February 4, 2025

CLIFTON DUNCAN: The Suicide of the Celebrity.

Imagine losing to literally Hitler.

Such was the fate of soon-to-be-ex Vice President Kamala Harris—a brown woman who inspired antiracists across America to form whites-only advocacy groups without a shred of self-awareness.

But Madame Harris and her white saviors didn’t suffer defeat alone—the stars who gave their all to ensure her triumph over Donald Trump also lost bigly. It was a valiant effort: Hamill harangued; Ruffalo ranted; Deniro raged; JLo cried; Cardi B powered through a reading assignment. And so on.

Alas, America overwhelmingly preferred Hitler to Hollywood. Defeat was decisive: Trump would not just take the electoral college, he would become the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, and the second president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms.

But how could the electorate shun the cast of The Avengers? How could Julia Roberts’ appeal to politically closeted (presumably battered) wives fail to win more women? Why did Meghan Thee Stallion’s cheek-clapping not mesmerize more black men? How could George Clooney—who helped raise millions for Joe Biden (weeks before urging him to step aside)—make so little impact?

There has always been some animus against “Actorvists”—people generally prefer not to be condescended to by soft-handed and obscenely rich entertainers. Still, Stars were far more tolerated before than they are now. Many were even liked.

That’s not the case anymore.

Here’s why.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS: Band Dads Thwart Active Shooter In Pasadena. “The MSM loves to report on successful mass shootings to further their gun control agenda of mass civilian disarmament, but pays far less attention when one is thwarted.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

DEMOCRATS DON’T LIKE DEMOCRACY AND THEY LIKE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLICS EVEN LESS:

Related from Mollie Hemingway: “This last week is complete vindication of the claim that cries about supposed ‘threats to democracy’ only made sense if understood as “‘threats to bureaucracy.'”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

BLUFF CALLED: Phil Murphy Splutters After Tom Homan Goes FAFO on Story of Garage-Dwelling Illegal Immigrant.

On Monday, we wrote about the stunning claim made by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) during a recent interview in which he strongly implied he and his wife, NJ First Lady Tammy Murphy, were harboring a female illegal immigrant above their garage.

“Tammy and I were talking about – I don’t want to get into too much detail, but there is someone in our broader universe whose immigration status is not yet at the point that they are trying to get it to,” Murphy stated. “And we said, you know what? Let’s have her live at our house above our garage.”

Even more shockingly, Murphy appeared to taunt ICE to try and take the alleged illegal immigrant he was allegedly harboring from them.

“And good luck to the feds coming in to try to get her,” he dared.

As RedState’s Rusty Weiss reported, border czar Tom Homan responded accordingly to Murphy’s statement, confirming on Fox News that “I got note of it. Won’t let it go. We’ll look into it.”

“And if he’s knowingly harboring and concealing an illegal alien, that’s a violation of Title VIII of the United States Code 1324,” Homan also observed, while adding that prosecution would then be sought.

Perhaps with the thought in mind that their boss might have just admitted to a federal crime, Murphy’s office hit the panic button, and suggested the governor, who is serving his last year in office due to term limits, had been wildly taken out of context:

To be fair, Murphy wouldn’t be the first Democrat governor of New Jersey who was simply living “his truth” to the max.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE: Starlink profit growing rapidly as it faces a moment of promise and peril. “The key takeaway I want everybody to walk away with is, if SpaceX was building the Starlink system to pay for a Mars colony, we’ve got evidence that the company will generate the type of free cash flows from the business that could pay for said endeavor.”

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FASTER, PLEASE: U.S. Begins Migrant Flights to Guantanamo Bay.

The first two flights carrying detained migrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay have headed to the naval base in Cuba, as the Trump administration begins to expand a small migrant-detention center there.

One flight from Fort Bliss to Guantanamo has roughly a dozen migrants on board, people familiar with the matter said. An additional flight left the U.S. on Monday, one of the people said.

The U.S. base at Guantanamo has always had a facility to detain some migrants, typically those caught heading for the U.S. at sea. The base is now equipped to hold 120 migrants, and the administration has said it would expand operations there to hold up to 30,000.

CTRL-F “Illegal” brings up zero results, curiously enough.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

MIKE ROSEN: Obama’s third term as president ends with a gasp and wheeze.

The obstacles and landmines Biden planted in his successor’s policy path will be easily cleared by President Trump, as he amply demonstrated just hours after the inauguration with a tsunami of executive orders overriding all of Biden’s, on which the ink had barely dried. Clearly, Biden’s deteriorating state of mind could not have crafted the intricate obstructions pouring out of the oval office in the final days of his presidency.

Instead, the fingerprints of White House staff were all over them. USA Today calculated that three quarters of Biden’s top 100 advisors had worked for Obama. The open secret in Democrat DC circles was that Biden didn’t matter. He may have had the title of president, but Obama-era young radical aides were really running the country. (And those whiz kids must have had a hearty laugh inserting America-hating left-wing billionaire George Soros among Biden’s picks for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Biden was the figurehead for the equivalent of Obama’s third term, who had promised to “fundamentally transform America.” NPR reported that 12 of Biden’s first 16 senior appointments were Obama alumni. Biden was a puppet whose ego was flattered by handlers portraying him as the new FDR who would create his own “social justice” New Deal (including a Green New Deal), expanding the administrative state, driving up social spending, opening the border, and codifying the Left’s cultural agenda. Rather than bringing spending sharply down from the hyper-elevated COVID levels, they pretended endless deficits don’t matter and don’t ignite inflation. Turns out, they do.

What matters just as much is derailing the federal gravy train that props up Democrats and their causes far beyond any genuine popularity — but the DOGE boys are on it.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

NEW DNC CHAIR: Democratic Party ‘not dead.’

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said the party was “not dead” despite the party’s loss of the White House and Senate majority in last fall’s elections.

“We’re not dead as a party. We’re still alive and kicking, and we’re going to fight for our values, and we’re going to fight for American values at this time, when people are seeing what Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing at this time,” Martin said during a Monday appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Martin won the race to become the next DNC chair on Saturday in a highly-contested race. Democrats are looking to Martin to reestablish the party’s presence in states across the nation as preparations for midterm elections kickoff.

Live look at Martin uttering his stirring cri de coeur:

Posted at 1:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOTHING IS MORE FRIGHTENING TO THE OTHERWISE UNEMPLOYABLE THAN SEEING THEIR GRAVY TRAIN DERAILED:

It’s hard to believe Trump is only in his third week.

Related (From Ed): Sunlight is the best disinfectant:

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 1:35 pm by Stephen Green

SADLY: Not the first time rank-and-file government employees abused their trust. JustTheNews is reporting that:

Airport workers have been charged for allegedly giving surveillance video to the news media of the deadly midair crash last week at Reagan National Airport, just outside of Washington, D.C., according to news reports Tuesday.

Less than three years ago, Kobe Bryant’s estate filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles Countyafter Kobe Bryan’s crash , alleging that:

“First responders took graphic photos of human remains at the scene as “souvenirs” and shared them with others. She claimed she suffered emotional distress and sued for negligence and invasion of privacy. In August 2022, a jury awarded Vanessa Bryant $16 million in her invasion of privacy trial against Los Angeles County.”

Aside from the Chiquita Banana phone hack (Gannett) and the Brown & Williamson case (CBS) I can’t think off hand of too many media outfits who bore the brunt of damages. There is an interesting line of cases about privacy and “ride-alongs” where any qualified immunity granted to the cops was not extended to the press.

Posted at 1:33 pm by Charles Glasser

TRUMP’S TRADE WAR EXPOSES GERMAN CARMAKERS TO A ‘FULL-ON STORM:’

The German chancellor’s visit to Chequers, in Buckinghamshire, the Prime Minister’s countryside retreat, was supposed to demonstrate thawing relations between Britain and the Continent ahead of a key European summit.

Instead, the pair’s carefully choreographed diplomacy was being drowned out by a cacophony of threats emanating from Washington.

Hours earlier, Donald Trump had stunned allies by announcing US tariffs on all goods imported from neighbours Canada and Mexico – and threatened to do the same to the European Union “soon”.

While tariffs on Mexico and Canada have since been delayed by a month after last-minute concessions, the threat remains.

For Scholz, the moves risk creating another almighty headache for Germany’s flatlining economy – and in particular the country’s prized carmaking industry.

American tariffs on EU exports threaten to clobber German automotive champions such as Volkswagen, BMW and Audi, at a time when they are already battling cut-throat competition from China and tough EU emissions rules.

“This isn’t a headwind for German carmaking, it’s a full-on storm,” says Sander Tordoir, the chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think tank.

Nick Parker, an automotive expert at AlixPartners, agrees, warning: “I think this does become an existential threat.”

Germany’s automotive industry will be the biggest loser by far if Europe is dragged into a trade war, according to modelling by Oxford Economics.

Should the US and the EU hit each other with 25pc tariffs, the consultancy estimates that German car exports to the US will drop by 7pc.

But that’s good, right? German greens have been pushing for “deindustrialization” for years, a sort of self-inflicted Morgenthau Plan. Trump appears to be eager to help them finish the job.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DOES DATA REPUBLICAN EVER SLEEP?

Full text:

48 vCPUs are throttled curating the USAID grant network for every single EIN, will take a while (~12 hours). Which is fine, it gives
@watilo time to prettify it in the morning.

Blame the federal government for creating such computational complexity.

But here’s a teaser – this is what the network for Defending Democracy Together Institute looks like. The graph represents grants from various USAID-affiliated NGOs flowing to Kristol’s non-profit.

Oh, there’s profit — just not the kind that productive people must actually earn.

I went into some detail on Kristol’s grift yesterday.

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS ENJOYING A LITTLE NAP:

I let my paid subscription to ChatGPT lapse last month. While Grok isn’t quite as good at organizing my research, over the last few months it’s gotten at least as fast as ChatGPT, the results are generally superior, and (near as I can tell so far) more trustworthy.

I also have yet to see Grok hallucinate anything big. The last straw for my paid subscription was when ChatGPT didn’t just invent a WWI history book with a title that was so close to my query that it set off “Hallucination!” alarm bells, but invented the historian, too.

Posted at 12:32 pm by Stephen Green

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: How Emilia Pérez Is Being Removed from the Emilia Pérez Oscar Campaign.

Saturday, Feb. 8, presented a dilemma for a lot of talent: the Directors Guild Awards and the Producers Guild Awards are happening opposite each other, and Emilia Pérez is nominated for the top awards of both. [Trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón] was to be deployed to the PGA Awards, at Century City’s Fairmont Century Plaza hotel, where she was to serve as a presenter.

And then on Sunday, Feb. 9, she was to have made the drive up to Santa Barbara to be feted as one of this year’s nine Virtuoso Award recipients at an Arlington Theatre ceremony at which the honorees would be interviewed individually and then collectively. The others set to be feted include her costar Gomez and fellow best actress nominees Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here).

However, given the massive controversy that has engulfed Gascón in recent days regarding commentary that she posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) — posts about which Gascón has, in recent days, been regularly writing on social media and discussing in interviews, without consultation or coordination with Netflix, which owns Emilia Pérez’s distribution rights in the United States, Canada and the UK — The Hollywood Reporter has learned that she will not be coming to town at all.

Tensions are said to be high between Gascón and the streamer, which has invested millions in the film’s awards push. It was flourishing as recently as Jan. 23, when the film received a field-leading 13 Oscar nominations, just one shy of the all-time record. But now, at the most inopportune moment, it is on life support thanks to the Gascón revelations.

The two parties are now said to be communicating only through Gascón’s agent, Jeremy Barber of UTA. And it is my understanding that there is no great interest on the part of Netflix to provide the usual courtesies afforded by a studio to an Oscar contender, such as transportation and accommodations, to facilitate her attendance at the remaining award season gatherings.

It’s a film with something for everyone!

● Emilia Pérez: Latinos Say It’s Racist, but Does the Academy Care?

● Emilia Pérez is Not Good Trans Representation.

● As a trans woman, this is why I think Emilia Pérez is sub-par, disingenuous, harmful nonsense.

● Emilia Pérez Star Karla Sofía Gascón Under Fire Over Tweets About Muslims, George Floyd, Oscars Diversity.

It’s also a film that’s come full circle. On January 24th, John Podhoretz wrote, “Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn.” But yesterday, Christian Toto spotted industry bible Variety comparing its “Best Actress nominee to Trump in latest skewering:”

Gascón is under fire for old social media posts. Some merely contrast with the preferred progressive narrative. The actress’ cynical take on the late George Floyd comes to mind.

Others are more alarming, like a post that goes shockingly soft on Adolf Hitler. The story has serious legs, with various outlets finding new ways to extend the narrative.

Day after day. Article after article. That’s no accident.

Gascón helped, in part, by crying through a new interview on the subject. The actress played the Victim Card along the way.

Here’s how Variety is framing the story now.

Karla Sofía Gascón may not be running for office, but her off-the-rails Oscar campaign has sucked all the energy out of this year’s award season — and made her look less like the anti-Trump and, well, more like the 45th and 47th President himself.

Comparing Gascón to Trump is the very worst thing Variety could say about the “Emilia Pérez” nominee. Full stop.

Previously, Variety said the actress’ comments cast a pall on the upcoming Oscars ceremony.

Gascón is “An awards-season star whose existence makes one wish the Oscars weren’t even happening.”

Speak for yourself, Variety!

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CURRENT POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT SUMMARIZED:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ASSUMES A FACT NOT IN EVIDENCE:

The angriest ones are in on the grift.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green