January 17, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SOCIALISTS NATIONALLY BEGIN SEARCHING FOR THEIR NEXT HITLER: Jim Acosta Helps Dems Make the Pivot to ‘JD Vance Is Worse Than Trump’ (Plus: Get the TDS Straitjacket!)

Flashback to 2021: Ron DeSantis Gets Labeled ‘Worse Than Trump.’

This is what Democrats always do. Geroge W. Bush is Hitler until Mitt Romney comes along. Then, Bush is the harmless guy who paints who they wish all Republicans were like. Once Trump came along, Romney was rehabbed. Now that DeSantis is the frontrunner for 2024 in many people’s minds, and clearly, the one Democrats fear the most, he must become worse than the Republican who came before him.

Related: Found via Ace of Spades, Scott Adams at the dawn of the Biden error era:

UPDATE: 

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

MATT DAMON SAYS NETFLIX WANTS MOVIES TO RESTATE THE ‘PLOT THREE OR FOUR TIMES IN THE DIALOGUE’ BECAUSE VIEWERS ARE ON ‘THEIR PHONES WHILE THEY’RE WATCHING:’

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience” to promote their new Netflixfilm “The Rip,” and the long-time friends and collaborators shared their thoughts on how the streamer is changing the way movies are made.

Damon pointed out that because viewers give a “very different level of attention” to a movie at home versus in a theater, Netflix wants to push the action set pieces toward the front of the runtime. He also said there are behind-the-scenes discussions about reiterating “the plot three or four times in the dialogue” to account for people being on their phones.

“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon explained. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

As Justine Bateman noted in early 2024, “I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’ Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a ‘visual muzak.’ When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No.”

Netflix may very well be controlling Warner Brothers in the not-too-distant future. And with that, the collapse of the movie industry will be complete.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOLLYWOOD STARS PUT BIG MONEY BEHIND CLIMATE ACTIVISTS WHO STORMED CONGRESSIONAL BASEBALL GAME, TAX FILINGS SHOW:

A fund backed by Hollywood stars including Jeremy Strong and Chelsea Handler provided nearly all of the funding for Climate Defiance, the far-left group that carries out illegal demonstrations like storming the field at the Congressional Baseball Game to “defeat” what it calls “fossil fuel fascism,” tax filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

The Hollywood-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) gave $250,000 to Climate Defiance’s political action arm and another $243,292 to its charitable arm in 2024, according to the filings. That means the CEF provided more than half of the two groups’ combined grant revenue and the entire revenue for the charitable arm, the Climate Defiance Foundation.

The records provide the most complete view of Climate Defiance’s finances since it was founded in 2023 for the purpose of pressuring officials to fight climate change, which it saysis “an existential crisis that threatens every fiber of every being in every corner of the world.” It also comes shortly after the IRS formally granted the group tax-exempt status in July 2025.

The nearly three-year-old organization has emerged as one of the most extreme protest groups in the nation, regularly disrupting public events and speeches in an effort to force lawmakers to rapidly abandon fossil fuel power in favor of green energy. It accuses oil executives and other officials who support fossil fuels of “mass murder.” One of their activists once went viral for calling former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin a “sick fuck” and “hideous fiend” to his face over his support for a large natural gas pipeline.

Sure, their tactics are the very definition of extreme — but let’s face it, they really get results. Such incredible results that they’ve protested themselves right out of their jobs!

Screenshot
Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNEXPECTEDLY: Elon Musk-funded mural of murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska goes up in Brooklyn — and local lefties are furious.

The artwork on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen Street is part of a campaign launched by conservative tech CEO Eoghan McCabe to honor the 23-year-old aspiring artist with murals depicting her in several cities. He told The Post he wanted to highlight how crime in liberal areas can lead to tragedies like Zarutska’s death.

“I started this campaign to make sure that the story of Iryna does not disappear. Her murder is at the nexus of many issues plaguing American society. For example, one is the progressive approach to crime,” said.

McCabe, who runs the AI firm Intercom, donated $500,000 to the tribute initiative and collected $1 million from Musk, a spokeswoman for McCabe told The Post. They also raised $200,000 from smaller donors.

As images of the painting on the building, which is home to the Taiwanese dumpling restaurant Formosa, first got praise from those saddened by the young woman’s tragic loss.

“Beautiful!! What a lovely tribute to a beautiful girl and a beautiful life! RIP Iryna!! . . . I’m so sorry the USA failed you!!” said a user named Mary Signorino on a Facebook post that also showed other murals commissioned by McCabe in Washington DC, Miami and Los Angeles.

But a backlash to the campaign by the conservative billionaire came quickly, as lefties on a Bushwick neighborhood reddit page angrily called the the mural propaganda from “anti immigrant fascists.”

“Anti-immigrant” and “fascist” seem like rather strange phrases to describe one of America’s most-prominent African Americans*, who is a proponent of a smaller government, but okay. The mural of Zarutska is a repeat, on a giant scale, of the posters that went up — before promptly being torn up — in American cities after October 7th. It’s already producing the same reactions from the same people who opposed them:

* In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll

WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE FREEZING COLD PRESS CORPS?

How hot is the White House briefing room? Pretty scorching if you’re Niall Stanage, the Hill reporter who was drawn into a back-and-forth with press secretary Karoline Leavitt over ICE’s conduct. Leavitt asked for Stanage’s opinion on why Renee Good was shot, he gave it… and she branded him a “biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” “You shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat, you’re pretending like you’re a journalist but you’re a left-wing activist,” Leavitt continued, in a moment that was rapidly clipped for Team Trump’s social media and posted by a flurry of White House staff.

The temperature is considerably lower for most other journalists, however. During briefings, the double doors that serve as the main entrance are propped open, which in the winter months effectively turns the briefing room into a wind tunnel. This has led to regular tensions in the packed room ahead of Leavitt’s arrival, as tetchy hacks beg for the doors to be closed, while those in the entryway have to explain that White House staff have insisted they be kept open. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with the sheer volume of reporters inside: Cockburn understands that Leavitt wants the doors open because she gets hot.

Thursday’s briefing offered a flashpoint in the door dispute: it was 32°F with a wind chill, “So cold I could barely think,” one reporter with a seat by the front told Cockburn. “Even when we’re packed like sardines in there, it’s absolutely frigid in the winter months,” said another. “My shivering is distracting as I’m trying to follow.”

Still though, could be worse — a lot worse, as Mark Steyn wrote way back in August of 2001, in the first months of a very different Republican president, and the last month of America’s decade-long “holiday from history:” The Desert Before the Storm.

According to his tanned spokesman, George W Bush will cut short his vacation in Crawford, Texas, and return to Washington next Friday, 31st August. The President arrived in Crawford on 4th August and it was thought he intended to stay at least until Labor Day, 3rd September, thus beating Richard Nixon’s 1969 summer sojourn and earning his place in history as the taker of the longest-ever presidential vacation. On the other hand, even at a paltry twenty-eight days, it’s almost certainly the longest vacation anyone’s ever taken in the Greater Waco area. Don’t try to book online: the computer will redirect you to more glamorous resorts such as Crawford, Florida, Crawfordsville, Indiana, Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, or the Crawford oil field in the middle of the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And, if you insist that no, really, you really want to spend a month in Crawford, Texas, the entire site crashes.

Vacation-wise, Bush’s place in history is already secure, as the patron of the hottest presidential resort in history: in his usual careless, brutal way, Dubya has ended the bipartisan presidential tradition of moderate vacation destinations with average August temperatures in the mid-seventies — Clinton, Martha’s Vineyard (77); Bush père, Kennebunkport (75); Reagan, Santa Barbara (75). In an average August, Crawford clocks in at 97 degrees. This summer, if anything, it’s a little hotter, with temperatures not dipping below three digits until well after sundown. Needless to say, the town, like the President, is teetotal.

The GOP — subjecting “elite” Beltway scribes to temperature swings that are almost as bipolar as the journalists themselves, for a quarter of a century.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S NOT MEN WHO RADICALIZED; IT’S WOMEN:

We hear all the time about how young men have lurched rightward, moving toward a fascist view of things.

There are endless thinkpieces out there trying to divine why men have become so right-wing. The evidence, they say, is clear: the gender gap between men and women is growing, which obviously shows that something is deeply wrong with men.

But…if you dive into the available data, it shows that men have not moved much at all ideologically. The movement is almost entirely among women, who have lurched—dramatically, as a group—leftward. So far left that in many cases, they verge on radical revolutionaries.

Read the whole thing, and then check out this article-length tweet, which is also well worth your time:

 

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

GREAT MOMENTS IN “FOSTERING INTEGRATION:”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES, SHE CAUSED A BELOVED FRANCHISE TO DEI A PAINFUL DEATH: Good riddance, Kathleen Kennedy.

If you wanted a skilled producer with excellent taste and blockbuster smarts, you sent for Kathleen Kennedy. And she delivered, over and over again.

It therefore was not remotely surprising that, when Lucasfilm passed into the hands of Disney, Kennedy was seen as the perfect person to shepherd their projects into highly profitable existence. With Star Wars pried from the protective hands of Lucas, Kennedy was free to expand the saga from a galaxy far, far away into a never-ending project in IP renewal. The first picture that came out, 2015’s The Force Awakens, was a shameless exercise in fan service, but it was still exciting and nonetheless made over $2 billion at the global box office. Kennedy was lauded to the skies; she announced plans for more films, to be released at the rate of one a year, and television series to fill in the gaps. Audiences loved Star Wars, and they were about to get an awful lot more of it.

What went wrong over the intervening decade represents one of the most fascinating – and deadening – studies in Hollywood hubris that there has ever been. There were two more canonical Star Wars films, Rian Johnson’s insultingly sneering and smug The Last Jedi, and returning director J.J. Abrams’s panicked The Rise of Skywalker, which was a desperate exercise in undoing all Johnson’s provocations. Both films were commercial hits but lacked the freshness of The Force Awakens.

As John Nolte wrote a couple of weeks ago, “Personally, Star Wars has worked so hard to alienate, offend, insult, and troll its loyal fanbase, it wouldn’t surprise me if Mandalorian & Grogu underperforms. We just don’t care anymore. There’s an air of indifference out there, a sense of moving on. I see it too with Paramount’s woke warping of its Star Trek franchise. The creators politicize their golden geese to a point where disappointment turns to anger and then the most deadly fate of all sets in for the brand: indifference.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 1:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

“IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS:” The Same New York Times That Called Trump a ‘Nazi’ and ‘Fascist’ Objects to THIS Hateful Word for Women.

As the article piously reported:

In the days since a federal agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Republican officials and conservative commentators have called the 37-year-old white woman “very violent,” a “deranged lunatic woman” and a “domestic terrorist.”

Some right-wing influencers have latched onto a different word — or rather an acronym: Ms. Good, they have said, was AWFUL.

“An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the conservative commentator Erik Erickson posted on social media. “Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”

Affluent. White. Female. Urban. Liberal.

Which of those five words does the Times believe is hateful?

Because for a solid decade now, the New York Times has bashed Donald Trump with the harshest, most vicious language imaginable. Words such as Nazi, Hitler, and fascist were used over and over again:

May 28, 2016: Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism

Aug. 8, 2017: The Test of Nazism That Trump Failed

Sept. 11, 2018: Is Trump a Fascist?

Oct. 15, 2018: If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be

Nov. 30, 2020: 1918 Germany Has a Warning for America

Dec. 19, 2023: Trump Attacked for Echoing Hitler, Says He Never Read Mein Kampf

Oct. 29, 2024: Presidents, Conventions and Nazis: A Political History of ‘The Garden’

Nov. 6, 2024: Amid Talks of Fascism, Trump’s Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past

Of course, every now and then, the Times would criticize Trump without calling him Hitler, a fascist, or a Nazi. For example, on April 13, 2018, the Times ran this delightful essay: “Tethered to a Raging Buffoon Called Trump.”

I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t “raging buffoon” a tad more mean-spirited than AWFUL?

Apparently not. In fact, according to the Times, affluent white women are now a targeted, vulnerable minority — just like the Indians and Jews:

Liberal white women are only the latest group to be on the receiving end of right-wing animus. In late October and November, as Tucker Carlson offered a friendly interview to the Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the fear among some conservatives was that attacking Jews was inching toward the mainstream of the Republican Party. Last month, Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur who is a Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, was calling out a surge of bigotry directed at Indian Americans, like himself.

Exit quote: “Gosh, it’s almost as if the Times is telling its readers exactly what they want to hear.”

Because of its subscriber-based model, it has to. The consequences otherwise would be disastrous for the awful Gray Lady:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll