This was the year Los Angeles burned to the ground: Literally, economically, culturally, spiritually.
What was once one of our greatest exports — movies, movie stars, a glittering celebrity industrial complex reflective of American supremacy itself — is no more.
That’s a good thing. A great thing. Healthy, even.
We began this year with horror as wildfires tore through LA, burning for nearly the entire month of January.
The response, needless to say, lacked urgency.
Mayor Karen Bass, upon finally flying home from a presidential inauguration in Ghana, was speechless as a reporter peppered her with questions about where she had been, why she had ever left, and how it was that LA was so woefully underprepared.
‘Both sides botched it,’ she said vaguely, at the end of this month. LA will doubtless re-elect this abject failure.
Consider a second, sobering expose tied to La La Land. Compact Magazine’s recent feature by Jacob Savage, dubbed “The Lost Generation,” explores how the Left’s DEI obsession prevented many talented straight white males from entering the entertainment industry.
In the fall of 2014, the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite was born. The New York Times ran story after story. The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In 2015, Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story editor. “I couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate… There was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a while.”
It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As #OscarsSoWhite bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified.
And just like that, Peak TV came to a close. Coincidence? Either way, Hollywood progressives have gotten what they demanded time and again:
DEI policies
Democratic leaders
Soft-on-crime legislation
Open borders
Closer to L.A., Democratic leaders fiddled while the Palisades fires burned earlier this year. Mayor Karen Bass was literally in a foreign country when the blaze began.
One of the reasons why American men, from Generation X in particular, keep coming back to movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Master and Commander”, “Gladiator”, “Braveheart” “The Great Escape”, “The Lord of the Rings”, and even “Die Hard” and “Predator”, is precisely because, as Men of the West, we are hard-wired to fantasize about how we will meet our own confrontations with “The Big Evil”, when and if those confrontations come. Modern American culture tends to look down upon this uniquely male instinct with ill-humor, if not outright derision. These kinds of male-coded sentiments are considered old fashioned at best, explicitly toxic at worst. Which is a shame, because the big studio movies we once made to cater to this male instinct for adventure, risk-taking and the instinctual defiance of Evil remain some of the greatest and most compulsively rewatchable films ever made.
To build on what “Washington” alluded to above, the worldview of woke Hollywood leftists prevents them from creating product that resonates with the public:
Which is why, the Critical Drinker noted early last month, we’re witnessing “The Beginning of the End:”
DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVE WITH BYLINE SUFFERS MASSIVE CASE OF AMNESIA:
The mainstream media journalist class is asking who gave “the random YouTuber” @nickshirleyy “a license” to go and investigate the Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota.
You can see just how angry some of these people are by the numbers the video is doing pic.twitter.com/BrrMM8Wo3A
[In the early 1960s, Jimmy Breslin of the New York Herald-Tribune] made a revolutionary discovery. He made the discovery that it was feasible for a columnist to leave the building, go outside and do reporting on his own, actual legwork. Breslin would go up to the city editor and ask what stories and assignments were coming up, choose one, go out, leave the building, cover the story as a reporter, and write about it in his column. If the story were big enough, his column would start on page one instead of inside.
But you look at these tanned, blow-dried gym bunnies like Brian Williams, NBC’s next anchor—all they do is read off a teleprompter, and no one has a problem calling them journalists. In the end I really don’t care what I’m called, as long as it’s not blogger. As Roger Ailes told me early on, you don’t need a license to report. You need a license to do hair.
Many putative First Amendment voluptuaries defend their position against the most absurd hypotheticals. My favorite example (as some readers may recall) comes from the columnist Michael Kinsley. A “very distinguished New York Times writer” once told Kinsley that “if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day’s offering of plies and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw.” Why? Because she’s a member of the priestly caste.
Other than the obvious problems – that the First Amendment is not a blanket protection to conceal crimes, that nowhere in case law or in the Constitution itself has such a right been established – there’s a sticky public policy problem. Who gets to be a journalist? That question is why federal shield laws are the camel’s nose under the tent of journalism licenses. If everybody can be a journalist simply by pecking away at a keyboard, then tens of millions of bloggers, newsletter writers and coupon-clipper weekly editors are journalists. If that’s the case, then such a sweeping right is unenforceable and dangerous. If, on the other hand, only some people get to be called “journalists,” then we’ve got the makings of a trade guild here.
There’s been some interesting economic research in recent years on the role of guilds (i.e., professional associations, including some unions, that work with the state to require licensing for people seeking similar occupations). Morris Kleiner, a University of Minnesota economist and visiting scholar at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, recently summarized some of his findings in The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, even though guilds don’t lead to better or safer service, they’re on the rise. Why? Well, one reason is that guilds have been very successful at persuading the public they’re better for the consumer even though much of the time they’re really better only for the members of the guild themselves. In states where a license is required to become, say, a hairdresser, salaries are higher by some 10 to 20 percent. This is partly because the licensing – the fees, the extra training, etc. – becomes a barrier to entry to others seeking employment. In states where strict state licensing isn’t required, job growth is 20 percent higher.
The same dynamic would surely play out if elite journalists got their way. The resentment and vitriol aimed at bloggers and the “New Media” is palpable at journalism school symposiums and panel discussions. Is there any doubt that the key masters of any new state-sanctioned journalism guild would translate that animosity into higher wages for themselves and fewer opportunities for the untrained masses nipping at their heels?
This illuminates the fundamental problem with the “enlightened” media’s fashionable pose on the First Amendment: It’s anti-free speech for anyone without keys to the clubhouse. They want special rights for “real journalists.” Well, special rights for some mean weaker rights for others. The editors of The New York Times rightly demand untrammeled opportunities to criticize politicians, but they want complex rules and regulations for everyone else – including other politicians! They think the First Amendment offers blanket protection to strippers “expressing” themselves, but citizens eager to criticize a candidate by taking out an ad can be muzzled if they want to take out that ad when it will be most effective – i.e., near election day.
The First Amendment was intended to keep political speech free; everything else was open to debate. Today, the leaders of the First Amendment industry see it exactly the other way around.
Falling birth rates among whites because we have to work and scrape by paying into a system that gives billions to foreigners who can outbreed us by a mile since they don’t have to worry about money. https://t.co/BqsVKIGq3b
Through Obama’s first term, Democrats compensated for the fact that they didn’t represent mainstream Americans’ values on many issues with a reputation for competent technocratic governance.
Since around 2014, they have sacrificed that for racial wealth transfers and DEI… https://t.co/saWIhZNBPe
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE SOMALI PIRATES AND THE COMING MIDDLE CLASS ANARCHY:
The Somali daycare scandal is not just about Somalis, or immigration, or Minnesota. It’s also, and more importantly, about declining trust in government and betrayal of the people’s compact. She nails it. https://t.co/LaRVt33TN8
“I want to talk about how the average American is starting to feel as major corruption is being exposed, especially now with the case in Minnesota and the daycare fraud. This is not just about money being stolen anymore. It’s a growing feeling that being a good citizen, being hard working person, paying your taxes may not be worth it. People are starting to feel stupid. They think, well, I’m here, I’m playing by rules, I am working hard, I’m providing for my family, I’m doing the hard work – and I’m the idiot. You see the memes online and we laugh, like, oh, me on my way to work, thinking that I should have just opened a daycare center in Minnesota and made millions. And again, it is funny, but it’s also deeply sad, because the next thing is, why am I even doing this? And that’s the part no one wants to talk about, because this kind of feeling shapes culture.”
Flashback: The Coming Middle Class Anarchy. “When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.”
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT?
BREAKING: Former CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge exposes how the network suppressed the Hunter Biden storypic.twitter.com/9Uh7OUORV6
By the time you get this, or open it, it will probably be 2026, or close to it.
If you are celebrating until the crack of dawn, more power to you. We’re not, having spent the last few days in Miami, eating our heads off. That city has fantastic restaurants to go with the weather.
Nevertheless, my optimism for the new year abounds for two reasons:
One, the older I get, the more I know that staying positive is the best way to live. Optimism and pessimism are self-fulfilling prophecies.
More importantly, perhaps, I don’t think I am looking through rose-colored glasses, maybe just slightly tinted ones, when I say the world has never looked better.
Forget Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, or Ursula von der Leyen. Donald Trump emerged in 2025 as the real leader of Europe, and 2026 is only likely to cement his position.
In just the first year of his second term, Trump’s administration has shaken Europe’s foundations to the core, with a far more assertive and effective approach towards transatlantic relations compared to the previous Biden administration.
The impact is being felt at every level, not least by European voters. A striking recent story in Politico (“Trump dominates democracy in Europe”) highlighted the results of a 10,000-person poll, showing that he was viewed as “strong and decisive” compared to their own leaders by 74 per cent of Germans, 73 per cent of Frenchmen, and 69 per cent of Britons. The corresponding figures for the leaders of Germany, France and the UK were 26 per cent, 27 per cent and 31 per cent respectively. Trump may not be loved in Europe, but he is increasingly respected as a force to be reckoned with. Europeans evidently view him as a towering presence in shaping their destiny.
Trump is often erroneously accused of being an isolationist. The truth is he has taken a far keener interest in Europe than his predecessors and has been actively involved in helping shape the continent’s future. He is the most transatlanticist American president since Ronald Reagan, and views rescuing Europe as a vital national interest for the United States. His approach toward Europe is nothing short of revolutionary. He is the first US president to challenge the European Project, and his end goal is momentous: saving Western civilisation itself.
In the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, many observers assumed that the massacre would release a wave of sympathy for the Jewish state and for Jews around the world. That would have been the logical expectation. After all, some 1,400 Israelis and Jews from other nations were killed in the attacks, and more than 200 were taken into Gaza as hostages.
Yet, something altogether different happened: the attacks unleashed a barrage of criticism against Israel, along with a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States and Western Europe. Jews were victims twice over: first in the terror attacks; second, in the response to them. That may have been part of the plan all along, since anti-Israel marchers hit the streets almost as soon as the event occurred. Nevertheless, the counterintuitive response took many by surprise.
Among those not surprised was Norman Podhoretz, who died on December 16, one month shy of his 96th birthday. Podhoretz was widely known for his transition in the late 1960s from radicalism to conservatism, in defiance of views widely and vehemently held by those who then dominated New York’s intellectual scene. In rejecting his youthful views and, much worse, turning himself into a conservative, Podhoretz became an outcast among his former friends, as he chronicled in Ex Friends, one of his later books. But by turning in those credentials, he won a larger following not only among Jews but also among many Americans who were not Jewish and had never stepped foot in Manhattan but looked to him, and to Commentary, the magazine he edited, for guidance in cutting through the fashionable left-wing views that they encountered in schools, Hollywood movies, and television news programs. It was a response that he did not expect but certainly welcomed.
Moreover, the concerns that caused him to change his views more than a half century ago were basically the same as those that led his allies today to lament the resurgence of anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel after the October 7. Podhoretz saw decades ago, as he saw recently, that an irrational and deeply rooted animus existed on the left toward Israel, linked to a parallel animus toward the United States. The more successful these countries are, the more the organized Left despises them. As much as anything, Podhoretz’s recognition of these twin impulses led him along a path toward conservatism, and turned him into the most influential editor and public intellectual of the postwar era.
This is an opportunity for the Republicans, and they had better not blow it. There must be merciless investigations. There must be prosecutions, including of Tim Waltz and others, if they appear criminally liable for tolerating, or even aiding and abetting, this looting of the public purse. We need to be careful here – we are foreclosed both by God’s prohibition on bearing false witness and the utilitarian consideration that the last thing we want to do is not be able to get a conviction should we criminally charge someone. But if we do criminally charge them, having found probable cause to do so, that may make it break through the regime media and the Democrat denials. There are some Democrats who aren’t completely psychotic, and they will oppose public corruption. Sure, a huge number will excuse it, or even argue that it’s a good thing, but there’s something about Nick Shipley‘s video of empty offices that get millions of dollars a year that can even raise doubts in loyal Democrat voters.
That’s why this is a golden opportunity for the GOP. You’ve got to be either getting paid off yourself or completely nuts to accept corruption. There are a few Democrats who are neither, but there are a lot of independents who are neither, and this is a winning issue. It’s also highly effective. The Democrat machine runs on government money. This is why they screamed so hard when we turned off the USAID spigot. And that’s why it’s going to be so effective as we tighten the controls on money going to illegal aliens. Almost everything they do can be traced back to siphoning off government money. That’s where the Republicans need to focus.
We need to starve the Democrat machine of cash. We need to demonstrate their perfidy with targeted prosecutions of real crimes. And we need 100 guys like Nick Shirley out there with their iPhones, finding the truth that the Democrats and the regime media have hidden, just like Andrew Breitbart wanted.
TOMI LAHREN: You’ve done incredible work. You are an incredible investigator on the go. My question is this: how much investigating did you actually have to do to find these centers? Some have misspelled signs. Did you find them easily, or how did you go about this?
It’s amazing to me that no one else besides you saw a problem here when they cannot even spell on the side of a learning center.
NICK SHIRLEY, INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST: That is a great question. I have to give props to David, who helped me in this investigation. He’s been doing research for years — years! — trying to expose this fraud, and nobody has given him the time of day to even talk about this.
With his help and my own investigation, I’ve known about this for a long time—Minnesotans have been telling me for a long time about the Somlai fraud taking place. With his help, we were able to track over $110 million in fraud in one day. That is just the tip. When they say “tip of the iceberg,” it really is. There are billions of dollars of fraud inside the state of Minnesota right now.
JOEY JONES: Nick, on that topic—you said his name is David, and he’s been researching this for years. In your experience, or in your opinion, just spending the days out there, is there any way this has not reached the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz? Take aside ongoing litigation or what have you— is there any way he could claim ignorance on this, just in your experience over this investigation?
NICK SHIRLEY: It is so obvious. If you are living in Minnesota, you have to raise your eyebrows and think, “What is going on?” Literally, if you drive around Minneapolis, you will see daycare centers, autism centers, and transportation companies that have snow piled up as if they have not moved in months.
You also go into buildings where there will be 20 healthcare companies. It’s like a kindergartner could figure out this fraud going on.
As Sean Connery said to Kevin Costner in The Untouchables, “Mr. Ness, everybody knows where the booze is. The problem isn’t finding it, the problem is who wants to cross Capone.” Or in this case, the entire Democratic Party, including their operatives with bylines. And right on cue: CNN Laments That ‘MAGA Journalist’ Nick Shirley Had No Guardrails.
Unbelievably CNN to see all the smoke and fire around the Minnesota fraud story and decide to ask the tough questions to…the guy who reported on it all. https://t.co/DhKn7Gb2mG
“They’ve already done 80 indictments, cases have gone on for years!”
NICK: “Then why did I show up one day in Minnesota, all these daycares, no children, millions of dollars, we uncovered nearly $110M in fraud in ONE DAY?” 🔥
Related: While we’re referencing Capone and the Untouchables:
Nick Shirley reveals he's facing serious threats after exposing billions in alleged Minnesota fraud.@nickshirleyy "There's bounties on me here in Minnesota, because people are so upset as far as the fraud that's being exposed, because they know their time's up, and they know… pic.twitter.com/dBvtHJxPsK
“And, finally, a social media used Sora to generate a faux toy commercial tied to the scandal. It’s another reason Hollywood should fear A.I. – it empowers everyday citizens to satirize headlines that late-night hosts likely won’t:”
Is Tucker Carlson “fringe?” It would be hard to claim that he is. He has been a journalist for decades, and one of the most recognizable and popular ones at that.
Yet he is now slyly promoting one of the most ridiculous and fringe conspiracy theories known to mankind, and one that is contradicted by so much evidence that it rivals Candace Owens’ “Charlie Kirk was assassinated by his friends” conspiracy theory.
It’s bats**t crazy.
The following clip is long, and Tucker makes his accusation that Israel was involved in 9/11 at the very end, but I still encourage you to listen to the entire thing.
The conspiracy logic goes like this:
Jews are blamed when Islamists get stereotyped as terrorists…
and Jews are also blamed for the terrorism Islamists commit, because it’s “really a psyop.”
So Jews get blamed for the stereotype and for supposedly orchestrating the thing that…
Meanwhile, on the left, when Zionists aren’t doing 9/11, they’re running TikTok:
As I've been saying, the political right has an antisemitic influencer problem, while it's completely institutionalized on the left. Candace Owens isn't going to be the mayor of New York City.
Every Democrat nominee for president is going to appear on this woman's podcast… https://t.co/UuUsubu5eq
Minnesota’s welfare fraud scandals dominate the national news, and calls are rising for Governor Tim Walz to resign. The Minnesota Star Tribune, a longtime DFL mouthpiece that is now run by a former Walz cabinet member, is doing its best to fend off criticism of the Walz regime. Toward that end, its “reporters” are desperately looking for a way to discredit the Nick Shirley video of Somali day care centers that has been seen by more than 100 million people.
Deena Winter, a Star Tribune reporter, evidently was assigned that task. In the Shirley video, he has a colleague who is identified only as “David.” Winter apparently thought this could be the weak link. So she set out to dox David:
As the knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would say, she chose poorly. So poorly, she deleted her Twitter/X account:
Both she & the Star Tribune have decided to go on the offensive in regards to the Somali fraud scandals & the people have rightfully called out their BS. Now I need to speak to a few of my left leaning friends to see if they're buying the defense or are starting to ask questions.
Similarly, the Somali pirates are proving to be an early stress test for Bari Weiss, with mixed results. First the bad:
This dunce didn’t do an investigation into fraud, he simply read a government compliance website and concluded that everything is fine. This is Soviet-style media. Bari Weiss has a lot more work to do. https://t.co/VI25Lxmd3l
And now the good: ABC, NBC Barely Touch Minnesota Fraud, While CBS Delivers the Goods. “CBS Evening News is the only broadcast network which has reported on this story consistently, airing three dedicated reports and several other smaller mentions for a total of eight minutes and 16 seconds of coverage since December 2.”
The Trump administration is cutting off all childcare payments to Minnesota and demanding a comprehensive audit of the state’s day care centers as a mushrooming billion-dollar fraud scandal engulfs the state’s human services department.
“We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota,” Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill wrote on X Tuesday afternoon, days after a viral video investigating alleged fraud at day care centers in the state drew national attention.
O’Neill said Minnesota has “funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent daycares across Minnesota over the past decade,” and outlined three actions the department has taken in an attempt to cut off the flow of exploitable funds.
The first action will impose the requirement for “a receipt or photo evidence” for any payments made to states through the US Administration for Children & Families (ACF).
O’Neill said he has “demanded” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz conduct a “comprehensive audit” of the centers highlighted.
Social media platforms have flooded with memes and viral jokes surrounding the “Quality Learing Center” after conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley’s Minnesota daycare fraud video spread widely online.
The footage of seemingly empty daycare facilities that allegedly received millions in state and federal funds had a sign up with the word “learning” misspelt as “learing.”
In the 42-minute investigative video, Shirley highlights a sign reading “Quality Learing Center,” a licensed daycare centre that appeared shuttered on a weekday with no children visible, despite allegedly receiving significant taxpayer funds.
In an exclusive interview with The New York Post, a resident says that he had never seen children enter the place before December 29. According to the resident, the parking lot was always empty.
In the video, which was released on December 26, Shirley is seen asking the person answering the door to the center, “You do realize there’s supposed to be 99 children here in this building, and there’s no one here?”
Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents St. Cloud and the Twin Cities suburbs, attacked Governor Tim Walz in response to the video.
He wrote on X, “4 million dollars of hard-earned tax dollars going to an education center that can’t even spell learning correctly. Care to explain this one, Tim Walz?”
No word yet if the Quality Learing Center is expanding its franchises, though the Second City seems like a logical next step:
Since 2015, Canada has tripled its Indigenous spending – paying more than on national defense. Over those same years, Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic collapse in health and well-being: on average almost a full decade of lost life expectancy. https://t.co/m7tVtXbe5S
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