November 12, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN SECURITY THEATER:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IF THE SWAMP TAKES OUT HEGSETH, THEY MIGHT JUST GET RUBIO, TOO:

I also wonder if the longer-term goal is reducing the Republican bench for 2028.

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

HE SEEMS SANE: Wizard-hat-wearing former UT-Tyler student faces assault charges after attacking TPUSA event with cane.

He was identified by law enforcement as Ciro Stephen Tomlian, 19, and booked into the Smith County Jail. He faces two counts of aggravated assault and one count of assault causing bodily injury.

The Smith County Criminal District Attorney’s Office could not be reached for comment Wednesday by The College Fix on what formal charges Tomlian may face. A phone call to the jail spokesperson was also not returned Wednesday.

Tomlian was seen in a video vandalizing a Turning Point USA display, ripping down an American flag, calling the TPUSA members “fascist pieces of sh*t,” and using a prop cane to smack a member’s legs before he was subdued and arrested. He was wearing a cape and some sort of wizard hat at the time.

According to his Instagram account, Tomlian goes by he/they/she pronouns.

Of course.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

ED MORRISSEY: Whoa: Trump Boots Vance From Iran War. “This sends an emphatic signal to our partners in the Persian Gulf, and to Democrats here in the U.S. Trump does not want a quick exit from the Hormuz crisis. He’s already paid the domestic political risk. Trump can now keep the blockade/embargo on for the next several months and let the IRGC slowly strangle in it. Diplomacy on the war now passes back to Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who have apparently finally prevailed over Vance in the administration’s internal debates. That amplifies Rubio’s positioning for 2028 if he chooses to run, especially if the outcome of the war gives Trump and the U.S. what it really wants – a regime collapse in Tehran and the larger collapse of the terror networks in the Middle East. Vance had already hinted that he might want to take some time off after this term to be more present with his young family. Trump may have made that choice for Vance.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

CORRECT:

Related thoughts here: Jensen Huang Had to Go. The Real Question Is Cui Bono?

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

YOU F***ED UP, YOU TRUSTED US: Greta Thunberg Laughs at Climate Protesters Following in Her Footsteps.

When Greta Thunberg started skipping school to protest climate change back in 2018, many of us scoffed at her and at the media that gushed over her, propelling her to international fame. We saw what was really happening: a brainwashed child being exploited by her parents and the media.

Well, now even Thunberg seems to realize all that climate nonsense was a joke. She has simply traded being brainwashed for one cause for being brainwashed by another.

A new documentary caught Thunberg cackling at the news that Fridays for Future, the climate movement she founded, still holds demonstrations. Her activism, of course, has moved on to the pro-Palestinian crusade.

Worth noting, Fridays for Future was her baby. She launched it in Sweden at age 15 by ditching class every Friday to demand climate action, and the media turned it into a global phenomenon that pulled millions of students out of school and into the streets.

The moment comes in the newly released documentary On Tanks into the Climate Crisis – How Activism is Criminalised. Thunberg, now 23 with a hideous haircut, hears that a Fridays for Future demonstration is underway in Berlin.

“Is it?” Thunberg asked before bursting into loud laughter. “Really? They still do that?”

An activist friend seated beside her joined in the laughter. Thunberg then turned to the camera and shouted, “Cut!”

Awfully rude of Greta to laugh at her disciples, even after the planet met its demise three years ago:

● Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end.

—The Post Millennial, March 11th, 2023.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE SHOULD REQUITE ELECTED AND CABINET-LEVEL OFFICIALS TO PUT THEIR FUNDS IN A BLIND TRUST…:

…with annual returns above 7% taxed at 100% and dedicated to deficit reduction.

Posted at 1:03 pm by Stephen Green

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS SCOURING THE DARK WEB FOR 30-ROUND MAGS: Surprise! Dems Immediately Drop Affordability Agenda in Favor of Banning Guns, Limiting Rights. “On day one, the gun confiscation lobby and their puppets filed a bill that would not only undo our ban on red flag laws, but implement a statewide red flag law that takes your guns without any crime, without a conviction and before you ever get your day in court. There is no common ground on confiscation, and Republicans in the Senate had better not go looking for any.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Confession: Ben Shapiro Delivers Powerful Anti-Communist Warning.

That faith-based label cuts both ways.

The phrase was initially fine for reaching Christian consumers. It later suggested small budgets, weak acting and stories that preached to the theatrical choir.

The genre has grown in recent years, expanding to horror (“Nefarious“), comedy (“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever“) and, now, anti-communist dramas.

“Confession,” written by Ben Shapiro, follows a broken professor hauled before Soviet officials to “out” an ex-colleague. It’s brainy and raw, making the most of its limited setting to tell a grim tale of faith and endurance.

Rob Lowe stars as Alexei, a former literature professor arrested by Soviet goons without explanation. He’s brought before Vladimir (James Franco), a government toady who once studied under the professor.

Vladimir insists Alexei squeal on a holy man who allegedly distributed anti-Communist pamphlets. Alexei refuses, telling his former student that he knows nothing about the pamphlets or the priest.

Vee haf wayz of making you tawk, of course, especially for guests at the infamous Lubyanka Prison circa 1938.

Vladimir and Alexei have a shared history and mutual respect, but Vladimir will show his old professor no mercy if he doesn’t do as told.

At The Free Press, Rod Dreher adds: Confession Is a Masterpiece.

How does a man follow Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s directive to “live not by lies” when a lie could save his life? Once he has soiled his soul with lies, can it ever be made clean? And the most difficult question of all, the one at the heart of Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary new film and screenwriting debut, Confession: In a world without God, why suffer for the truth if a lie can free you and your loved ones from tormentors too powerful to defeat physically?

These are Dostoyevskian questions, posed in a psychologically intense drama set inside Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1938, at the height of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. Rob Lowe (of all actors!) plays Alexei Abramov, a drunk and dissolute literature professor dragged into Lubyanka for interrogation by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Though Fyodor Dostoyevsky died in 1881, we are in the world the great novelist foresaw with nightmare clarity, the one Solzhenitsyn faced down in the 20th century with so much courage, and that Confession conjures for the 21st, which needs the reminder. Adding to the complexity of Abramov’s brutal interrogation is the fact he knows his interrogator, Vladimir (played by James Franco with the eyes and delivery of a spitting cobra). Vladimir was once Alexei’s most brilliant student. Lowe, a Hollywood heartthrob of yore, whose battered, handsome face conveys the psychological and spiritual downfall of his character, finds himself under the boot—at times literally—of his former protégé, who found life as a Bolshevik secret policeman more fulfilling than the scholarly path.

The dramatic setup is simple: The secret police are trying to build a case against an Orthodox priest they suspect of committing the crime of evangelism. They know that Abramov is acquainted with the priest, Father Nikolai, hence his interrogation. The Soviet prison suggests a dark, hopeless, unremittingly grimy anteroom to hell—which is what the Lubyanka was in those days. The jailers toss the professor into a dank, tiny cell not much bigger than a coffin.

The coolly sadistic Vladimir tries to goad his old professor into making a confession, a statement that will give the NKVD the grounds to arrest the priest. But Stalin’s secret police never needed a legal warrant to take anybody into custody and put a bullet in their brains. We soon see that the demand for a “confession” is a psychological scalpel slicing through Abramov’s spiritual scar tissue, to reveal a cancer eating at his own soul.

It gives nothing away to say that Abramov is no innocent. He might not be guilty of association with the priest, a counterrevolutionary believer in Christ, but he has informed on his academic rivals to get ahead. Is this why the once-respected scholar has become a wretched drunk? And for that matter, how did a promising literature student, Vladimir, who studied all the Russian greats with Abramov, turn into a sadist who delights in tormenting his former master?

Naturally of course, a reviewer at leftist industry house organ The Hollywood Reporter is obligated to trash the movie: Confession Review: Rob Lowe and James Franco in a Ben Shapiro-Scripted, Stalinist Russia-Set Drama That’s Terminally Tedious.

Confession is an all too painful reminder that every time Hollywood makes one of its periodic anti-blacklist movies, ultimately, that’s the system of government they’re defending. And simultaneously, a warning that any actor who risks working with non-approved studios committing doubleplus ungood wrongthink risks get blacklisted himself, which is why the son of Danny Trejo, the veteran tough guy actor who starred in 2010’s Machete, issued a groveling apology to the industry earlier this year after dad appearing in one of Shapiro’s movies: Danny Trejo Had ‘Never Heard’ of Ben Shapiro Before Signing On for Daily Wire’s Pawn Shop, Says His Son: ‘It’s F—ed Up. He’s Handcuffed to This Stupid Project.’

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

OH: Ukraine captures first Indonesian prisoner of war as Russia steps up foreign recruitment.

The man, identified as Sukamto Ayok from the city of Blitar on Indonesia’s Java island, was promised civilian construction work in Russia by a former classmate in May 2026, according to the project.

Ayok arrived in Moscow on July 22, where he signed what he believed was a one-year construction contract. In reality, he had signed an agreement with the Russian Defense Ministry and was assigned to Russia’s 39th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, the project said.

He reportedly discovered he had been enlisted in the military on July 30, while being transported to Russian-occupied Donetsk. Ayok and another Indonesian national attempted to escape but were detained, after which Russian personnel allegedly forcibly tattooed an identification number on his chest.

Huh. And people keep telling me the real Nazis are in Ukraine.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

HAMAS LIES, FILM AT 11:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green