December 29, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DON’T EVER CHANGE, GRAY LADY: As Predictable As the Setting Sun: After Conspiracy Theorist and Lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene Turns on Trump, the NYT Offers Her a Puff-Piece with an Attempted Glamour Shot.

UPDATE: Conserving conservatism most conservatively! The Easiest Grift Flip from The Bulwark: MTG Bashes Trump, Jonathan V. Last Falls in Love.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PBS-LIKE BRITISH CHANNEL LETS JIMMY KIMMEL VOMIT AN ‘ALTERNATIVE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE:’

The “public service” Channel 4 in the U.K. knew what it was getting when they asked Jimmy Kimmel to give their annual “Alternative Christmas Message” this year. It wasn’t religious or charitable. It was like a monologue on his ABC show, except this time, as he mentioned being tyrannized by Trump’s government this year, he made no mention of what it was he said. The name of Charlie Kirk or the motive of his assassin went unmentioned.

Instead, Kimmel gave another false impression, like the notion Kirk’s killer was MAGA. He suggested Trump took him off the air because he can’t stand dissent. This is especially bizarre because the U.K. right now is the real censor of opposing views. “Hate speech” on social media can land you in jail.

Backed by cheery music, Kimmel began by suggesting he didn’t know what was going on in England, but “I do know what’s going on over here though, and I can tell you that, from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.”

“You may have read in your colorful newspapers that my country’s president would like to shut me up because I don’t adore him in the way he likes to be adored,” and “the American government “made a threat against me and the company I work for, and all of a sudden we were off the air.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr uttered some threatening words (with no actions), but the real driver was ABC affiliate groups finding Kimmel’s Kirk comments to be dramatically insensitive, if not completely inaccurate.

As Tom Wolfe famously wrote, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe:” The victims of Britain’s free speech crackdown. Reports show police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive online posts.

UPDATE: Allison Pearson, the London Telegraph columnist visited by police over a tweet. “There was a police report that was commissioned by Essex Police which said that the two officers had behaved towards Mrs. Pearson in ‘an exemplary manner.’ I don’t care if they brought me a box of f**king chocolates, they were not supposed to be there, right?”

As Kimmel told British viewers, “From a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year.” Wait until he finds about this!

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

WORST. HITLER. EVER: 

Posted at 8:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW IT STARTED:

How It’s Going: Richard Hammond tried the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, Yangwang U9, and the Maextro S800 in Shanghai.

According to someone posting at the Pistonheads forum, “So this is essentially bootleg Top Gear. Videos made by a guy that started out by adding Chinese subs to official (but illegally downloaded) Top Gear episodes that were never officially available in China…Then all these years later Hammond is their guest star!”

I started watching this with raised eyebrows but they seemed like genuine car guys and were totally honest with RH when he asked about the habit of copying the west — and various other questions about the turning tide of car manufacturer supremacy..

I’m genuinely impressed that RH’s interest in cars was sufficient for him to do this, given that he’s getting driven around by the guys that illegally provided his Top Gear content to the entirety of China. The local car culture guys clearly adored Top Gear and to be fair there was no way they could have ever had it legally.

Got to admit, the cars are very impressive — despite being a bit bootleg, although it’s hard to argue with the lap times at the Nurburgring. Every last thing about this video is bootleg though, and RH seemed entirely at peace with that.

Bootlegging? The Chinese are extremely good at that:

UPDATE: The original video was pulled from streaming in this region of the world. Let’s see how long this version stays online.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DOUG ROSS: Nick Shirley’s Exposé – The Infographic.

Shirley deserves all of the fame he’s currently getting, but hopefully he’ll be joined in short succession in covering Minnesota’s Somali Pirates by many other new media types. Because otherwise, it becomes a repeat of when Matt Drudge ran Newsweek’s* spiked story on Clinton’s affair with Monaca Lewinsky, and the DNC-MSM trained all of their guns on Drudge in response for having to be shamed into reporting something bad about their idol. Because this was still the early days of the World Wide Web, and blogs were still mostly used as daily diaries rather than new media platforms, Drudge was absolutely crucified by the legacy media, in a classic case of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Not surprisingly, Tim Walz is already trying this technique on Shirley, who so far is very wisely resisting taking the bait:

* Back when Newsweek was still owned by the Washington Post, a newspaper that only aims their fire at the other party’s presidents.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I’M GUESSING THAT DUTCH WAS A BETTER MAN THAN BRUCE: Deliver Me from My WWII Veteran Father and His Traditional America. “Deliver Me from Nowhere is fundamentally a film about the singer’s relationship with his father, Douglas ‘Dutch’ Springsteen, who died in 1998. The biographical basics of Dutch Springsteen reveal a man in the mold of bygone American masculinity. He had honest, humble work as a bus driver. He served in World War II. He married his wife, Adele, in 1948 and was still married to her at his death a half-century later. These are accomplishments that instantly place him morally well above many millions of contemporary American men who shirk duty and embrace lives of moral nihilism and personal cowardice. Yet the film reveals a young Springsteen fixated on what he sees as the shortcomings of his father.”

All of leftism is rooted in rebellion against the father.

UPDATE (From Ed): Easy Riders, Raging Oedipal Resentment.

Posted at 7:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 5:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ENABLING OUR DESTROYERS:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Stephen Green

THE COMPLICIT MEDIA: Drew Holden’s LENGTHY Thread of Media Actively HIDING MN Somali Fraud a MUST-Read. “Just when you think you’ve seen the mainstream media at its worst, Drew Holden puts a thread together highlighting just how abysmal they have been in ignoring the Somali fraud in Minnesota. Sorry, they’ve not just been ignoring it, they’ve been outright dismissing and even hiding it.”

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

LOOK BACK IN ANGER:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Movies as Weapons of Spiritual Warfare. If we lose Hollywood, we will lose so much more than just something to do on Friday nights.

Spend more than a few minutes scanning through the network and cable news channels and you’ll quickly discover a vast array of odious characters like Nikole Hannah-Jones and her dubious anti-American “1619 Project”, over which Hollywood has been drooling since its inception. Or Elie Mystal, a regular commentator on Progressive MSBNC, who says things like “Our country needs to be sanctioned. We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace, not only to free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point.” On the American Left, it’s not China, Iran, Qatar, Hamas or even Vladimir Putin who are the true enemies of world peace, you understand, it is the United States of America.

Nor is the political Right blameless here, either. The New Media Right is filled with bad actors from the “Verbal Kint” school of Devil denial… figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Darryl Cooper, a self-styled “historian” who wants you to know that Hitler was misunderstood and that the real villain of World War 2 was Winston Churchill.

The Allied victory over the Nazi regime, an abomination on Earth which subjugated much of Western Europe by force and built enormous factories for the express purpose of liquidating millions of human lives as quickly and efficiently as possible, was our proudest civilizational victory and one of the great inspirational stories we tell ourselves as Americans. But Cooper would prefer we feel ashamed. He calls the American effort to free Europe from tyranny and horror a “myth” on his way to arguing that the Allied victory was not only regrettable, but that The United States fought on the wrong side.

If there really were a Devil, this sort of total moral inversion of the truth about good and evil is exactly the strategy he would employ for convincing the world that he did not exist. Because if Americans are willing to believe Hitler was the good guy, The Devil might say, what other moral perversions might they be convinced are true?

Variety has a year-end article whose Google-friendly metatag is “Why the Box Office Struggled in 2025: Analyzing the Hits and Bombs.” But because Variety is the trade rag for a very much left-leaning company town, it dare not analyze the real reason why the industry struggles, both because of the moral relativism that “Washington” describes above (definitely read the whole thing), and of course, Jacob Savage’s recent “The Lost Generation” blockbuster article on how DEI captured the industry, leading to the terrible product that has kept us increasingly away from the multiplex post-Covid.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is It Over for Tim Walz?

With the incompetence (or worse) of Tim Walz’s administration being the number one news story in the country, my non-Minnesota friends ask me: “Tim Walz couldn’t possibly be re-elected. Could he?”

Let’s first dispose of any criminal issue. Elon Musk, in the tweet embedded above, urges that Walz be prosecuted. But there is no evidence that he, or other members of his administration, have committed crimes. Rather, they have perpetrated the dodge that has been a mainstay of the Democratic Party for going on 100 years: buying votes with other people’s money. They have pumped billions of dollars into Minnesota’s relatively small (100,000-150,000) and insular Somali community, and by doing so have created a solid and reliable voting bloc that has helped to swing one election after another their way. Why should they care if half or more of those billions of dollars were fraudulent? Criminal or not, the spending bought votes.

Did Tim Walz know the frauds were going on? Of course. Even Walz isn’t that stupid. But absent taking bribes, of which there is zero evidence, he has not committed a crime.

That said, Walz’s standing with Minnesota voters is teetering on the edge. Conventional polling has shown him around even in approval/disapproval, with approval a little under 50%. Not great, but not hopeless. I think the most meaningful poll is the one that was conducted for American Experiment by Meeting Street Insights and published here. We found a very high level of awareness of the frauds among Minnesota voters, and also a high level of concern: 68% said that fraud would play a role in their vote for governor in 2026, with 50% saying it would play a major role.

Walz ought to resign in disgrace and drop forever out of public life, but we know that will never happen.

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green