May 6, 2026

NICK GILLESPIE IN 1995: Terrible Ted Turner.

As I suggested earlier, this may not be entirely the Goldbergs’ fault. They don’t help matters with ham-handed lines such as, “Half visionary, half crackpot, and allAmerican character, Ted Turner is a genuine original,” or “Using second-string producers, third-rate correspondents, and recycled network programming, [Turner] has gone about his task with a singleminded determination.”

But beyond the Goldbergs’ often labored prose, Turner himself seems capable of only the most banal thoughts and insights. In the 1980s he became convinced that he would be shot by an assassin, and told his then-mistress what he would say to his killer: “Thanks for not coming sooner.” At another point, he boasted to a reporter, “I want to set the all-time greatest personal achievement record, greater than Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison, Napoleon or Alexander the Great.” Or consider this deep conversation Turner reports having had with Fidel Castro in 1982: “After three drinks with rum … I said [to Castro] ‘Are you interfering in Nicaragua and Angola?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you are, too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re the United States. We’ve got every right to be there.’ And he said, ‘How come?’ I said, ‘Because we’re right, we’re capitalists. We’ve got a free country.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what about people that don’t agree with that?’ I went back and scratched my head. I never even thought there was another side to the picture.”

The secret shame of Ted Turner may be that, like much of the programming for which he became famous, he just isn’t very smart or interesting. Indeed, by the end of Citizen Turner, the protagonist seems less reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane and more like another great fictional millionaire: Jay Gatsby. Turner, now in his fifties, has been spared Gatsby’s tragic fate. But just as Gatsby turned out to be less real than imagined, so too does Turner seem unmasked as more shallow than deep.

QED:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does The Odyssey confirm that Christopher Nolan is camp?

We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey-ho. Damon rocks a beard of varying lengths and grayness, and wears an expression of becoming seriousness. At various points in the trailer, he makes it clear that he wants to go home. This is becoming a trait of Mr. Damon. He has also made this clear in Saving Private Ryan, The Martian, Interstellar (another Nolan jaunt) and Elysium. Looked at dispassionately, Mr. Damon is the actor who seems keenest to go anywhere, least of all Hollywood.

Well, he’s been lucky with The Odyssey. And the fact that he has slimmed down to near-skeletal proportions suggests that he has committed to the bit. As, indeed, has his co-star Robert Pattinson, playing the villainous suitor Antinous. I am a great admirer of Pattinson, who was the saving grace of Nolan’s solitary misfire Tenet, but I would suggest that no actor alive could deliver the line, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard”.

Spider-Man vs Batman (Pattinson vs Tom Holland): how could audiences possibly resist? But whatever happens, there is the suspicion that Sir Christopher has let loose after his earlier exercises in Sturm und Drang and offered audiences a film that they will want to see in some quantity. It’s budgeted at $250 million – some reports suggest that it ended up costing even more – which will make it by far the most expensive film of his career. Oppenheimer was a relatively cheap $100 million, and that featured the biggest bang of them all. Studio Universal no doubt hopes it is his biggest hit yet.

Speaking of camp: The Hollywood Reporter on The Odyssey: Everybody Using American Accents Is Definitely a Choice.

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan‘s adaptation of Homer’s timeless epic set in ancient Greece. An operatic, fantastical tale of Odysseus, Telemachus, Antinous and Athena. “Not just a story,” as director Christopher Nolan declared at CinemaCon, “but the story.”

And also: Dude. Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.

On Tuesday, Universal dropped the latest and most footage-filled trailer yet (below) for the highly anticipated film. Fans are impressed by the film’s scope and compelling star-studded cast. They’re also a bit thrown by one choice: The characters sound American and use contemporary-sounding language — more Ithaca, New York, than Ithaca, Greece. At one point, Matt Damon’s Odysseus leads a battle charge by crying, “Let’s go!” Even stars Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, who are English, sound American.

The choice is a striking departure from the unwritten Hollywood rule of characters in historical epics employing British accents — from The Ten Commandments to Ben-Hur to Gladiator to HBO’s Rome. Obviously, The Odyssey characters speaking the various dialects of Homeric Greek, Attic and Hellenistic Koine wouldn’t make for a very accessible film. But the modern British accent is traditionally considered universally pleasing and “just foreign enough” to convey a timeless quality (even though it’s only existed in its current form for 250 years or so).

The actors in ’50s Hollywood bible-themed epics such as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur often spoke with transatlantic accents, since that was a popular choice in Hollywood ever since talkies came into vogue at the end of the 1920s. But I don’t recall Edward G. Robinson speaking with a British accent in The Ten Commandments: 

Or John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told: 

I’m happy that Stanley Kubrick had his entirely American cast speaking with their regular accents in 1957’s Paths of Glory rather than having to endure a film of Inspector Clouseau-wannabes. I’m glad that David Lean avoided his mostly British actors doing Mr. Chekov impersonations in Dr. Zhivago. In the 2008 Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, the director cast several supporting actors who had been in earlier WWII-themed movies such as Kenneth Branagh in 2000’s Conspiracy and Christian Berkel from 2004’s Downfall. Everybody spoke with his local accent except for the actor who played Hitler, who was dubbed by another actor with a terrifying Austrian accent. That seemed like a far better compromise than having Cruise and his supporting actors all sound like they had all stepped out of a Hogan’s Heroes episode.

Earlier: The Critical Drinker on The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MARK HAMILL POSTS IMAGE OF PRESIDENT TRUMP DEAD IN A GRAVE WITH CAPTION “IF ONLY:”

Mark Hamill is under fire after sharing a graphic image depicting President Trump dead in a grave alongside the caption “If Only”. This comes just weeks after the latest reported assassination attempt involving the President.

The post appeared on Hamill’s verified Bluesky account and quickly began spreading across social media due to both the disturbing imagery and the timing surrounding it.

The image itself shows President Trump lying seemingly lifeless in dirt beneath a gravestone reading “DONALD J. TRUMP 1946–2024.” Across the bottom are the words “If Only.”

Hamill then added his own commentary to the post:

“If Only,” he said, repeating the words from the photo. “He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes. Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore. #don_TheCON.”

In 2024, VDH explored, “Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left:”

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

Or should we deplore the use of telescopic scope imagery, given that the Left blamed Sarah Palin for once using bullseye spots on an election map of opposition congressional districts, claiming that such usage had incited the mass shooting by Jared Lee Loughner?

In 2009, VDH wrote, “Welcome To The New Rudeness:” 

Over the last three decades, we saw vicious attacks on Ronald Reagan and on Bill Clinton, and their tough replies in turn. But recently the vicious rhetoric has escalated far beyond anything in the past. The smears seem reminiscent more of the brawling on the eve of the Civil War, or the nastiness during the 1960s that took decades to heal.

No one knows what the rules of engagement are now. Republicans have not forgotten that Democratic legislators loudly booed Bush during his 2005 State of the Union. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic party, not long ago boasted, “I hate Republicans!” Around the same time, The New Republic magazine published an article entitled “Why I Hate George W. Bush.”

Major politicians such as former vice president Al Gore, Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.), and former senator John Glenn (D., Ohio), have compared George W. Bush or his supporters to Nazis or the brown shirts. A major publishing house released a novel about killing President Bush; a movie won a prize at the Toronto Film Festival with the same theme. Bush Derangement Syndrome was no joke.

Today at the Corner, Noah Rothman plays “That Same Old Song:”

For Democrats, the last version of the GOP, the Republican president out of power, or the late conservative lawmaker are forever better than what they have to deal with now. Take former Senator Mitt Romney.

“He’s the modern voice Republicans need,” said onetime Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prior to his death in 2021. “I like him.” That’s quite the turnaround from when Reid baselessly accused Romney of felony tax evasion, later explaining the lie away as an instrument of political utility. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reid later said of his own mendacity.

Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a change of heart when it came to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now? Oh my God,” she mused in 2019 as Romney contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were president of the United States?” How odd. Either the man she accused of being “kind of sexist,” a liar, and a racially hostile bigot somehow managed to burnish his reputation with the former speaker in a relatively short period, or she never meant a word of her criticisms in the first place.

Even Obama got in on the act. When the acute political imperative was to attack Trump, Romney served as a useful foil. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he told one interviewer in 2016. Trump, by contrast, was “unfit” for the office. That’s quite the reversal from four years earlier, when Obama had cast Romney as a “bullsh***er.” Obama’s running mate had said that Romney wanted to bring slavery back, and his campaign accused the GOP nominee of being guilty of negligent homicide.

For Democrats, the Republicans who are dead and gone are always somehow better than whatever we have today. It’s a trite political tactic that reflects less on its subjects and more on those who deploy it.

Given that the Kamala campaign aggressively sought the endorsements of Dick Cheney and Dubya in the fall of 2024, the left’s rehabilitation of the man Hamill wishes dead in the next decade will be astonishing to watch.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEI IS A SCAM.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HMM: Ukraine could lift arms-exports ban this year as would-be buyers line up.

Vadym Ivchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker for the Batkivshchyna party, told Defense News a political consensus on the need to allow Ukraine’s defense industry to launch export sales has emerged across party lines.

“Meeting the needs of the defense forces as a top priority is a fundamental condition for all sides. Only after that can the sale of surplus be considered to attract investment,” Ivchenko said.

The lawmaker said that, as Ukraine’s president has already approved the so-called Drone Deals framework, Ukraine is now officially coordinating export details at the state level.

“Therefore, 2026 can be considered a realistic timeframe for launching the first contracts. Of course, delays are possible, but it is important to understand that this would lead to idle production capacity, which is an unacceptable luxury during wartime,” according to the politician.

Ivchenko said drones of various types are expected to become the Ukrainian defense industry’s flagship export products.

Making yourself an indispensable part of other countries’ pressing defense needs isn’t a bad way to get them to invest in your national survival.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green

JAMES KIRCHICK: The Strange New Respect for Jew-Haters.

By far the starkest example of the budding alliance between the far-right and the far-left is the strange new respect some progressives express toward Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Like Greene, it wasn’t so long ago that Carlson was a hate figure for progressives, and one of his biggest haters was a man named Cenk Uygur. Founder of a progressive media company called “The Young Turks,” Uygur denounced “fake” progressives who praised Carlson as late as 2022. “Tucker Carlson doesn’t agree with us at all,” Uygur declared. “He uses the fact that most of the country agrees with progressives as a tool to sheep-herd them into right wing talking points.” In 2019, Uygur attacked Carlson for displaying a graphic on his Fox News show depicting then–CNN head Jeff Zucker as a puppet master. “That is a deeply antisemitic trope, it goes back in history a long time, of the Jews being puppet masters,” he said.

Uygur felt similar disgust for Owens, the comically deranged podcaster who claims that Brigitte Macron is a man and who recently alleged that “satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress.” For spreading disinformation about Covid-19 in 2021, Uygur screamed, “I said it, Candace Owens, you’re the worst of the worst! You’re a sellout! You’re scum of the earth!” Uygur went on, “People like Candace Owens lead pathetic lives because they’re paid to sell their own identity out.” In 2024, Uygur accused Owens of deploying “over-the-top antisemitic tropes.”

Fast-forward a year, and Uygur has changed his mind. “No, I’m not going to denounce Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens!” he declares. “We don’t have to denounce her at all. Don’t come at me about denouncing Candace Owens until you denounce Jared Kushner.” Last year, accusing Israel of “proudly doing a genocide”1 in Gaza, Uygur beseeched Carlson, Owens, and Greene to join forces with him and other progressives to “stop this.” He reached back in history to convey the gravity of the situation. “I would hope to god that if I was around in the 1930s and 1940s that I would have said, ‘Work with any right-wing populist and any left-wing populist or anyone period to stop that Holocaust,’ to save one more person,” he said, apparently unaware that it was the right-wing populists who were “doing” the Holocaust. In January, Uygur appeared on Carlson’s show, extending the hand of cooperation. “We’ve been taught by the media to hate each other and to have a tribal brain,” he said.

Carlson has also been gaining fans among Muslims, a proposition that would have shocked anyone who knew him personally or listened to his commentary over the past quarter century. “Democratic leadership has no idea how many people are being won over by Tucker Carlson and MTG right now over Israel,” the left-wing Substack writer Wajahat Ali tweeted, linking to a three-and-a-half-minute video in which the editor of the Economist tried unsuccessfully to get an answer out of Carlson on the question of whether Israel “has a right to exist.” Addressing speculation that Carlson might run for president, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “If it was [Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro vs. Tucker, I could imagine a significant number of progressives, young people, Arabs, and Muslims sitting it out or actually voting for Tucker.”

Not surprisingly, Megyn Kelly is also jumping on to this trend: Bills to Pay? Four Months Ago vs. Today: Megyn Kelly’s Head-Spinning Shift on Radical Islam (Watch).

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE COUNTER-RECONQUISTA: Grateful Migrant Repays His Hosts in Barcelona “There’s the old excuse again: for years now, European authorities have classified what are clearly Islamic jihadis as mentally ill, which allows them to continue to pretend that there is no such thing as Islamic jihad and that the mass migration of Muslims into Europe poses no cultural or civilizational threat.”

Posted at 3:19 pm by Stephen Green

VIDEO: Hero Dad Drops a Persistent Carjacker Who Threatened His Family. “The “gentleman” in the peach shirt had already slammed a green sedan into two other vehicles nearby, then stumbled out like a man possessed. Not content with totaling ride #1, he launched a one-man crime spree, yanking door handles of other vehicles, trying to wrest doors open to steal a new set of wheels.”

Then he picked the entirely wrong car.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…

Certainly some interesting directorial choices being made by Christopher Nolan:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

BACK AND TO THE LEFT. BACK AND TO THE LEFT: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Isn’t Radical Enough for Graham Platner and the ‘New’ Democratic Party.

The Democrats are doubling down on crazy, and they show no sign of moderating their radical social and cultural agenda any time soon.

Last week, 78-year-old Maine Gov. Janet Mills bowed out of the primary contest for senator. Mills used traditional Democratic fundraising conduits to raise an impressive $5.4 million in two quarters. This isn’t a big haul for a large state, but it is pretty good for Maine.

Meanwhile, the infamous oyster farmer, Graham Platner, the man with the Nazi tattoo, raised $12.5 million. Mills woke up last week and realized there was no way she could compete with a juggernaut like that. Besides, Platner had awoken something in the usually staid and sensible Maine Democrats. He was leading by 30 points in some polls.

Sen. George Mitchell served three terms as a Democratic Senator from Maine. He was the Majority Leader of the Senate from 1989 to his retirement in 1995. Mitchell was the last elected Democrat to serve in the Senate (Angus King is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats).

Mitchell was a poster boy for Democratic Party moderates. He was a consummate Senate insider who put getting things done ahead of partisan bickering. His kind is gone now. They’ve been shoved aside by hysterical radicals whose grasping for power presages a dark period in U.S. political history.

How dark? This dark: Antisemitism Is The Litmus Test for Democrats in 2026.

Antisemitism is a mental disease, in the way that Trump Derangement Syndrome is.

Neither is based primarily on political or ideological affiliations, although each correlates highly with partisan affiliations and ideological commitments.

That correlation does have a causal relationship, but the opposite of what is generally assumed. The antisemitism comes first, then the ideology and the partisanship. First, the antisemitism, and only then the political decisions. That’s why you see the “right” coded antisemites flocking to the Democrats, as I wrote yesterday, and the Democrats gaining a “strange new respect” for former Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and right-coded Nick Fuentes.

That same sorting is happening with current and former Democrats, who are so appalled by the antisemitic outbreak in their party that they are flirting with becoming Republicans, or at least praising their clear-sightedness on this issue.

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which former(?) self-admitted communist Van Jones is a voice of sanity:

Tweet continues, “It just shows you how nutty things have gotten that someone who wants to stick up for Israel and doesn’t want an open border now has to be a Republican.”

Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record is once again doing straight-up reportage:

(Though as Frank J. Fleming wryly noted, “Leftists: ‘If Graham Platner is a Nazi, then why does he hate Israel so much?’”)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

MAGA: The heartland’s revenge: how AI is reindustrializing the American interior.

America does not currently have the capacity to power these mega-projects, but the market is responding. Utilities are expanding existing plants, and a new generation of power stations is being planned, often funded directly by the “hyperscalers” themselves.

The materials for this build-out are coming from the “Rust Belt” and the South, regions once hollowed out by globalization. This reindustrialization is not accidental. Federal tax incentives, specifically domestic content requirements, have encouraged companies to source equipment from American manufacturers. But if policy is the carrot, our unique energy position is the engine.

By steering procurement toward domestic sources, federal policy has tapped into a decisive competitive advantage: our staggering abundance of natural gas. While much of the world faces shortages, the American interior is practically swimming in fuel. Because natural gas is often a byproduct of oil production, the shale revolution has created a massive surplus. Today, oil companies often flare this gas or pay to have it removed; now, new pipelines are being planned to transport it directly to the heavy industry hubs of the Heartland.

Here’s your takeaway: “For years, the goods economy relied on foreign products arriving at coastal hubs. But as the center of the country begins to export freight again, the gravity is shifting.”

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:

 

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D):

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds