The far-Left comic had the great Meryl Streep on his couch, but their interview time had nearly run out. So Colbert teed Streep up to share anything that was still on her mind, from the world of entertainment to beyond Hollywood’s gates.
If you know something about late-night TV, these kinds of unscripted moments are nothing of the kind. Pre-interviews establish the basics behind the upcoming chat, from personal anecdotes to promoting the project du jour.
Stephen Colbert concluded his interview with Meryl Streep by inviting her to talk about whatever she wants and she went for the voter suppression fearmongering, "the SAVE America Act, if that passes, all the married women that have changed their names are going to have to go to… pic.twitter.com/i9ax1nlBQu
“A COMPETENT LEADER USES GENERALS LIKE A BASKETBALL COACH USES PLAYERS. Bench them, swap them out, shift them to different positions based on how they stack up against the opposing team:”
General Douglas MacArthur was fired by a hat salesman. General George B. McClellan was fired by a small town lawyer. And during WW-II, US generals were replaced constantly.
You see, a competent leader uses generals like a basketball coach uses players. Bench them, swap…
David Letterman: "[Trump's] our dictator. His appearance is fraudulent as is everything about the regime… Think of the worst thing that you’ve ever seen humans accomplish."
Trump’s such an all-powerful dictator that there will be no repercussions whatsoever for Dave saying this. Incidentally, will anyone ask him who he wants to win this time around, Iran or the US?
“ELIMINATING CONSIDERABLE ARTERIOSCLEROSIS,” THEN AND NOW:
Poor General George C. Marshall. If you think the SECWAR criticism is unique, it's not. Marshall had to defend his actions powerfully and without apology:
“Most of our senior officers on such duty are deadwood and should be eliminated from the service as rapidly as possible.”… pic.twitter.com/Zv3lxEiCBc
Related: “The US Army’s ‘Spiritual Fitness Guide’ reads like it was written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on a bender—not a word of encouragement for a soldier’s faith, but pages upon pages of New Age nonsense that makes Universalism sound like rational thought and really does imagine no religion:”
So SecWar Pete Hegseth just fired Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the US Army’s (now former) Chief of Chaplains.
I have zero insider information on this, but I have my own theories as to why it happened.
Green’s most important event as the Chief of Chaplains was to produce the…
TRUMP HAS BROKEN THE MAN WHO HAS PLAYED THE GODFATHER, JAKE LA MOTTA, AND AL CAPONE:
This is such a perfect example of how Trump broke the brains of so many on the Left. In the name of opposing "totalitarianism" and "defending democracy," DeNiro thinks there should be a body of elites who bar people from running for office, including someone who went on to win… https://t.co/H2eKWF5rv1
Tweet continues, “DeNiro thinks there should be a body of elites who bar people from running for office, including someone who went on to win the popular vote. What’s sad is that DeNiro is obviously experiencing immense, totalizing pain, genuine psychic distress at the outcome of an election. So much of their hatred of Trump is just an attempt to evade recognizing that democracy—their neighbors getting what they want when they vote in greater numbers—causes them searing psychic pain.”
THE NOT SO FINAL COUNTDOWN:
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.
The Biden Administration did not let Elon use SpaceX to save astronauts who had been stranded for 9 months before the 2024 election because it could possibly help Trump politically.
A Good Friday service in south London was broken up by police over apparent breaches of Covid-19 regulations.
Footage uploaded on YouTube showed Metropolitan police officers addressing worshippers at the Christ the King Polish Catholic church in Balham, south London, late on Friday afternoon.
The video shows an officer telling the congregation that they could be fined £200 or arrested for the potential rule-breaking. He said: “This gathering is unfortunately unlawful under the coronavirus regulations we have currently. I suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that though it is Good Friday, and I appreciate you would like to worship, that this gathering is unlawful, so please may you leave the building now. Thank you.”
A statement posted on the church’s website on Saturday said that they complied with the order to close the service and for people to go home, but insisted it had met all government requirements. It claimed the Met officers had misunderstood regulations on church services during the pandemic.
They said: “We believe, however, that the police brutally exceeded their powers by issuing their warrant for no good reason.”
Heh. Flashback to the infamous 2018 train wreck “interview” that instantly made Peterson a superstar by easily swatting back all of Newman’s hectoring interviewing techniques: Jordan Peterson, Hero. Clinical psychologist triumphs over ideologically-driven journalistic idiocy.
As Rod Dreher wrote at the time, “The interview ought to be shown in journalism classes as an example of what happens when a journalist believes that ideological ardor substitutes for reason, and that contempt for her interview subject should rightly override professionalism.”
Similarly, the London Spectator responded, “If I was Channel 4 I would take it down. If I was Cathy Newman I would sue or seek a super-injunction. I don’t think I have ever witnessed an interview that is more catastrophic for the interviewer.” In response, Newman initially tried to shrug off the debacle, before descending full-on into victimhood:
Recent stats show that as of March 2026, jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industries have dropped from where they were at their peak in July 2022 of more than 455 thousand jobs to 344,000.
Ann Coulter and Mickey Kaus wonder how much Hollywood getting woke has caused them to go broke:
I don't think Hollywood has really confronted the possibility that "Go Woke, Go Broke" was one major cause of its apparent decline. (When it didn't go Woke–eg "Top Gun: Maverick" it didn't go broke!) A… what do they call it … a *reckoning* seems in order. I'm sure various… https://t.co/KcOOdbuTEF
In 2007, private jet enthusiast Leonardo DiCaprio told Vanity Fair, “We are in the environmental age whether we like it or not. So, what does the future look like? We know the United States, the greatest consumer and source of waste, needs to make a transition to a greener future, but will our pivotal generation create a sustainable world in time?”
Wouldn’t banning movie production be a way to save resources? Films involve miles of celluloid, a petroleum-based resource. Plus the fuel involved in transporting the celebrities, crew, and equipment. They involve thousands of watts of electricity for their lighting. Imagine what the lights themselves are doing to the ozone. Then more reels of celluloid when the finished product is shipped to theaters. What about the chemicals involved in processing the film? Then all of the DVDs, which are made of plastic. Then there are the forests cut down to produce magazines to promote them, such as Vanity Fair. And what about the obesity issues caused by theater concession stands? Is the popcorn grown organically? Is the CO2 in the Coke machines harming the atmosphere?
I call on Leonardo DiCaprio to put his money where his mouth is. He’s made enough. It’s time to (a) quit the film industry and (b) call on studio executives to voluntarily cease production of all movies and television shows.
I challenge James Cameron to lead the charge with Big Hollywood to stop eco-unfriendly Hollywood film and television production. We’ll call our initiative: “Lights Off, Camera Off, Action Now!” We can start with an immediate moratorium on wasteful and redundant sequels. Then we’ll create a government bureaucracy to decide what can and cannot be made, with a heavy entertainment surtax for the producers to incur. Our delicate and depleting ecosystem cannot handle more energy-sucking television and film production, especially the size and scope of the average James Cameron production. And anyone that disagrees with me is swine and an effin’ demagogue.
At the first link above, the New York Post noted that tax cuts are being suggested by the establishment left as a solution to revitalize the increasingly beleaguered film industry:
At a March congressional hearing, California Democrat Sen. Adam Schiff met with others who work in the industry to gain support for a bill that would create a federal film tax incentive for movies to be made in the U.S.
During the hearing, Schiff noted that LA County has lost 42,000 entertainment jobs in the last two years.
“These are great jobs and we want to keep them here at home,” Schiff said. “It’s not rocket science how we do that. It’s largely drafted. It needs to be bipartisan. We are working to gather bipartisan support for this.”
As Conquest’s First Law of Politics posits, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” But why would Hollywood and its shills turn to tax breaks now to salvage the industry, when for decades, it’s been propped up by Eisenhower-era tax cuts. In 2012, Glenn was demanding: Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!
It’s no coincidence that much of the Democrats’ base doesn’t have to worry about taxes much, either because they work for nonprofits and public entities that don’t pay taxes, or because they live off government benefits, or because they work in industries — like the motion picture and recording industries — with a long history of shady accounting and favorable tax treatment. Republicans, if they’re smart, can nonetheless teach them that tax increases do, in fact, hurt.
They should head into the next budget battle with a list of proposals for tax increases that will sting Democratic constituency groups, but which will seem eminently fair to voters.
The first such proposal would be to restore the 20 percent excise tax on motion picture theater gross revenues that existed between the end of World War II and its repeal in the mid-1950s. The campaign to end the excise tax had studio executives and movie stars talking like Art Laffer, as they noted that high taxes reduced business income, hurt investment and cost jobs.
The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two. Deficits are high again, and there’s already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like. But in these financially perilous times, why should movie stars and studio moguls, with their yachts, swimming pools and private jets, not at least shoulder the burden they carried back in Harry Truman’s day — when, to be honest, movies were better anyway.
For extra fun, they could show pictures of David Geffen’s yacht and John Travolta’s personal Boeing 707 on the Senate floor. You want to tax fat cats? I gotcher “fat cats” right here! Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!
Raising taxes inevitably results in a painful economic slowdown, which of course “unexpectedly” decreases tax revenues. Hollywood heavyweights have been calling for higher taxes and a worse economy for the rest of us — but their blue state economic worldview is now making life painful for the below the line technicians in their own industry:
Exit quote:
If you’ve even flown into Los Angeles, you understand how gorgeous and perfect Southern California is.
It’s takes a superhuman effort to make that paradise a place where nobody wants to live or do business.
Los Angeles County sheriff deputies arrested a man who was by himself in the ocean, in the name of stopping the spread of covid. The deputies were unmasked. It was a crazy time in which authorities erred on the side of authoritarianism to stop the spread of a virus.
The experts sided with closing down the world.
[On April 2nd, 2020], The LA Times reported, “Kim Prather, a leading atmospheric chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wants to yell out her window at every surfer, runner, and biker she spots along the San Diego coast.”
She told the paper, “I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now.”
Why?
Covid is a virus. Viruses spread from person to person — or according to those covering up for Red China, from bat to person. And yet the government ordered everyone inside.
That was dumb. But it is worse. We now know by staying indoors and vegetating, people made themselves weaker.
NPR reported two days before Christmas, “A regular exercise routine may significantly lower the chances of being hospitalized or even dying from COVID-19, recently published research shows.
Even if social media content is not protected by the First Amendment, and even if Twitter, as a private company, can create its own “terms of service” and just decide to banish whomever they want, a key question posed by the Twitter Files is: what if the government is telling this private company to do so?
Isn’t that just an end run around the First Amendment’s protections of our right to free speech? I’m no lawyer but it sure seems so.
And, even worse, what if the cozy relationship between government and social media evolves to the point that platforms censor users without needing to be specifically asked to do so by the government? Like a Mafia don ordering a hit with a sideways glance, no words are ever spoken, but the order is made clear.
Just like that, an unholy alliance has been created, with government and private companies working in lockstep to censor our guaranteed right to free speech.
There’s a name for when private companies and the government work hand in hand: fascism. Benito Mussolini said that “fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
As indicated in the Twitter Files, access to Twitter’s bureaucratic censors, de-boosters and outright platform banners was equal opportunity — Republicans could make a call just as easily as Democrats. But what is also made clear is that the Democratic Party loyalties of Twitter employees are close to 100 percent.
So who was being censored? Anyone who challenged Democrats. Which goes a long way towards explaining why those 11,000 people who questioned Covid lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates and vaccine effectiveness were given the boot.
She spoke in the video about the action against Iran, but she didn’t talk about how the Biden-Harris administration has helped toprop up the terrorist regime by relaxing enforcement on sanctions, and even released billions of dollars to Iran in frozen assets at the same time as a prisoner exchange.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly just flattened her, using Harris’ own comments about coconut trees to do her in.
“Kamala Harris oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and ushered in an invasion of migrant criminals into our homeland. She should listen to the overwhelming majority of Americans who want her to crawl under a coconut tree and go away.”
Thirteen service members were killed directly because of the Biden-Harris failures.
This is what it looked like under Biden-Harris. We do well never to forget how out of control it was, from the border to the rampant high prices/inflation.
To be fair, I can understand why a cabinet member from Obama’s third term would be angry about how Trump is cleaning up Barry’s messes. It’s a far cry from giving the mullahs $400 million in cash, and the Taliban seven (cue the Dr. Evil voice) billion dollars worth of American weapons, vehicles, and aircraft:
But in regards to Graham’s questions, while it’s obvious that as a fellow lefty Brinkley is a fan, his biography raised a number of questions about just how biased was Mr. “And that’s the way it is,” particularly in an era when his competition consisted of three other prime time anchors (two on commercial networks, eventually, one on PBS) with exactly the same Democrat Party talking points.
Still though, it could be fun for audiences to discover that Democrat Party operatives with a lavalier were smearing Republican presidential candidates as crypto-Nazis decades before Trump.
His 2000 thesis on civil-rights-era Atlanta lifts passages from other people’s work.
Known for posting Twitter threads that call out both real and imagined errors of accuracy in conservative commentaries about America’s past, Kruse earned the moniker of “History’s Attack Dog” from TheChronicle of Higher Education. Kruse parlayed his half-million Twitter followers into a recurring opinion column on American political history at MSNBC, and he will soon be taking his Twitter threads to print in a co-edited book, which purports to catalog “distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media.”
But a discovery from Kruse’s past may now put Princeton’s Twitter warrior under a microscope of his own, raising the question of whether he holds himself to the same standards that he imposes on his internet adversaries. A key passage from Kruse’s doctoral dissertation on the history of race relations in Atlanta displays uncanny similarities to a 1996 book on the same subject by Ronald H. Bayor, a now-retired historian from Georgia Tech.
Nike’s stock has slumped to its lowest level in more than a decade after the sportswear giant warned sales will keep falling through 2026.
Shares hit an 11-year low on April 1, capping a brutal stretch that has seen the company lose around 75 percent of its value since shares peaked in 2021.
It is now worth under $68 billion – a third of the value of TJ Maxx.
The latest sell-off was triggered by a bleak outlook, with Nike forecasting sales will slump 4 percent this quarter – a staggering $500 million fall in the value of shoes, tracksuits, and t-shirts.
The brand is being hit by a triple whammy: backlash to its more ‘woke’ image shift, a failed retreat from major retail partners in favor of direct-to-consumer selling, and a deepening slump in China.
* * * * * * * *
Nike’s recent ad campaigns have apparently featured not only Colin Kaepernick, who whines about being “oppressed” while enjoying fame and fortune, but also the woke Megan Rapinoe and a “non-binary esports player” – whatever that is – named Dominique McLean. That’s not very likely to draw a wide audience of loyal American buyers.
Why can’t these companies just advertise the virtues of their products? Why not just make the case to the buying public that Nike athletic shoes and so forth are better quality, longer-lasting, more comfortable, and explain why? Traditionally, advertising has promoted the virtues of a product. The company is looking to entice buyers to a free trade in which their buyers perceive a gain in value; that the shoes, or sportswear, or whatever, will return value to them greater than the cost of the product.
Promoting anti-American woke nutbars does nothing to that end. Nike seems to be learning that; they are learning, as other companies have before them, what it means to “get woke, go broke.”
How woke did Nike get before the plummet began? This woke:
Flashback to Nike entering into a partnership with Dylan Mulvaney *soon after* the Bud Light debacle.
100%, most people don’t understand this. NASA spends lots of time and money developing & testing components because they use various subcontractors so everything needs to work flawlessly and as designed when it comes together. They’re also more scrutinized being publicly funded…
SpaceX on the other hand can rapidly develop their rockets because most of it is built by them. If they make changes it doesn’t result in months of back and forth they can pretty much do it on the fly. And then test them on full rockets. This ultimately saves time and money but faces more public scrutiny, especially from those who are ignorant or are simply against the company/elon and are looking for any reason to be critical.
A perfect example of this was on the last couple of flights where various heat tiles and even no tiles were all tested to see what real world effects they would have.
Boston’s winter is a natural disaster, but its predictability changes everything.3 As Hutchinson suggests, New Englanders know winter is coming. Bad weather is annoying but easy to plan for: You build snow days into the school year, buy a car with four-wheel drive, get used to scraping ice and shoveling snow. You make sure you have a coat, hat, and gloves. Snow, says Hutchinson, is no big deal: “You just put on boots.” Life has a regular rhythm.
Good weather plus earthquakes creates an utterly different environment. On a day-to-day basis, you can concentrate on your goals, with no need for contingency plans. Your softball game, your picnic, your wedding won’t be rained out. But everything could change in an instant. You can’t anticipate earthquakes, can’t plan for them, can’t even predict when and where they’ll strike. Instead of providing the certainty of seasons, nature promises a future of random shocks. All you can do is develop general coping skills and resources. There is nothing familiar about the aftermath of an earthquake, and no one survives it alone.
In his 1988 book, SEARCHING FOR SAFETY, the late UC-Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky laid out two alternatives for dealing with risk: anticipation, the static planning that aspires to perfect foresight, and resilience, the dynamic response that relies on having many margins of adjustment:
Anticipation is a mode of control by a central mind; efforts are made to predict and prevent potential dangers before damage is done. Forbidding the sale of certain medical drugs is an anticipatory measure. Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back. An innovative biomedical industry that creates new drugs for new diseases is a resilient device. . . . Anticipation seeks to preserve stability: the less fluctuation, the better. Resilience accommodates variability; one may not do so well in good times but learn to persist in the bad.
Here, then, is the basic difference between the Valley and the Hub: Viewing the world as predictable and itself as the center of the universe, Boston has encouraged strategies of anticipation. People try to imagine everything that might go wrong and fix it in advance. But in Silicon Valley, there are no certainties. The future is open and subject to upheaval. Resilience is the strategy of choice. People do the best they can at the moment, deal with problems as they arise, and develop networks to help them out.
I wonder how much of Musk’s experiences in Silicon Valley impact how his team builds and tests rockets?
The mission, which launches today, even follows the playbook that governs Hollywood reboots. While not challenging Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s near-final form of ‘diversity’, with virtually no men of recognisably European extraction at all, the lunar mission will return in a gender swap for the ages: Apollo has been replaced with Artemis, the Graeco-Roman god’s girl-boss twin sister. Artemis is Rey to Apollo’s Luke, Galadriel to Apollo’s Aragorn, Nahla Ake (captain of the USS Athena, funnily enough) to Apollo’s Kirk.
In some regards, the NASA mission is not quite as eccentric as Hollywood. DEI considerations are clearly visible in the four-strong squad actually riding in the warhead, but all are well qualified in traditional terms and, on the ground, NASA is at least still staffed by top scientists and engineers. And unlike the new Lord of the Rings proposal, which will adapt scenes from the books that didn’t appear in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Artemis is at least intended to retell the whole story, and then start layering in sequels.
Faster, please; the surviving men who walked on the moon during the Apollo program aren’t getting any younger:
The last five surviving astronauts to be anywhere this close to the moon
Buzz Aldrin (96) – Apollo 11 David Scott (93) – Apollo 9 and 15 Charles Duke (90) – Apollo 16 Harrison Schmitt (90) – Apollo 17 Fred Haise (92) – Apollo 13, never walked pic.twitter.com/S9y8ZzBPeC
— Tsar Apu II Apustayevich (@tsarlet2) April 2, 2026
California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.
The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco into no-go zones. And the cost-of-living crisis is pricing middle-class taxpayers out of basic necessities like groceries and gas, even as the state spends billions on welfare programs that never seem to lift anyone out of poverty.
Californians are beginning to ask: Where is all this money going? On paper, it funds hospitals, universities, schools, prisons, infrastructure, and other public services. But beneath the surface, something else is happening that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not want you to see: massive, systematic, brazen fraud.
We conducted interviews with public officials, fraud experts, and political figures, and reviewed hundreds of pages of government reports, state audits, criminal indictments, and other public records on California fraud. From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.
Trump posted a link to Douglas Murray’s piece, which absolutely eviscerated Tucker, within about half an hour after his speech to the nation. Obviously, it was top of mind, and the two events are obviously linked directly in his mind.
Trump is at war, and Tucker is a traitor to both the President and the nation. That is the message, and I have to say that everybody I know, at least, believes it.
And now my Twitter feed is just full of these Japanese tweets translated into English, and I’m seeing how much we have in common with each other. There’s dozens and dozens that I could list, but I’ll just point out a few here.
Probably my favorite of all that I’ve seen… The past week, I’ve been introduced to the Japanese theory of “cheese violence.” Let me explain that.
The other day, a Japanese Twitter user named @hoshizorarock quote-tweeted a photo of a huge triple bacon cheeseburger with what appears to be about a half-pound of cheese on it.
And since then, I’ve looked around, and there’s a lot of other people talking about “cheese violence.” I was not familiar with this concept.
And at first I laughed, and then I said, “Okay, that actually fits. Putting that much cheese on a burger is cheese violence. That’s it. You nailed it.”
I am both a victim and a perpetrator of cheese violence.
So I asked Grok to explain if that was just a bad translation. But no, it’s actually a thing in Japan.
I’ll quote this from the robot:
“Cheese violence” (チーズの暴力 / chīzu no bōryoku [CHEE-zoo no BOH-ryoh-koo]) is established Japanese internet/foodie slang for ridiculously excessive, melty, gooey cheese overloads in food—hyperbolic praise for something so indulgent and rich it “violently assaults” your senses (in the best way).
So, yeah, that’s it. They nailed it. Cheese violence. I love it. I’m going to start using that. I want some cheese violence.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
