December 6, 2025

HUGH HEWITT INTERVIEWS POWER LINE’S SCOTT JOHNSON: The first reporter on the Minnesota fraud scandal on how this iceberg of a story is being revealed.

Posted at 2:20 pm by Ed Driscoll

FINALLY: It’s Official: The Original Theatrical Cut of Star Wars Is Coming Back to Theaters.

A day Star Wars fans never thought would happen is finally happening. Lucasfilm and Disney are rereleasing the original version of Star Wars in theaters for its 50th anniversary. It’ll happen on February 17, 2027, and io9 has confirmed with Lucasfilm that it is, in fact, the original theatrical cut of the movie.

Earlier this year, the studio announced it would be bringing Star Wars, later titled Star Wars: A New Hope, back to theaters to celebrate its massive anniversary, but there was the big question of what version? Would it be the Special Edition that had become the standard over the past 30 years? The version with Greedo shooting first, Jabba the Hutt, and rings around the Death Star?

Now, we know that the answer is “No.” This will be “a newly restored version of the classic Star Wars (1977) theatrical release” that will play in theaters for a limited time. And, according to other reports, it’ll even be released in IMAX, though Lucasfilm has yet to confirm that.

Back in 1997, when George Lucas remastered and tinkered with the original trilogy with the Special Editions, those became the only versions that Lucasfilm would release. That meant in theaters, on streaming, on DVD, all that stuff. As a result, copies of the original film—with Han shooting first, no Jabba, etc.—became rather rare. Last year, though, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy attended a screening of one of those prints, giving the event an official seal of approval. And now we know why.

As John Nolte wrote last year, “Until Star Wars is fun, masculine, cool, and sexy again (instead of prim, proper, woke, and preachy), the phenom is over. And it might be over regardless, because Kathleen Kennedy’s obsession with homosexuality and gender politics has drained the greatest franchise in Hollywood history of all its goodwill.”

Fans of the original Star Wars have been begging Disney to release the film in its original version ever since they acquired LucasFilm in 2012. Having run the franchise deeply into ground, this seems like its last gasp, no matter how much slop is yet to be released under the brand name.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BORDER IS CLOSED, NOW THE REAL WORK RESUMES: Saving America will be won or lost in the home. More hard truths from Virgil Walker.

Posted at 12:34 pm by Mark Tapscott

STEVEN PINKER IN THE AIRSTRIP ONE LONDON TIMES: 1984 revisited: George Orwell would be relieved at how we’ve done.

When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1967 at the age of 13, I was intrigued by its implied prophecy. This futuristic novel specified the year in which it was set in its title, a year I would live to see. What would life be like in 1984? And how would the novel be received once the year had elapsed, set in a future that then would be past?

We are now more than 40 years past the time in which the book was set and almost 80 years after it was written. This raises an irresistible question: how much is the world of 2025 like the world of 1984 as imagined in 1948?

Of course, Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a prophecy but as an extrapolation and a warning. As he explained: “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive. But I believe, allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire, that something resembling it could arrive.”

Did it arrive? It’s instructive to assess Orwell as a prophet. For one thing, it can be a reminder of the limits of prophecy. Even the predictions of the world’s most accurate forecasters, when tested against prespecified dates and outcomes they can’t weasel out of, fall to chance levels about five years out. It would be unreasonable to expect Orwell to do much better.

Comparing 1948 with 1984 and 2025 is also a way to understand the history we’re living through beyond the short time horizon of journalism. If the news came out once every 50 years instead of every day, it surely wouldn’t cover celebrity gossip and politicians’ gaffes but rather sweeping developments we might be oblivious to as they gradually unfold. Looking back at the future is a way to see our era in historical perspective.

Given that the British police routine arrest people for posing with a shotgun in Florida, writing anti-immigration tweets, confiscating their kid’s iPad, insulting their school board on WhatsApp, or calling someone a “faggot” in a text message, while looking the other way at massive grooming scandals, I think Orwell would have some serious questions about the state of England in 2025. But there’s no doubt that economically, and especially technologically, it’s moved far beyond the immediate postwar scarcity in which Orwell wrote his novel. Which was why, in 2007’s Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg concluded:

The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it’s set in the year “632 A.F.,” after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what’s wrong with it?

There’s a second important difference between the two dystopias: 1984 is a masculine vision of totalitarianism. Or rather, it is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley’s totalitarianism isn’t a “boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” as described in 1984. It’s one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormonal gum and blithely doing what they’re told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley’s totalitarianism is essentially feminine. Orwell’s was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley’s is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the “nanny state,” we still don’t have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.

In 2020, we could have used it.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FORGET IT, CHUCK: Fully 93 percent of congressional aides responding to the survey say the proposal to extend those Obamacare tax subsidies that send billions of tax dollars directly to healthcare insurers will not be approved by Congress and signed into law by the President. That’s virtually all of them not just those representing one party.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Mark Tapscott

INSIDER THOUGHTS ON WHAT’S WRONG WITH OUR MILITARY LEADERSHIP:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

INDEED:

Posted at 11:02 am by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

The New Hotness? To Boldly Go Where Beverly Hills 90210 Has Gone Before:

Needless to say, the cringe is extremely strong in this one. As the Critical Drinker notes in the video below:

This feels like the kind of show that their target audience would have on a second screen while they flick through social media on their phone.

So every so often they can look up and see some really hot, young, muscly, good-looking characters having relationship stuff going on—vaguely connected to the Star Trek universe—and then they can look back at their phone again. That’s honestly what this seems to have been designed for.

And, wow. As you say, Star Trek used to be a show of real intelligence and ideas, something that would expand your view of the world and what was possible. And this is what it is now? Wow.

Gene Roddenberry must be rolling over in his grave. The first show he produced was The Lieutenant, starring Gary Lockwood, who would appear as a guest star in the second Star Trek pilot, before hopping on a plane to London to become the co-star of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Lieutenant depicted Lockwood’s character as being, as Wikipedia notes, the young idealistic “recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who is assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon,” at Camp Pendleton in southern California. Roddenberry, a former L.A. cop and WWII bomber pilot, kept the military theme going in the original Star Trek, of course. Even after Roddenberry’s death, Star Trek: The Next Generation could do an episode set in Starfleet Academy that depicted a far more disciplined and serious group of students studying to join a futuristic military origination than the weird L.A. high school class in space depicted in the new trailer.

Oh, and just to put the button on the new series: Stephen Colbert Joins Cast of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Role Revealed at New York Comic Con.

James Lileks once wrote that whenever Kirk mentioned “we were at the Academy together” about that week’s guest star, it was Trek’s version of “I have a bad feeling about this.” I’ve got a very, very bad feeling about Starfleet Academy. 

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

A FRIEND WHO GOT OLIVIA NUZZI’S NEW BOOK, AMERICAN CANTO, WRITES: “I thought the audiobook was the move, but hearing this in her own voice is so much worse than reading it. I couldn’t even make it through the intro.”

Posted at 9:01 am by Glenn Reynolds