January 20, 2026
SASHA STONE: Springsteen Lashes Out After Biopic Flops.
Who is the movie for? Springsteen fans? Nope, he alienated most of them with his Trump Derangement Syndrome-fueled rants*. Wine moms and resistance libs? Nope, they stopped going to the movies during COVID. Gen-Z would not even know who he was.
His friendship and alliance with Barack Obama and the Democrats meant that he was now part of the ruling class, not the working class, so who was he now? The Democrats took ownership of him, and he did nothing but scream about Trump, even knowing that most of his loyal fans probably voted for Trump. Did he care? Nope.
Not only did Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere flop harder than a wet noodle, but so far, in the awards race, it has all but disappeared. Maybe it will come in with a Best Sound nomination. That’s the best bet at this point.
Read the whole thing, which goes on to discuss Springsteen’s onstage anti-ICE rant during Saturday gig in Red Bank, NJ. This from the Bruce who sang in 1984, “They’re closing down the textile mill ‘cross the railroad tracks. Foreman says, ‘These jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back,’ to your hometown.” As Stone concludes, “Springsteen, more than any other artist, rescued the desperate who had nothing else. He pretended he was one of them, those invisible working-class stiffs no one in American culture really cared about. Now, Trump’s the hero for many of them, and Springsteen is just another screeching lib trapped inside the Doomsday Cult.”
* Miami Steve Van Zandt told the London Times in 2024, “‘When Bruce got vocal behind the Democrats, we probably lost half the audience. There’s nowhere we can’t do business.’ But some places feel like enemy territory now? ‘A little bit, yeah. We’re ten times bigger in Europe. We might play six stadiums in America and sixty in Europe.’”
Not that Van Zandt is eager to mend fences with the Boss’s former base: Steven Van Zandt Is Bruce Springsteen’s Guitarist. He Hates You. He Wants You Dead.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
One big difference, among many: The church actually had kids inside. pic.twitter.com/GZgkKw27d9
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) January 20, 2026
Evergreen:
It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
— Millennial Woes (@MillennialWoes) February 22, 2025
CHINA, MAN: Two men detained for fabricating news claiming two male giant pandas successfully mate in the wild for the first time. “According to the statement released by the Chenghua branch of Chengdu Public Security Bureau, the police launched an investigation after receiving public reports of online accounts spreading false information about the city. The police immediately launched an investigation and began collecting evidence.”
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Seen The Lights Go Out On Sunset.
I suppose you can still catch a rock show on a Saturday night, it just won’t be Van Halen. And you can grab a drink in one of the Sunset Strip clubs that are still hanging on. But you won’t have any trouble finding parking. And you might be surprised by how empty the streets feel when you stumble out of the club after the show is over in the graveyard hours of the night… those witching hours when, back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, the real fun was just beginning.
In the end the two erstwhile parents of the Sunset Strip were both mortally wounded by the same monster… a monster called streaming which came disguised, as devils always do, as something that would be “better” for us. That it turned out to be more difficult to stream video than audio was nothing more than a technological stroke of luck which gave Hollywood an extra thirty years or so to figure out a solution which, I’m sorry to say friends and neighbors, we never really did. Quite the contrary, Hollywood has actually been complicit in its own streaming decline. A fact of which I was reminded as Robin and I stood on the empty boulevard outside The Rainbow hugging out our goodbyes.
Looking down at me from a billboard across the street were the faces of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon advertising the imminent release of their new movie “The Rip” along with a big red “N” and the words which, for may of us on the theatrical motion picture side of Hollywood, have become something like a muttered curse… “exclusively on Netflix.” With only two weeks to go, this was the first marketing I had seen for the movie despite the fact that it features one of the best-known and most-popular movie star pairings of the current movie star era, and a director (Joe Carnahan) who has made some really good movies.
But there has been no hype for this movie… there is no buzz at all.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: John Nolte: Newsom Fail – Film and TV Production Drops 20% in Democrat-Run California. “Imagine what it takes to move your production to another state — all the inconvenience and expense. But California is such a disaster, nearly twice as many productions are now shot outside California. Things are so bad in the former Golden State that studios are building permanent production facilities in places like New Jersey and Georgia. They obviously want all the way out.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Minnesota Changes Official State Bird To Screaming Lesbian https://t.co/QDiec7QOeZ pic.twitter.com/Ymc8LMyfRJ
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 16, 2026
READER FAVORITE: Toniiq Ultra High Purity Quercetin Capsules. #CommissionEarned
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s Artemis II reaches the launch pad and the countdown to the Moon begins.
The trip began hours earlier when NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 set off on a 4-mile journey carrying the fully stacked SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. Traveling at a top speed of just 0.82 mph, the crawler moved the massive Moon rocket steadily toward the launch pad.
After exiting the VAB’s high-bay doors, the rollout briefly paused so teams could adjust the crew access arm, a structure that allows astronauts and closeout crews to enter Orion on launch day.
Over the next several days, engineers and technicians will focus on readying Artemis II for a wet dress rehearsal. This test simulates key launch-day activities, including fueling the rocket and running through countdown procedures. The rehearsal is currently targeted for no later than Feb. 2.
During the test, teams will load the rocket with cryogenic, or super-cold, propellants, carry out a full countdown sequence, and then safely drain the propellants. These steps are essential preparations ahead of NASA’s first crewed Artemis mission.
NASA may conduct more than one wet dress rehearsal to ensure the rocket and spacecraft are fully prepared for flight. If additional work is needed, the agency could roll SLS and Orion back to the Vehicle Assembly Building after the rehearsal for further inspections or adjustments.
I’m still not entirely comfortable with the Orion heat shield situation, but NASA chief Jared Isaacman is, so here we go.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods 4 Wireless Earbuds, Bluetooth Headphones. #CommissionEarned
OLD AND BUSTED: “Never Again.”
The New Hotness? Davos’s Iran invite is a new low.
Davos has always enraged a certain type of equally smug leftist – and now the MAGA crowd and their allies elsewhere – for whom the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘globalist’ respectively are rant catnip. I have always just found the whole thing more amusing than worrying or even important. Not this year, however: Davos 2026 is a shameful event, and those organising it deserve not just to be pilloried but to be covered in verbal red paint.
Red paint, that is, to represent the blood of the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime in Tehran. In autumn, the WEF thought it appropriate to invite Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, to this year’s event. Aragachi is not just the regime’s main foreign spokesman. He is also a member of its Supreme National Security Council, which in recent days is understood to have ordered the use of live ammunition on protestors. The theme of this year’s Davos event is ‘A Spirit of Dialogue’; some dialogue, when one side is seeking basic freedoms and the other is using machine guns to slaughter them.
After it emerged that Araghchi was due to give his thoughts on the question of ‘How can we cooperate in a more contested world?’ in an event moderated by Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf, Davos has seen sense. In a hastily-written statement published on X this morning, the WEF said: ‘The Iranian foreign minister will not be attending Davos. Although he was invited last fall, the tragic loss of lives of civilians in Iran over the past few weeks means that it is not right for the Iranian government to be represented at Davos this year.’
Good. But the damage is done. We know exactly the mindset – indeed, the amorality – of those behind the WEF. That cannot be undone. As the great and the good hobnob in Davos, innocent Iranians are dying in the streets and hospitals as they fight for their freedom from a cruel Islamist regime.
Right around this time in 2024, Joel Kotkin wrote, “Goodbye to Davos — and good riddance:” “The interconnected world envisioned by the WEF is disintegrating. Indeed, it has fallen victim to the resurgence of history and the rise of powers determined to return us to the glories of the Middle Ages.” Or a much more primitive era, in the case of the mullahs.
QED: Iranian soldier sentenced to death for refusing to shoot protesters, human rights group says.
Related: “There’s a strange sense of desperation at losing the narrative here:”
Early Davos impressions. Will need to process, consolidate into an article.
– There’s kind of a distributed consciousness at play here. Almost nobody I talked to knows what the AI stuff is about, in concrete details. They just have vibes. And yet they dropped almost all of the…
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) January 20, 2026
SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: French Activist Arrested On-Street While Asking Questions About Radical Islam and Women.
Lemon’s live feed could provide useful evidence for federal authorities, who said Monday the protest is being investigated as a potential violation of the FACE Act, which makes it a crime to threaten or intimidate people at houses of worship or patients at abortion clinics.
“I’m looking at a young man in the corner. He’s frightened. He’s crying. He’s scared,” Lemon narrated from inside the church.
But Ellison insisted Monday that the FACE Act does not apply to the church operation, saying it usually applies to anti-abortion protests outside abortion clinics.
“The FACE Act is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights to be protected and so that people for a religious reason cannot just use religion to break into women’s reproductive health centers,” Ellison told Lemon.
But Ellison’s own record contradicts that claim. As Minnesota attorney general, he submitted a brief in a 2020 federal lawsuit that accused a Minneapolis woman of violating the First Amendment rights of parishioners at Dar Al-Farooq, a mosque outside Minneapolis, by filming them without their permission.
In 2015, as a House member, Ellison urged Obama civil rights chief Vanita Gupta to investigate whether a group of protesters in Phoenix violated the FACE Act by holding firearms during protests outside a Phoenix mosque.
Why, I’m beginning to believe that Keith Ellison has his thumb firmly on the lefthand scale when it comes to applying the law:
FAIL, BRITANNIA: Britain approves ‘mega’ Chinese embassy in London despite national security fears. “The delays are a measure of the British government’s uncertainty about its approach to China. Britain wants China’s money and diplomatic goodwill, but has long been wary about allowing Beijing to build an embassy that would sit near fiber-optic cables carrying sensitive data for financial firms, and which some fear could be used to spy on Chinese nationals living in London.”
DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Pam Grier Shares ‘Hanging From Tree’ Lynching Claim on The View — Never Mentioned It In Her Memoir. Grier was born in 1949:
“My mom would go, ‘don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,’ and she would pull us away because there’s someone hanging from a tree,” Grier told Whoopi, Sunny and the others. “And they have a memorial for it now where you can see where people were and left. And it triggers me today to see that a voice can be silenced and if a white family supported a black, they’re going to get burned down or killed or lynched as well.”
OutKick reached out to the NAACP to get a reaction to Grier’s claim and for any supporting evidence to support the claim. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there has not been a single lynching documented in the history of Columbus, Ohio.
Furthermore, America’s Black Holocaust Museum lists the last documented lynching in Ohio as taking place in 1911.
Exit quote: “Did Sunny Hostin or Whoopi ask her why she never told that story? Of course not.”
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Sun releases the largest solar radiation storm ‘in over 20 years,’ forecasters say. “A solar radiation storm, ranked at a level four out of five on a severity scale, is being tracked by the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center, or SWPC.”
