December 28, 2025

RIC GRENELL: Trump Kennedy Center Filing $1M Lawsuit Against Musician Who Canceled Christmas Show as Political Protest.

Musician Chuck Redd, this year’s host of the annual Christmas Eve concert, canceled the event following the Center’s board voting unanimously to rename the institution, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told the Associated Press Wednesday, hours before the event was scheduled to take place.

Grenell, who has worked assiduously to restore the struggling institution, is not taking the politically motivated cancellation lying down.

“Your dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with your last-minute cancellation has cost us considerably,” Grenell wrote Friday in a letter to Redd obtained by Breitbart News. “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”

Grenell hammed the artist for hurting an institution created to promote the arts throughout the nation, not to serve as an insulated haven for liberal elites.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” he wrote. “Regrettably, your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances at our national cultural center.”

Protesting against the renaming of the Kennedy Center and stomping away from his Christmas Eve concert was quite a savvy PR move by Redd, transforming his name recognition, heretofore mostly known to hardcore jazz cultists, and getting lots of headlines, which should likely improve his bookings in urban nightclubs. (See also: Hollywood’s full employment act for Alec Baldwin ever since 1998, when the actor “suggested on national television that people stone House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-IL) and his family to death.”

Posted at 1:27 pm by Ed Driscoll

PBS-LIKE BRITISH CHANNEL LETS JIMMY KIMMEL VOMIT AN ‘ALTERNATIVE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE:’

The “public service” Channel 4 in the U.K. knew what it was getting when they asked Jimmy Kimmel to give their annual “Alternative Christmas Message” this year. It wasn’t religious or charitable. It was like a monologue on his ABC show, except this time, as he mentioned being tyrannized by Trump’s government this year, he made no mention of what it was he said. The name of Charlie Kirk or the motive of his assassin went unmentioned.

Instead, Kimmel gave another false impression, like the notion Kirk’s killer was MAGA. He suggested Trump took him off the air because he can’t stand dissent. This is especially bizarre because the U.K. right now is the real censor of opposing views. “Hate speech” on social media can land you in jail.

Backed by cheery music, Kimmel began by suggesting he didn’t know what was going on in England, but “I do know what’s going on over here though, and I can tell you that, from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.”

“You may have read in your colorful newspapers that my country’s president would like to shut me up because I don’t adore him in the way he likes to be adored,” and “the American government “made a threat against me and the company I work for, and all of a sudden we were off the air.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr uttered some threatening words (with no actions), but the real driver was ABC affiliate groups finding Kimmel’s Kirk comments to be dramatically insensitive, if not completely inaccurate.

As Tom Wolfe famously wrote, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe:” The victims of Britain’s free speech crackdown. Reports show police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive online posts.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE:

“Unexpectedly,” there’s a bit of a media blackout on their excesses in Minnesota:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE BABYLON BEE:

 

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE: “Introducing a fraud-based culture based on tribalism into America is like introducing some sort of lethal virus into a population that has no natural immunity. The virus will spread and grow, unchecked, because it is so alien to the host. Similarly, a culture of fraud is anathema to American thinking, and it must be cut out before it consumes the host.”

Read the whole thing.

Exit question:

As always with the GOP, we’ll get plenty of first class, Academy Award-level failure theater in response.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

THEY SPOKE THE LANGUAGE: When in Rome, do what the Romans do, including speaking to them in their language, right? So give a read to these two statements by Founders John Adams and Benjamin Rush, then ask yourself why do Leftist academics and other influencers keep insisting we were not a nation that spoke the language of (mainly) Protestant Christianity?

Posted at 8:07 am by Mark Tapscott

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Starmer welcomes ‘extremist’ to Britain.

Sir Keir Starmer has welcomed an alleged Islamist extremist, who labelled British people “dogs and monkeys” and called for Zionists to be killed, into the UK.

The Prime Minister said he was “delighted” that Alaa Abd el-Fattah had arrived from Egypt on Friday evening after a travel ban imposed by Cairo was lifted following lobbying by ministers.

Mr Abd el-Fattah, an activist with dual British-Egyptian citizenship, previously said that it was heroic to kill Zionists “including civilians”. He urged Londoners to burn Downing Street, told his supporters to kill police and said he hated white people.

Ministers are facing calls to revoke his British citizenship, which he was granted in 2021 while imprisoned in Egypt, where campaigners described him as a “prisoner of conscience”.

The row risks undermining Sir Keir’s attempts to prove the Labour Government can be tough on migration and threatens to overshadow an announcement of the UK’s first visa restrictions on a foreign country – the Democratic Republic of Congo – over its refusal to take back illegal migrants.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has written a letter demanding that Sir Keir explains what he knew about Mr Abd el-Fattah’s remarks, whether he condemned them and whether he would say that the Government does not “excuse or legitimise calls for violence against police, Jews or Israelis”.

Mr Jenrick told The Telegraph: “Shame on the Prime Minister for making it his ‘top priority’ to bring an extremist to our country who has incited violence against Jews. This awful extremist should never have set foot in the UK again.

“Two-Tier Kier” strikes again:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE:

I’m sure Walz himself would agree!

Fortunately for his job security, the DFL-MSM doesn’t care:

Neither does Jake Tapper, who is far more interested in tone policing Minnesota voters than reporting on Minnesota corruption:

Err, sorry. Tone policing Minnesota Republican voters. At CNN, “Civility feels like it misses the mark” when Democrats are protesting:

So why the crickets from the national DNC-MSM, when there’s a slam-dunk 60 Minutes-style story in Minnesota, only needing a cameraman, an interviewer, a rental car, and some door knocking?

We all know why:


Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

WHILE IT’S STILL CHRISTMAS TIME: FROM SARAH A. HOYT:

Christmas In Time: A Collection of Short Stories

Christmas In Time: Six Stories of Time Travel and Second Chances

Time is not an Ocean. But then again it is.

From award-winning author Sarah A. Hoyt come six tales of time travel, parallel worlds, and the furthest reaches of space—all bound together by Christmas miracles and the choices that define us.

Meet Time Corps agents who risk madness to prevent reality from splintering. Follow a mathematician pulled into a parallel universe where his twin captains starships between worlds. Watch as mysterious children arrive from impossible futures, and discover Victorian lighthouses that serve as anchors in the storm of time itself. Journey from blood-soaked space stations to asteroid colonies at the edge of the known universe.

This collection includes “What Child Is This,” a prequel to Hoyt’s acclaimed novel No Man’s Land, revealing how a child’s accidental time-slip can save a man’s life and create the bonds of family love.

AND:  Christmas in the Stars.

A collection of four Christmas short stories by Prometheus Award Winner Sarah A. Hoyt.
Perfect for curling up by the fire with eggnog in hand, these heartwarming tales bring the spirit of Christmas to the far reaches of space and beyond. A star-explorer stranded in unknown coordinates on Christmas Eve listens desperately for sleigh bells while his AI companion offers little comfort. Two deserters from a doomed planetary war seek peace and goodwill on a forsaken planet—even though one of them happens to be dead. Discover the small, sweet robot who witnessed the first Christmas at the nativity. And remember that sometimes, all you need for a Merry Christmas is a cat. With the warmth and humanity that has made Hoyt a beloved voice in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales, these stories blend science fiction wonder with holiday comfort. Though brief, this collection delivers the rational optimism and cozy charm perfect for a snowy afternoon—proving that the Christmas spirit endures even among the stars. As one reviewer notes, these aren’t schmaltzy Hallmark tales, but genuine stories that earn their emotional moments through compelling characters and imaginative settings.
Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt