3tnXJPBnO

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 13, 2026

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Bugs Bunny Halftime Edition.

REUTERS: US military preparing for potentially weeks-long Iran operations.

The U.S. military is preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations against Iran if President Donald Trump orders an attack, two U.S. officials told Reuters, in what could become a far more serious conflict than previously seen between the countries.

The disclosure by the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the planning, raises the stakes for the diplomacy underway between the United States and Iran.

U.S. and Iranian diplomats held talks in Oman last week in an effort to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s nuclear program, after Trump amassed military forces in the region, raising fears of new military action.

U.S. officials said on Friday the Pentagon was sending an additional aircraft carrier to the Middle East, adding thousands more troops along with fighter aircraft, guided-missile destroyers and other firepower capable of waging attacks and defending against them.

Trump, speaking to U.S. troops on Friday at a base in North Carolina, said it had “been difficult to make a deal” with Iran.

“Sometimes you have to have fear. That’s the only thing that really will get the situation taken care of,” Trump said.

Asked for comment on the preparations for a potentially sustained U.S. military operation, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “President Trump has all options on the table with regard to Iran.”

Well, as long as the operation will only last a few weeks:

“This is going to be a two month war not a two year war” – Bill Kristol 2003 https://t.co/RIVFHi9p9g pic.twitter.com/prD5FlHNma

— a newsman (@a_newsman) February 14, 2026

MY, THAT’S AN AWFUL LOT OF BAD LUCK IN RECENT YEARS: This account shows how South Africa has decayed in just a decade, and it’s a warning to us all.

I’ve been seeing this account in my feeds for months, and there’s a reason why.

People are fascinated with the ruins of once-thriving civilizations.

pic.twitter.com/XQNzmqWNyf

— Jozi vs Jozi (@jozivsjozi) February 12, 2026

That’s a timelapse of Booysens Train Station in Johannesburg from 2014 to 2025. Within 11 years, what was once a clean, functional rail station was stripped for parts and reclaimed by nature.

This is happening all over South Africa, and you can see it on Google Maps:

Click over for many, many before and after photos.

Exit quote: “Understand, this is an experiment in race-based Marxism. It is no different than what woke groups like BLM want to do. America is at the beginning of the same experiment. We saw it in the late 2000s in Detroit during the financial collapse. Entire city blocks just disappeared as everything broke down.”

Classical allusion in headline: “Bad Luck” and the Evanescence of Imperfection.

This colloquy of gloom reminded me of a famous observation from the writer Robert Heinlein.

“Throughout history,” Heinlein wrote in 1973, “poverty is the normal condition of man.”

“Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.”

Then comes the kicker: “Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.”

“This,” Heinlein added, “is known as ‘bad luck.’”

Of course, Heinlein was speaking ironically with that last bit.

The issue was not “bad luck” but virtue-fired stupidity.

All those “right-thinking people”—the people with the socially certified ideas, the kinder, gentler, mask-wearing, anti-fossil-fuel types—are on the ramparts, proudly toppling the atavistic instruments of their prosperity.

Very soon now, they will look around at the wreckage their good intentions have wrought and wonder who is to blame for the poverty, the chaos, the ruins that lay strewn where once, not so long ago, a vibrant civilization stood, supported by a mighty economy.

I don’t know if I’d necessarily call South Africa in 2015 “a vibrant civilization,” but its physical infrastructure didn’t appear to be descending into collapse back then, either.

AI, THE AMELIA MEME, REVOLUTION, AND THE FUTURE OF CELEBRITY:

Orwell wrote about government power being used to control the thoughts of individuals, and his thesis in 1984 was that this power would or could ultimately win.

But if Orwell saw the Amelia meme, he might have to rewrite the ending. Because the tools now exist to make it absolutely impossible to impose government narratives over the objections of common sense. The public won’t put up with it, and there are too many smartasses with technical savvy out there. Even in Orwell’s time, people were subverting official Soviet art to push anti-communist narratives.

We saw a taste of this a decade ago when the American alt-right, which is a very small number of people, popularized the Pepe the Frog meme. You didn’t have to be alt-right to think Pepe’s antics were hilarious, and the alarmed and befuddled reactions of the official Left, which included demands for the disavowal of Pepe by mainstream conservatives, made it all the more fun.

Not to mention the crackpot controversy over the “OK” hand signal and its “racist” overtones, which was shortly turned into a smartass rebellion against cancel culture by the non-woke.

And that’s what the Amelia meme has become. But with AI video apps that can’t be shut down (you can run Wan 2.1, one of the better AI video engines, on your own computer if it has enough memory), this isn’t just a cartoon character. It’s a walking, talking personification of the resistance to the British political class.

It’s a Guy Fawkes mask, straight out of V for Vendetta.

And that personification makes for an impossible challenge to Keir Starmer’s government. (RELATED: Lord Mandelson: The Albatross Around Sir Keir’s Neck)

Exit quote: “A Tommy Robinson you can make a victim of Alinsky’s Rule 13. You can pick him, freeze him, personify him, and polarize him, and then you can arrest and imprison him, and in so doing make him an example for all those who might follow: is this how you want to end up? But you can’t do any of that to Amelia. And you’ll look like an idiot for trying.”

Read the whole thing, if only to see Amelia channeling Mel Gibson heroic pre-battle speech in Braveheart, and chatting with an AI Winston Churchill.

TOM CRUISE VS. BRAD PITT WAS FAKE. HOLLYWOOD’S PANIC ISN’T:

Did you catch the video clip for the upcoming movie featuring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as the protagonists? There’s a full slobberknocker on a rooftop.

This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV

— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026

There’s only one problem: What you watched was fake.

Using AI tools to generate the fight, a Chinese tech company created the faces, voices, and movements that looked real enough to fool casual viewers.

The clip sparked immediate anxiety across Hollywood. If a machine stages a blockbuster fight between two A-listers without cameras or contracts, what else can it do?

Rhett Reese, one of the screenwriters behind the Deadpool franchise, warns that advances like these could “decimate” Hollywood.

It’s not an abstract idea; studios already use digital de-aging and CGI doubles. AI now eliminates more human labor from the process.

Jim Treacher responded to the imaginary Cruise and Pitt rumble by asking, “A.I. = Actors Inessential?”

It just feels like… It’s like you’re on the side of a mountain, and you’re looking up at an avalanche, and all you’ve got is a toy shovel.

I just don’t know how we stop this as a society. The incentives are too strong. If you can do something that amazing, that cheaply and quickly, people are going to do it.

There’s a good quote from a guy named Rhett Reese. He’s a screenwriter, Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote the Deadpool movies, he wrote Zombieland, a bunch of other stuff. He’s been very successful in Hollywood, so he’s looking at it from that perspective.

And he writes:

In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous.

I think that’s true. That’s kind of the bright side I’ve been trying to look at. The sort of democratization of this.

Some kid in… I dunno, Indiana? Is going to become a star by making movies that people want to see, using this technology.

In Hearts of Darkness, the brilliant documentary about the making of 1979’s Apocalypse Now, while he was in the Philippines directing one of the massive, sprawling and (at the time) expensive films ever made, Francis Ford Coppola mused:

To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some… just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That’s my opinion.

It took almost 50 years for technology to match Coppola’s vision, but for better or worse, that’s where we are today. As James Lileks asked in 2024: Art That’s Just for Me: What will the rise of artificial intelligence do to visual media?

In 10 years, there will be movies about every single person who boarded the Titanic. In the style of Robert Altman. In the style of Martin Scorsese. In the style of Steven Spielberg. There will be 100,000 fan-fic Star Wars movies as bad as the TV shows, all starring the person who dictated the scenario. There will be a subculture of people who exhaust the creative world of “Twin Peaks” with endless vignettes, and one or two will get it exactly right. In the end, we will watch our own movies more than others, and the theatrical experience will have gone from the great shared silver screen in the communal dark, to niche streaming, to watching our own particular curiosities and desires played on our own glowing rectangles. Millions of hours of movies, made for an audience of one.

I don’t know about that — I think the best AI video makers will garner their own followings, just as the most interesting YouTube channels acquire large numbers of viewers.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Me in 2005: Backyard Filmmakers Are Hollywood’s Greatest Fear. The entertainment industry’s real threat isn’t piracy, it’s backyard Spielbergs armed with digital movie gear.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES:

Not gonna lie I didn’t think we’d be at the Rivers of Feces stage of rapid third-world-ization for a few more years but here we are https://t.co/o3wNSTJoZb

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 13, 2026

(Classical reference in headline.)

AND NOW A FEW WORDS ON GEOPOLITICAL BRINKSMANSHIP FROM A LIKELY 2028 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE:

AOC is asked about the US committing troops to Taiwan.

Her brain completely short-circuits.pic.twitter.com/YRuiKS7Iuj

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) February 13, 2026

THAT NICE IRISH MAN THAT IS WASTING AWAY IN DETENTION? YEAH, THERE’S A REASON HE WON’T JUST LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND GO BACK HOME:

The Irish­man held in the US by Don­ald Trump’s ICE agents who likened his deten­tion to a ‘mod­ern-day con­cen­tra­tion camp’ had left Ire­land while facing drugs charges, the Irish Daily Mail can reveal.

Séamus Cul­leton, 38, made world­wide head­lines this week after he described the ‘hell­hole’ con­di­tions in which he was being held for almost five months with 70 other detain­ees.

Ori­gin­ally from Glen­more in Co. Kilkenny, he has been locked up in a facil­ity in El Paso, Texas, since he was detained by Immig­ra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) last Septem­ber for over­stay­ing his 90-day visa. He arrived in the US in 2009.

Mr Cul­leton was arres­ted while on his way home from work in Boston, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany, who is a US cit­izen. He runs his own plas­ter­ing busi­ness.

The Mail has now con­firmed that Mr Cul­leton was charged in 2008 with sev­eral offences in Ire­land before emig­rat­ing. The charges were pos­ses­sion of drugs with intent for sale or sup­ply, pos­ses­sion of drugs for per­sonal con­sump­tion and obstruct­ing a garda in the course of their duty, sev­eral sources said.

Mr Cul­leton failed to appear at New Ross Dis­trict Court in Co. Wex­ford for his hear­ing and a bench war­rant was reques­ted.

However, it was never issued as he had left the jur­is­dic­tion.

He also appeared in the same court in April 2008 for being ‘extremely drunk’ in pub­lic and gardaí detained him for his own safety, court reports from the time state.

Speak­ing to the Mail last night, Mr Cul­leton’s US law­yer Ogor Win­nie Okoye said that she only became aware of the charges against him yes­ter­day. She said: ‘It’s a war­rant that was issued after he came to the United States. I can­not speak fur­ther without know­ing the details of the case. A war­rant does not equal a crim­inal con­vic­tion.

‘Today is the first time that I’m aware of any­thing like that… I can’t speak more on something that I don’t know about… I have not spoken to him since this broke today.’

Curiously, most on the right don’t have a problem with him being deported:

"Let's start publicizing an attractive white migrant who is being deported and the racists will go nuts to keep them here, thereby demonstrating their racism!"

*DEPORT THAT TATER-GOBBLING CLOVER JOCKEY!*

"Whhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?!?!?!?"

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) February 13, 2026

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL ❤️ JEFFREY EPSTEIN:

Kathryn Ruemmler has one of the most gold-plated resumes of any lawyer in America. She was an associate counsel to President Clinton, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and the deputy director of DOJ’s Enron Task Force. She was a partner in Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins.

In 2009, Ruemmler joined the Obama Administration as principal associate deputy attorney general. She then became President Obama’s White House Counsel. In 2014, she apparently was considered for the Attorney General post vacated by Eric Holder, but withdrew her name from contention and instead joined Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most profitable businesses. In 2021 she became Goldman’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel, and serves as a member of Goldman’s Management Committee.

So one would assume that she is a person of remarkable ability, extraordinary dedication and–call me naive–sterling character. Maybe so. But it turns out that, alongside all her accomplishments, she was a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. She has been embarrassed by the current dump of Epstein documents, as the New York Post reports:

Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer Kathy Ruemmler signed emails to Jeffrey Epstein with “xoxo” and wished him a happy birthday — prompting a crude joke from the disgraced financier about naming his penis, newly released Justice Department documents show.

Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under then-President Barack Obama before becoming Goldman’s chief legal officer, emailed Epstein on his 62nd birthday in 2015: “I hope you enjoy the day with your one true love :-)”

Commence the anti-journalism from the DNC-MSM in response: Media Actively Cover Up Obama Lawyer’s Chummy Ties to Epstein. “Democrats Sure Got It Good…Need I even point out what these headlines would look like if Epstein’s gal-pal spent five years in Donald Trump’s White House, or if she had been Trump’s legal counsel, or even if her association with Trump were something as fleeting as she was once his Uber driver?”

UPDATE: More great moments in anti-journalism:

Friday at 5pm is the best time for NYT to put out this story. pic.twitter.com/LNk5ySOsUZ

— Karol Markowicz (@karol) February 13, 2026

THE HYPOCRISY OLYMPICS. In his latest Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald writes:

Yes, there was a sex ring. The multimillionaire at the heart of it traveled with a harem of women and used them for his own sexual needs. But he regularly pimped them out to high-profile men as well. He assigned each woman a number so that the john, after viewing what was on offer, would just have to tell him which number he wanted. When the pimp had used up a particular woman, he’d discard her and replace her with a new one. It was really as vile as all that, and it’s absolutely true. The guy bragged about it.

Jeffrey Epstein?

Heck, no. I’m talking the man who’s currently being celebrated for his role as honorary coach of Team USA at the Winter Olympics: Snoop Dogg, America’s most beloved thug.

“I put an organization together,” Snoop told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, f**k a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, t**ty to t**ty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer…. A lot of athletes bought p**sy from me.”

Well, at least he sounded conscience-stricken about it.

And there’s this. Snoop went on his pimp tour in 2003, when he had already been a rich and wildly successful recording artist for a decade. Which is perhaps why he was more generous than most pimps. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch,” he said, “but I’d let her have it.”

What a guy, huh.

I previously wrote about Snoop in the context of anti-Semitism. Namely, about how the liberal establishment took a career-long defender of Louis Farrakhan and elevated him to the heights of cultural acceptability.

Why am I writing about him now? Because while Americans have worked themselves into a moral fit and launched a witch hunt for anyone whose name is mentioned glancingly in the Epstein files, they’re also delighted to their core that, as one CNN headline has it, “Coach Snoop is having a blast at the Olympics.” This is about moral hypocrisy.

The transition of Snoop from rapper to the Olympics’ ambassador of goodwill (and good chronic) has been helped by years and years of favorable TV appearances and commercial endorsements, and a lack of recent negative headlines. But then a lot of rappers from the ‘80s and ‘90s have gone on to play good guys on TV and in the movies, such as Ice Cube, and astonishingly enough, the Ice-T, who went from rapping “Cop Killer” in 1992, to playing a cop on Law & Order: SVU since 2000.

IF YOU WANNA GET DOWN, DOWN ON THE GROUND: RFK Jr: I’m not afraid of germs — I snorted cocaine off toilet seats.

NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Babylon Bee just dropped the most savage infomercial roast of 2026 😂

“Freezing in your selfish capitalist isolation? Warm up with the loving arms of collectivism!”

Watch “shared prosperity” turn into “everyone starves equally” while the bureaucrats keep the thermostat at 72°.… pic.twitter.com/cBfaLlna89

— Jake (@JakeCan72) February 13, 2026

On the other hand, when socialism is spreading nationally, it’s good to be an apparatchik: Hilarious Thread of Champagne Socialist Mamdani Bro Throwing Tantrums Over Airline Injustices a Must-Read.

After taking a Business Class flight on American Airlines Mathis E. Roy Vigne — an advance man for Zohran Mamdani and Democratic Socialist had this public meltdown at being directed to an insufficiently luxurious airport lounge and said he was targeted because "they did not like… pic.twitter.com/qUcmSzalRn

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 12, 2026

Post continues: “… they did not like my face.”

Aww, yes, the racist claim. Typical.

Keep going.

In 2020 Mathis E. Roy Vigne — an advance man for Zohran Mamdani and Democratic Socialist told Air France he was "disgusted" and "outraged" at being downgraded from Business Class to economy and called their staff "rude" pic.twitter.com/pcg14xhZgj

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 12, 2026

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Curiously, these tweets are all after early 2019, when the distaff Mamdani vowed to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” but then, globe-trotting enviromentals don’t mean that they should stop flying:

A multi millionaire who's too good to wait in line at the airport like the rest of us peasants and is instead flying around on private jets is "fighting oligarchy" and climate change?

— Pro-America | Politics & Markets (@Pro__Trading) May 8, 2025

CNN HOST KAITLAN COLLINS REVEALS KAROLINE LEAVITT DEFENDED HER PRESS ACCESS IN SAUDI ARABIA:

CNN host Kaitlan Collins credited White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday for defending the journalist while on a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia.

Collins explained on Heather McMahan’s “Absolutely Not” podcast that she was in Saudi Arabia on a trip covering President Trump’s visit to the country and noted the Saudis famously do not like the media.

“I asked a shouted question to President Trump, who had seen me when the US press came in,” Collins said. “He didn’t answer, which is, I mean, that’s how it works. You shout questions. They either answer or they don’t — it’s their prerogative. And then the world leaders left the room.

“The Saudi Royal Guard kind of freaked out because I dared to ask a question, and they’re not used to that there because they don’t have a free press.”

Collins said Saudi authorities then tried to stop her from entering the next press event and, when she pushed back, they told her she wouldn’t be allowed in.

“I could see them like, whispering, and pointing about me,” Collins said. “And some of the younger White House staff, they are with the press, weren’t really sure what to do, and they went to Karoline and, to her credit, she said, ‘No, Kaitlan’s coming in with the rest of the US press,’ and we went in. And, so, it didn’t become this huge issue.

So, to her credit, she, without a doubt, was like, ‘No, you’re coming in,’” Collins said of Leavitt. “Which I do think is important in that moment, especially when you’re kind of the US contingent abroad, and we don’t do things like they do in Saudi Arabia.”

Worst. Fascists. Ever:

Welp- there goes that narrative around the Trump administration being authoritarian and anti-press… https://t.co/5KKbovRvl7

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) February 12, 2026

THE HYPOCRISY OF THE EPSTEIN PANIC: Conspiracy theorists ignore a bleaker truth.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralising is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralising nearly hard enough.

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defence that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

* * * * * * * * *

The depressing fact is that sexual behaviour like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defence of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

There’s a reason this specific group of women (none of which were trafficked by Epstein) don’t want their names shown in the files despite otherwise doing so many public interviews.

And it has nothing to do with normal privacy concerns. https://t.co/rm7YxqAfhp

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) February 13, 2026

Sure. Many of the redactions you see in the files are the names of women who met Epstein as adults and were prostitutes, not trafficking victims. Some of them allegedly helped him recruit as well.

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) February 13, 2026

RAND PAUL CALLS OUT KATIE COURIC’S ‘LESS THAN 14%’ MIGRANT CRIME DEFENSE, GIVES HER A REALITY CHECK:

“This whole argument about the role of Minneapolis police in this or Minneapolis state officials might be more applicable, Senator, if ICE agents were truly talking about the ‘worst of the worst,’ as the president likes to say,” Couric replied. “Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE and President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, supporting to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.”

She then proceeded to ask, “So isn’t all this talk about ridding the country of violent criminals a massive overstatement? If less than 14%, again, of the 400,000 immigrants being arrested are had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses?”

“I think the facts make a difference, and so that’s one of the questions we will ask, and so, when you come to Minneapolis, if they have a policy that says, oh, we’re not going to turn over from our jails nonviolent prisoners, people who are, I don’t know why you’re in prison if you’re nonviolent, but maybe you have a drug crime that’s a nonviolent,” Paul said.

“I think there are plenty of non-violent people in prison,” Couric replied.

“But the thing is, that’s not their policy,” Paul said. “Their policy is ‘we will turn no one over.’ So you can be, you beat somebody half to death, you get an assault charge, and you’re in jail for a couple years, and somehow you’re getting out on parole, and you’re not going to be turned over, and you are illegal, I’ve got a problem with that and so do probably most independents and Democrats. But that’s what we have to ascertain.”

Paul went on to argue that most people are probably in the middle on this issue, to the point that while they are against excessive force against protesters, “If you ask them, ’If a guy has committed rape, and he’s in prison, and he is going to get out, do you want him deported?’ I think people would say, ‘Hell yes, he ought to be deported.’”

“Having said that though, what about the 14%? Such a low percentage of 400,000 people,” Couric retorted.

“If your daughter gets raped by the guy that gets back out, and he’s one of the 14%, I don’t think you’re going to quibble about whether it’s 14 or 64,” Paul replied. “What I’m saying though, is that if you’re not going to turn over anybody, then that’s 0%.”

“I don’t think the percentage – it makes a halfway argument to how much effort should we have, but if Minnesota’s not going to turn over anybody, the whole argument — whether it’s 14 or 86 — doesn’t mean anything,” the senator continued.

Couric is boldly going where Martha Raddatz has gone before: Martha Raddatz Unbelievably Downplays Illegal Immigrant Gangs in Interview With JD Vance.

We are here RN. https://t.co/2sW60CFToe pic.twitter.com/VUNwAsvakt

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 13, 2024

YOU CAN’T GO ON DESTROYING WEALTH FOREVER, YOU KNOW. Ultimately, There Are Consequences:

Yeah, it sucks when your job gets blown up.

But the employees at the Washington Post have been, for far longer than Jeff Bezos has owned it, almost universally in favor of an ideology that is injurious to prosperity, entrepreneurship, and behavioral success.

* * * * * * * * *

It turns out that the internet is, on balance, a superior news medium than is newsprint (and I say this as someone who used to publish a print publication). The internet provides for dynamic content, audio and video, live streaming, and lots of other things you can’t get from print. And it doesn’t require the use of a printing press to disseminate information.

Which means the market isn’t in need of legacy prestige publications like the Washington Post like it once was, and so the trappings of significance that publication has carried far past the reality of its circumstances have made for red ink.

And lots of it.

The Post loses money because it ran off the conservative side of its subscription base, and then, when it attempted to recover some sort of balance by refusing to endorse the farcical Kamala Harris in 2024, it ran off the leftist subscribers who remained. And it did these things at a time when it was of decreasing necessity to have a bloated, lavish news agency like the Post to cover events from sea to shining sea.

So eventually the destruction of wealth by incompetent people — both businessmen and journalists — was going to result in a correction. Bezos doesn’t have a perfect record of brilliance in business — he bought this turkey in the first place, after all — but he did build Amazon from nothing and therefore he does understand the concept of a long-term business vision and how that compares to a lack of one.

But the Democratic party operatives with bylines still remaining at the Post would like to keep on destroying wealth for as long as possible, consequences be damned:

…The Washington Post has been losing revenue and readers for years, but writers are irate that Bezos will not simply allow them to write for each other and an ever-contracting base. Publisher Will Lewis sought to instill some reality into the Post but has now resigned.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) February 13, 2026

That’s really odd, considering we’ve been reliably told for several decades now that oligarchy is a really, really bad thing:

OMG 😂 pic.twitter.com/CDq60JMizH https://t.co/YPyEuLn7Sx

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 21, 2025

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Why doesn’t the CDC care about Chinese biolabs in America?

If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it and found a whole laboratory’s worth of scientific kit of the kind more useful to medical scientists than, say, drug dealers. Curious.

Curiouser still, the house belongs to a Chinese national named Jia Bei (Jesse) Zhu. He is currently in prison awaiting trial over a secret laboratory that (it is alleged) he was running in Reedley, California. In December 2022 an alert city official in Reedley noticed a garden hose leading into a supposedly empty building. She went inside and found three women who identified themselves as Chinese nationals, wearing white coats, masks, safety glasses and latex gloves, among the equipment of a busy laboratory with liquid nitrogen bottles and ultra-cold deep freezes.

“Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare.” — see also, 2020:

The Zhu scandal is gobsmacking: labs in Nevada and California, full of pathogens, run by a well connected Chinese businessman who was a fugitive from justice in Canada.

Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare. pic.twitter.com/DLedv4SymI

— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) February 12, 2026

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Rupert Murdoch to take over printing of The Grauniad. 

HYSTERICAL ABC NEWS: Trump’s Going to Destroy the Planet and Kill You!

Today, President Trump repealed the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which constituted the basis for a slew of regulations that impacted every aspect of daily life and imposed enormous costs on the American people. ABC World News Tonight went into a full meltdown.

This is how anchor David Muir introduced the report:

DAVID MUIR: Tonight, President Trump has repealed U.S. power to regulate climate in this country. The president officially rejecting the science. And what this now clears the way for. Critics tonight arguing this is not only dangerous for the environment but for your health.

“The power to regulate climate”, says Muir. We always knew that the presidential power Donald Trump wields is tremendous, we just didn’t know it was god-like. Does Trump regulate the climate with a thermostat? Does he speak to it? Muir doesn’t specify, further adding that Trump has rejected The Science™. In fairness, The Science™ said that the East Coast should’ve been underwater by now. The Germans seppukued their nuclear program based on, you guessed it: The Science™.

It wasn’t just The Science™, but ABC News itself. In January of 2007, Good Morning America ran a Chyron that read “Will Billions Die from Global Warming?”, while then-GMA weatherman Sam Champion breathlessly told Robin Roberts:

That’s what’s in this report and why everyone is trying to jump this report that officially comes out Friday, Robin. There are big, new headlines and some of them are coming out of Australia in media reports. Now, they say that those scientists in Paris will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That’s not your grandchildren, that’s your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry.

The following year, ABC News was back at it: Quick Reminder: Nobody at ABC Personally Takes Their Global Warming Doomsday Predictions Seriously, Either.

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.

The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.” (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.)

On June 12, 2008, correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”

As one expert warns that in 2015 the sea level will rise quickly, a visual shows New York City being engulfed by water. The video montage includes another unidentified person predicting that “flames cover hundreds of miles.”

Then-GMA co-anchor Chris Cuomo appeared frightened by this future world. He wondered, “I think we’re familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That’s seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?”

As I wrote back in 2015, “Obviously, no one at ABC thought so, since the network never moved their corporate headquarters from its tony Upper West Side address, despite attempting to scare the crap out of gullible low information viewers that Manhattan would be flooded in seven years.”