December 24, 2025

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S CHRISTMAS EVE MESSAGE TO AMERICA (1941): “This is a strange Christmas Eve. Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle…. [B]efore we turn again to the stern task and the formidable year that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

Posted at 10:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE FUTURE IS NOW:

Related:

Translation: “Today, in Il Sole 24 Ore, I explain why Elon Musk is creating enormous wealth. To buy himself an island? A mega yacht? A super plane? No. He does it to achieve what many ‘good’ people say they want to do, but don’t: solve the problem of poverty on Earth.”

Posted at 10:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Visions of sugarplums.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE NORTH POLE’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

I’m told Santa’s pretty flexible about this stuff; the items in the second photo wouldn’t be a bad choice, either.

Posted at 9:16 pm by Ed Driscoll

BARI WEISS CHIDES CBS REPORTERS OVER ‘WINNING BACK TRUST’ IN CHRISTMAS EVE EMAIL, while claiming 60 Minutes backlash was due to ‘slow news week:’

Weiss defended her decision in a Christmas Eve email with the subject line ‘Building Trust.’

‘Right now, the majority of Americans say they do not trust the press. It isn’t because they’re crazy,’ Weiss began the message, which was leaked online by Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker.

‘To win back their trust, we have to work hard,’ she continued. ‘Sometimes that means doing more legwork. Sometimes it means training our attention on topics that have been overlooked or misconstrued.

‘And sometimes, it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.’

* * * * * * * *

‘We are not to score points with one side of the political spectrum or to win followers on social media,’ she said, in an apparent reference to veteran journalist Sharyn Alfonsi’s argument that ’60 Minutes’ had been advertising her ‘Inside CECOT’ segment on social media all week.

Instead, Weiss said, CBS News journalists ‘are out to inform the American public and to get the story right.

That’s certainly a valid goal for the network to shoot for; Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Katie Couric and Scott Pelley have all just entered the conversation.

Exit quote: “Sources at the network even told CNN, ‘People are threatening to quit over this.’”

Let them. It’s an awfully hollow threat, considering How many J-school graduates would absolutely kill to work for any network television news team.

Related:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

US DENIES VISAS TO EU EX-COMMISSIONER, FOUR OTHERS OVER TECH RULES:

The measure targeted Thierry Breton, the former top tech regulator at the European Commission, who often clashed with tech tycoons such as Elon Musk over their obligations to follow EU rules.

Breton was described by the State Department as the “mastermind” of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a major piece of legislation that imposes content moderation and other standards on major social media platforms operating in Europe.

The DSA has become a bitter rallying point for US conservatives who see it as a weapon of censorship against right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, an accusation the EU furiously denies.

The DSA stipulates that major platforms must explain content-moderation decisions, provide transparency for users and ensure researchers can carry out essential work, such as understanding how much children are exposed to dangerous content.

Breton, who left the European Commission in 2024, on X slammed the ban as a “witch hunt,” comparing the situation to the US McCarthy era when officials were chased out of government for alleged ties to communism.

Well, it’s nice of Breton to self-identify, but then, as James Lileks wrote twenty years ago, “‘McCarthyism’ today doesn’t mean false accusations of communism; it apparently means calling self-identified communists by their proper name.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: TDS.

The New Craziness? BDS! Disgusting: Julie Roginsky Goes Full Hitler on Bari Weiss.

To recount the facts, ’60 Minutes’ hack, Sharyn Alfonsi, known for using the show for her politicized hit pieces was outraged that her piece on the El Salvadoran prison CECOT was temporarily pulled for additional sourcing. The left-wing dominated mediasphere pounced because in their heart-of-hearts, media is supposed to be used as a weapon against all things conservative and/or Trump.

Taking Roginsky’s fevered take at face value, she has fully bought into the belief that deporting criminal illegal aliens is morally wrong, CECOT is literally a concentration camp and that Weiss killed the story in order to protect the newest Hitler, Donald Trump. She’s not alone in this belief. Its held from the lowest six follower ‘#StillWithHer’ mouth breather to the so-called elite wandering the MS NOW hallways. Her take, however, it the most vomit inducing by a long shot.

Close. This is an ‘intellectual’ so her point is not that Weiss is Hitler. No it’s more nuanced than that. Weiss, you see, is Hitler’s propagandist.

It’s not even a new insult; Jenin Younes, national legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, tweeted in September that “CBS literally hires modern day Goebbels to manage its editorial output.”

But then, in the future, everyone will be Joseph Goebbels for 15 minutes:

● Robert DeNiro calls Stephen Miller the ‘Goebbels’ of Trump’s Cabinet.

● Biden Compared Trump to Goebbels, Used Hitler in a Campaign Ad.

● Biden compared Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to Goebbels.

● Robert “Beto” O’Rourke defends likening Donald Trump to Nazis like Hitler and Goebbels.

● Outsports writer Dawn Ennis responded to [Martina] Navratilova by likening the legendary LGBTQ rights activist to …. Joseph Goebbels.

● Los Angeles Times Review of Andy Ngo’s Antifa Book Compares Him to Nazi Josef Goebbels.

Posted at 5:52 pm by Ed Driscoll

MERRY BURGMENTUM!

 

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE REAL WAR ON CHRISTMAS:

In Germany, Christmas markets this year are festooned with concrete barriers and police armed with automatic rifles.

The famous Christmas market in Salzburg, Austria, now includes 33 surveillance cameras and 24-hour security guards.

It’s the same story in France. Authorities in Paris have canceled the city’s New Year’s Eve party. Parisians will not be celebrating on the Champs- Élysées this year.

“Unfortunately, in France, there is such a turn toward savagery that everything becomes a pretext for violence,” said Bruno Retailleau, the head of France’s center-right Republican party.

There have been numerous ill-conceived or foiled attacks at Christmas markets—from Bavaria, in southeastern Germany, to Leipzig, in the east-central part of the country, to Lublin, Poland.

Last December a Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany, left six dead; five were killed in the 2018 Christmas market attack in Strasbourg, France. This year the global terrorist group ISIS urged its followers to re-create those attacks across the West. The September 18 edition of its newsletter Al-Naba urged Muslims to target “Christians and Jews” and “kill by all means.”

Those orders, it seems, were followed in Australia earlier this month, when two gunmen killed 15, including children, at a ceremony to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. Authorities say the alleged gunmen, Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, were inspired by ISIS.

Far left Politico Europe’s response is to blame the victims of the attacks, and, err, last time I checked, the man who is colloquially known as “the reason for the season:”

Related: It’s come to this:

UPDATE: Decline is a choice:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

RINO ADAM KINZINGER PUTS PARAMOUNT+ ON DOUBLE-SECRET PROBATION!

To be fair though, it’s great to see that Kinzinger is no longer pretending to be even conservative-adjacent, when he’s declaring a centrist liberal like Bari Weiss to be “clearly a right winger,” as if it were some sort of terrible slur.

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GIRLS WILL BE BOYS AND BOYS WILL BE GIRLS. IT’S A MIXED UP, MUDDLED UP, SHOOK UP WORLD, EXCEPT FOR LOLA:

Why did People magazine do this? Two reasons: They’re staffed by SJW leftists who want to be champions in the war on gender and/or reality. Secondly, they’re terrified that their fellow SJW leftists in the social media mob will once again pretend they’re in a 1930s Universal horror movie and they need to break out the pitchforks and lanterns and find and kill Frankenstein. In 2023, Jeremy Clarkson wrote thusly about his longtime former employer:

Remember, what everyone on every BBC platform fears more than anything is a Twitter backlash, so to try to keep that festival of left-wing madness happy, they have to be even more left wing and even more right-on. And they have to make sure that every show is pitch-perfect to the BLT+ community and the ethnic minority communities and the community communities, and when you’re thinking defensively like that, the concept of informing and educating and entertaining pretty much goes out of the window. Could I do Top Gear there now? Not a chance.

Flashback to 2022: Variety More Concerned Over Misgendering Ezra Miller Than His Assaulting Victims.

As for the rest of us, as Jim Treacher rhetorically asked: Why Should I Use Ezra Miller’s Preferred Pronouns?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll