February 12, 2026

A LOT: ‘Snow White’ Lost [GULP] How Much Money? “Let me ask one vital question that nobody at Disney seems to have asked themselves or one another: How is it even possible to lose that much money on a picture that could have been shot for probably $100 million, with another $50 million in marketing costs?”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

ENGLAND AS IT REALLY IS: US visitors may be in for an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.

The American sees that the glorious metropolis of the English, London, is no longer particularly English. We see it because we walk its streets and witness the newcomers, visibly alien, who dominate some of its neighbourhoods and much of its politics. Both the authors of this piece had an eminent British academic tell us, weeks ago, that in our pessimism over his country we missed positive developments, like the fact that London is now majority non-English for the first time in well over one thousand years.

This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do. It isn’t just London of course: the change has descended upon so much of the country now.

We are Americans and so this does not immediately strike us as evidence of crisis — we are especially accustomed to the alien and the newcomer alike — until we learn that the social mechanisms of assimilation that we take for granted are simply not in evidence in the United Kingdom. The realm is not one people. The things English society used to cheer for and applaud — for slavery abolition, perhaps, or the relief of Mafeking or the Monarchy — are slowly replaced by the things the successor society cheers for and applauds. For example: jihad or the slaughter of the Jews. Football at least remains something of a commonality.

The American sees that the Vice President of the United States was not entirely joking when he referred to Britain as an Islamic power with nuclear weapons. We also see that the rise of Islam in England is a symptom, not a cause; a consequence of a prior loss of confidence and vigor, a result of every major institution utterly failing to conserve the nation. The Church of England, bearer of a proud tradition, relinquishes its hold, not just upon the minds and souls of the nation, but upon its own inheritance.

The British Army, heir to a mighty and unparalleled tradition with victories and valour from Goose Green to the Imjin to Arnhem to the Somme, is reduced to a shadow of its former self. The Royal Navy, shield of freedom for both Britain and America — although the Americans don’t acknowledge it nearly enough — is for the first time in centuries incapable of securing the home seas.

The Parliament that mothered all the others, the crucible of a particular sort of liberty in which we Americans yet repose, is now an arena for the advancement of petty interventions and a sort of bland managerial tyranny. We could blame Starmerism, but like Islamism, he too is a symptom.

The American sees all this, and we see something else besides: we see us. We see the essential tragedy of the plight of England, our ancestral mother, as incepted in no small part by an American spirit. We see the decline of England in the world, the abandonment of its mission, as conceived and imposed in no small part by ourselves. We sided with a squalid tyranny at Suez against our own faithful wartime ally and bade the United Kingdom tie itself to us. We demanded Britain follow us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It did, and we mismanaged the one and lost the other. We nearly even betrayed Britain entirely over the Falklands in 1982, although thank the God who watches over nations that we were spared that dishonour.

Most fatefully, we have watched the government of the United Kingdom, across the past generation, reform itself along explicitly American lines. America has states, and so too does Britain now have devolution. America has a Supreme Court, and now so too does Britain. America has a constitutional separation of powers, and now so too does Britain — haphazard and scattered to the quango sector as it is. America has a pretence to the universal rights of man, and now so too does Britain. America has an aspiration to an egalitarian society, and now so does Britain, and there is nothing that the SW1 won’t do to the House of Lords, or to fox hunting, to achieve it.

As Peter Hitchens wrote in the 2000 edition of The Abolition of Britain about England during WWII:

Because so few people knew the unpleasant facts, and because Churchill was such a superb propagandist, there were two completely different versions of 1940, one circulating among the rulers and one accepted by the ruled. Out of this was born a new division between the élite and the mass of the people—the élite knowing how close we had come to extinction, the people refusing to believe that such a thing could have happened.

But the masses were to have their own awakening not long afterwards. When American servicemen began arriving in Britain in 1942, much of the United Kingdom fell under a bizarre and unique form of military occupation. The occupiers were officially friends, often because they were ordered to be, and definitely allies. They spoke the same language but brought with them a completely different culture, different morals, different habits of courtship and even different tastes in food and drink, music and entertainment. Because many of them came from immigrant stock whose children had learned to be Americans more quickly than their parents, they showed less respect for old age and had a distinctive ‘youth’ culture quite unlike Britain’s. They were richer, bigger, better fed, better dressed and better educated than their hosts, and they were subject to a different legal system; because their country was so rich and powerful Britain had no choice but to accept this rather colonial arrangement, which she had once imposed upon the Chinese in Shanghai. They even broke the iron monopoly of the BBC, insisting on their own separate network of radio stations. In all ways but one, they behaved like a reasonably well-disciplined army of occupation, and many British people, including George Orwell, frankly viewed them as occupiers as well as saviours.

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Hitchens also wrote, “We seem to be in the sort of demoralized period that often ends in revolution or collapse.” A quarter century later, we’re certainly witnessing that collapse in real time, along with much of the rest of Europe:

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

#HERTOO?

Once again, the torpedoes the left fired to take out Trump are circling around on them again. Fortunately for Plaskett, the DNC-MSM has the motto of no enemies to the left, so it won’t become “the biggest story in America.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S AS IF THE ANTI-MUSK “SENTIMENT” IS REALLY JUST A BUBBLE PHENOMENON:

Posted at 12:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CBS EVENING NEWS PRODUCER BAILS ON SHOW:

A CBS Evening News producer has complained that journalists are being forced to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives” under the network’s new Trump-friendly management.

The attack came in a fiery farewell note to colleagues from producer Alicia Hastey explaining her decision to take a buyout and leave the program. The letter was shared on X by New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin.

Hastey does not mention by name either Bari Weiss, the MAGA-curious TV novice now running CBS News, or Tony Dokoupil, the much-criticized Evening News host Weiss installed.

Hastey does namecheck and quote the late Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS News anchor with whom the lightweight Dokoupil has been unfavorably compared:

* * * * * * * *

Walter Cronkite once said in response to critics: “If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism — that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.”

Cronkite’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. He understood that labels are inevitable, but standards are what matter. What defines journalism is not what critics call it, but whether it remains faithful to those principles.

The ghost of Barry Goldwater must be roaring with laughter right now.

Incidentally, the Daily Beast article linked above is headlined, “MAGA-Coded Anchor’s Show Producer Rips CBS in Fiery Farewell,” which is apparently something of a leitmotif at the leftist-coded Website:

Curiously, because Tony Dokoupil dared to actually do on-air journalism in the fall of 2024, and ask a few tough questions to leftist icon Ta-Nehisi Coates (for which he has forced to endure a Maoist struggle session under CBS News’ former management), he’s apparently “MAGA-coded,” despite being married to Katy Tur, who has not exactly been “MAGA-coded” in much of her coverage of Trump: Watch Katy Tur of NBC News Wonder If Trump Will Become Like Putin and Start Killing Journalists.

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: Our Super Bowl Satyricon.

In his vile, obscene “Safaera,” to avoid being censored, Bunny omitted a few of the song’s lyrics about his celebration of exploitative sodomy, fellatio, and anilingus—with misogynistic trashing of his compliant female sexual partners as “hoes.”

(Do woke intersectional feminists weigh in on the side of Bunny’s DEI credentials and sexual fluidity, or do they bristle at Bunny’s “objectification” of women, as he reduces them to mere mindless receptacles of violent and toxic masculinity?).

If Bunny’s purpose was to shock America, then he should have sung his full lyrics of “Safaera” in English, ensuring that his first-time listeners were forced to hear and react to his sick adolescent riffs on breasts, bottoms, phalluses, and vaginas.

Bunny had been previously instructed not to repeat his prior performance-art trashing of ICE and to keep his politicking subtle and coded.

Translated, that meant the NFL had greenlighted some of his obscene references as long as they were relegated to a Spanish-speaking audience only and toned down a bit. But he was not overtly to alienate over half of the NFL’s viewership, who not long ago had voted to stop illegal immigration and millions crashing the border.

Bunny mostly complied, albeit with empty platitudes about hate and love, and reducing the American flag to a status similar to that of the other South and Central American states.

Ricky Martin chimed in with his own incoherent Spanish-language harangue about the American rape of paradise in Hawaii (“They want to take my river and my beach too/They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave”). If Martin’s point was the arrival of too many newcomers, then he might have first reflected on the 10-million uninvited illegal aliens who, during the Biden tenure, stormed America’s southern border.

A writer for the now-defunct sports section of the Washington Post had earlier and ludicrously boasted that the mostly forgotten Colin Kaepernick—the Dylan Mulvaney of the NFL—would be the most relevant figure at the 2026 Super Bowl.

He really was though – everything Kaep set in motion in the twilight of the Obama era was in full display during the halftime show on Sunday.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL, THAT NARRATIVE COLLAPSED IN A HURRY: Bad Bunny Reportedly Lost Record Slice of Super Bowl Viewers Heading Into Halftime Show.

Glasspiegel reported 135.9 million people were watching the NBC and Telemundo broadcasts between 8:00-8:14 p.m. ET on Sunday; that dropped to 128.2 million combined viewers between 8:15-8:29 p.m. That exodus of 7.7 million viewers lined up with the halftime show.

“Bad Bunny’s performance occurred during the latter window,” he explained. “This was a decline of 7% from the game’s peak viewership of 137.9 million in the second quarter, and 5.7% from the immediately preceding quarter-hour.”

The article noted that the audience typically increases for the halftime show during most Super Bowls.

I enjoyed the Puppy Bowl.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

BRICS WAS ALWAYS MORE WISHFUL THINKING THAN REALITY:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

HOW TO SAFEGUARD WORSHIP PLACES: Violence against Christian churches and Jewish synagogues is on the rise in this country, but there are effective steps officials can and should take to reverse the tide. Richard Pollock has the scoop in an interview with holy places security expert Stephen Bryen.

Posted at 10:18 am by Mark Tapscott

THE SHOW MUST GO ON: Activist Investor Slams WBD For Rushing Into ‘Flawed’ Netflix Deal, Tells Board To Engage With Paramount As Temperature Rises.

Activist investor and Warner Bros. Discovery shareholder Ancora Holdings threatened to vote ‘no’ on the Netflix deal and launch its own proxy fight if the WBD board does not engage with Paramount.

The David Ellison company Tuesday sweetened its hostile takeover offer for Warner in its latest attempt to derail the company’s agreement with Netflix.

The WBD board “now has no choice but to deem Paramount’s amended offer as one that could reasonably be expected to result in a Superior Proposal, given Netflix’s presently inferior proposal and unaddressed regulatory issues. Once that happens, the Board could then engage in good faith with Paramount to maximize shareholder value, paving the way for WBD to secure an even higher offer. If the WBD Board refuses to do this, Ancora will vote “NO” on the inferior Netflix deal and seek to hold the WBD Board accountable at the 2026,” the firm said in a presentation posted on its website.

“The WBD Board opted to rush into a flawed deal with Netflix rather than earnestly pursue a superior offer from Paramount – in line with the directors’ fiduciary duties,” it said. Ancora, a nearly $11 billion firm, said it has an approximately $200 million economic interest in Warner Bros. Discovery.

Stay tuned.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Marco Rubio Would Make a Splendid Territorial Governor of Cuba. “Hey, if we can pick up the island on the cheap, Secretary of State Marco Rubio might want to don a seersucker suit and start a new gig as the territorial governor and enjoy presiding over a revitalized Havana.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green