Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast has made a lot more news off the air than on it. The latest is that ABC will resume the show Tuesday night and that some 400 Hollywood celebrities have signed a petition supporting their friend. Stop the presses! Today’s celebrities support leftist politics! So does ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, the folks who lost a fortune by remaking Snow White as a progressive wet dream.
It would be a cruel joke to add, “If another 53 celebrity’s sign up to support Kimmel, his audience will double.” Actually, he will get a lot of viewers on his first night back. After that, viewers will remember why they didn’t watch.
The joke about Kimmel’s small audience may be cruel, but it captures two points. One is that Kimmel’s audience, like that of his mainstream peers, is a shriveled replica of Johnny Carson’s huge numbers. The second is that celebrity culture, represented by those 400 signatures, is badly out-of-touch with a broad swath of the American public and clueless about the most important lesson in marketing: don’t insult your audience. When you do that, the audience walks away, as they have from Bud Light beer, Jaguar cars, and Cracker Barrel restaurants.
It’s even dumber to alienate your viewing audience when the media environment is as tough as it is today. With the internet and stream content, the market has grown more and more fragmented. As it has, the profitability of late-night shows has shrunk. Their traditional format has also grown stale. After the host finishes a short monologue, he sits behind a desk and talks with one guest at a time. The guests are familiar faces, fresh from Botox, promoting their latest ventures.
With this reduced viewership and dull format comes reduced profitability. The only winner has been a show with a different format and a different political angle. Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld is funny and snarky, but he never takes himself too seriously. He sits in a circle of chairs, talking with a group of guests, some of them regulars, some new for that episode. The goal, which has been wildly successful, is to draw in younger, more conservative viewers, who already like Fox News, and, according to polling, are shifting from Democrat to Republican.
Gutfeld, unlike Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, is performing on a conservative cable channel, not a mainstream network meant to appeal to all viewpoints across a wide demographic. Kimmel and Colbert seem to have missed the point, turning their mainstream broadcast slots into tendentious political platforms, mimicking MSNBC and CNN just as those cable networks were imploding.
Kimmel and Colbert’s decision to alienate half their potential audience is far different from the older, blander days of late-night talk shows, when the hosts poked gentle fun at both sides. Their goal was to appeal to the Upper Midwest as well as the Upper East Side and to provide calming entertainment to a broad national audience as they eased into bedtime. It’s not rocket science, and they knew it.
No one understood this logic better than Johnny Carson, by-far the most successful late-night host of all time. “Tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton, any comedian, used his show to do serious issues. That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that?” he told CBS’ Mike Wallace in 1979. “It’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling.”
Gee, I hope Kimmel and Colbert don’t get that feeling. But, of course, they got it long ago. They chose to become political tribunes, a posture that appeals to some, alienates others, and fits better into a Hollywood party than a bed-time TV slot.
If Hollywood’s reaction to Kimmel’s troubles has been predictable, the reaction from Republican politicians has been more interesting – and surprisingly varied.
They were unified, naturally, in lambasting Kimmel for his malicious and factually incorrect statement that Charlie Kirk was killed by a MAGA supporter. He wasn’t. Kimmel should have known that – or shut up. The assassin was a crazed, left-wing ideologue, living with his transgender lover, and outraged at Kirk’s traditional Christian morality and willingness to debate issues that the assassin deemed beyond debate.
Now that Kimmel understands his misstatement, you might expect an apology. If so, you must be waiting for the Easter Bunny to arrive with your breakfast omelet. (When Kimmel goes back on the air, ABC will almost certainly force him to apologize. Kimmel and his team will negotiate to water it down as much as possible. The network will surely want pre-approval on anything he intends to say. They know Kimmel’s own judgment could land them in even more trouble.)
What’s new and unexpected is not the conservative revulsion at Kimmel’s comments but the pushback against the Trump administration for pressuring ABC and Disney. The leader of that pushback is Sen. Ted Cruz, aided by Rand Paul, and their target is Brendan Carr, the outspoken head of the Federal Communications Commission. Since the FCC controls broadcast licenses for TV and radio stations (not for cable or social media), his threats to reconsider ABC’s licenses pose a serious financial risk for that network and its corporate owner. Ted Cruz likened Carr’s threat to that of a Mafioso boss. He’s right.
The crucial distinction here is between pressure from a government agency and pressure from private citizens, station owners and advertisers. It is perfectly fine for a conservative media company, like Sinclair, to say they will not resume broadcasts of Kimmel’s show. They own the stations, and they can choose what to broadcast, within broad limits. Likewise, it’s perfectly fine for left-wing owners, or those in progressive markets, to say, “Let’s bring Kimmel back now! Our audience wants it.” It’s fine for the Acme Manufacturing Company to announce it will no longer advertise its Wile E. Coyote products on the Kimmel show. Or that they’d love to buy more advertising there.
Why is pressure from the government unacceptable? Because it carries the implicit threat to use the full force of the Executive Branch to harm the target. That’s why it was wrong for the public health agencies under Trump 45 and Biden to pressure social media companies to block alternative views about Covid, hoping to quash dissent.
We now know that the dissenting voices were often more accurate than the government “experts.” But even if the dissents had been mistaken and the CDC experts correct, the pressure from official sources would have been wrong. We are much more likely to find the right answers when we allow a vigorous public debate. We are much less likely to find it when the mailed fist of government suppresses our First Amendment freedoms.
The point here is not that “both sides do it” when they are in power. Sadly, they do. The point is our country and our citizens are best served by free and open debate, not the hidden, suppressive hand of the state. It is best served by letting viewers, advertisers, and media owners make their own decisions, after they’ve heard various voices.
Yes, publicly-licensed airways are subject to a few reasonable restraints. But those restraints shouldn’t be stretched to bind and gag alternative views. We also need a lot more self-restraint from powerful bureaucrats, who are all-too-ready to silence and punish anyone they oppose. When their self-restraint fails, we need the freedom to call out the miscreants in government, just as we need it to call out failed comedians for their malign and ignorant comments.
Category: Media
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Jimmy Kimmel is back
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Did the Jews kill Charlie Kirk?
Yes, things can always get worse. Within less than a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a new conspiracy was in town. Despite mounting evidence of the homegrown nature of Tyler Robinson’s radicalism, social media was ablaze with an explanation so perfect, so fitting, so dazzling that only a stooge could possibly deny it. This was no story about terrorism, they say, let alone the online incubation of extremism. This was a story about – who else? – the Jews.
The idea that Israel is responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to clock up millions of views every single day on X, so it’s worthwhile explaining what happened to readers sane enough to avoid social media entirely. By far the most common accusation was that Benjamin Netanyahu himself gave the order to kill Charlie Kirk because he was starting to “turn against Israel,” The evidence provided for this view is predictably slim, and rests mostly on a few short clips in which Charlie Kirk talks to Ben Shapiro and raises some sporadic, though hardly uncommon, questions about the conduct of the Gaza war. It didn’t make things any better when Netanyahu himself went on camera to deny the accusations soon after, doubly strange given the old adage that you should never believe anything until it is officially denied.
The second (and only slightly less ludicrous) theory is that Charlie Kirk was killed so that Ben Shapiro could take the reins of his organization, Turning Point USA. This would allow full consolidation of the organization in the hands of someone who wanted to protect Israel from criticism within the MAGA movement.
Then, another conspiracy theory appeared claiming that Jewish donors were upset with Charlie for his broad stance against US involvement in the Israel-Iran war last June.
Lastly, and least surprisingly, a conspiracy interpreted all of this in light of the Jeffrey Epstein/Mossad cover-up saga which continues to engulf the imagination of a considerable number of Americans today.
Whichever angle you take, it appears that a degree of anti-Semitic conspiratorialism has gone mainstream among large swathes of the American electorate. Why?
Some have said that anti-Semitism, like all forms of racism, simply always exists. Analogously, it is like a “virus” that is liable to suddenly catch and take over people at any random point in history. But this way of viewing things doesn’t quite explain why anti-Semitism happens to catch particular people at particular times, other than by invoking a kind of weakened “social immune system” kind of explanation. Plausible? Somewhat. But completely satisfying? I don’t think so. Even if we carry this idea to its logical conclusion, we’d still need to explain why anti-Semitism has gone mainstream right now – as opposed to, say, ten or twenty years ago.
Another popular alternative explanation would be to blame social media, and Lord knows I have done it. In this telling, some weird mixture of bot activity and engagement farming – particularly from the blatant use of highly emotive and conspiratorial ideas – drive revenue for social-media influencers, particularly on the far ends of the political spectrum. By peddling these wild and extreme theories to millions through the monetization algorithm of X/Twitter, they can (and do) make a lot of money. And even if they do get sued for defamation, these fines can be absorbed and written off as the cost of doing business – much as the marketing departments always have the biggest budget in tech companies. Early reports suggest that this disinformation about Kirk is indeed being pumped into social media by bots, but whether it’s for making money or foreign influence still remains unclear.
Maybe, others have told me, the people that push these “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” conspiracies are just crazy. And it’s a nice idea, and probably not altogether completely incorrect, but crazy is as crazy does – and crazy people are doing extremely well in global politics these days. Without realizing it, we’ve entered a cultural universe so totally fused with the internet and a memeified social media today that bombastic and wild trickster anti-heroes continue to reach the summits of global power. You can never quite write off the sense that crazy performative politics is just a cynical, tongue-in-cheek technique for gaining attention. But attention, when skillfully manipulated, easily turns into political power.
But there’s the last perspective, too, and it’s one which I personally believe to be the most compelling of all. People greatly misunderstand conspiracy theories. Most of us believe that they are, in the words of the critic Frederic Jameson, simply the “poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age.” In other words, conspiracy theories help us make sense of a world which is increasingly fragmented and destabilized by social media, fake news, conflicting narratives and straightforward lies. Rather than try and organize and shift through this incredible complexity of information, most people prefer to just take a black-and-white view of things. They ignore everything else, and are easily prey to simplistic conspiracy theories.
It’s a seductive theory, but it’s not quite the full story. Conspiracy theories, much like the outgrowth of strange cults and mystical religions, do more than just offer us a digestible explanation of the world. They’re not just intellectual. They do something for us socially, too. When new movements break off and found new Churches, secret societies, or even tech startups – they’ll often do so with the rationalization that the older guys were doing it wrongly or immorally. Think of the many Protestant sects that exploded in the 16th century, all of whom disagreed with one another but basically agreed that the Catholics were absolutely and unequivocally wrong. They didn’t split in the name of some new variety of prayer, or view on transubstantiation, or resurrection, or whatever. They broke off and then they came up with the reasons for doing so. New ideologies are always downstream of the desire to break away from the original group. Ideologies are rationalizations, not explanations.
And the same basic process is now happening within the American right. Donald Trump upended a system of neoconservative Republicanism that had been relatively stable for decades. He rode to power renouncing many of the old shibboleths, particularly around foreign intervention, that had once animated serious players on the Washington scene. Now, however, deep and possibly unresolvable cracks are starting to appear in the MAGA movement, particularly (although not by any means entirely) around America’s relationship to Israel. Now is the time of conspiracies not because the loonies have temporarily taken over, as many people earnestly wish to be true, but rather because we’re in the middle of a white-hot battle for ideological control over the Republican party and the essence of American conservatism itself.
Public anti-Semitism is often simply a tool – and a particularly shrewd one, as is often the case in the history of conspiracies about Jews – to hive off support away from previously mainstream leaders and institutions to build rivals that can compete with them. Even some of the most pro-MAGA social media commentators said the conspiracy was dumb. But it’s only dumb if you misunderstand what it is. Tucker Carlson’s final speech at Charlie Kirk’s funeral comparing his death to Christ’s crucifixion by the Jews seems outrageous, which it obviously is. It seems stupid, too, but it’s not. It’s the opening gambit in an ideological battle which will only continue to accelerate the widening gulf between factions within the MAGA movement. It reflects an assertiveness and a growing dominance which, whilst still marginal, is rapidly gaining in strength.
Soon, Donald Trump will finish his second presidency and his successor, almost certainly J.D. Vance, will fight the next election. The fight is on to see whether the MAGA movement will fully institutionalize as mainstream, or fade as a little more than a charismatic ejaculation tied to the personal fortune and celebrity affection for the current president. Anti-Semitism has been loaded in the deck, and the cards are being shuffled. What comes next will almost certainly direct the future of American Jewry, and perhaps even the United States itself. -
The mayor of Dearborn called me an ‘Islamophobe’
I didn’t remotely expect to go viral when I walked into the city council meeting here in Dearborn, Michigan, last week. But I’m glad I did. I say that not out of ill will towards the honorable mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, who called me an “islamophobe” for objecting to the name chosen for two intersections. I say it because the incident makes me think of much more serious experiences of prejudice against fellow Christians in so many Islamic countries around the world – and now also in western countries. This problem urgently needs to be counteracted with the type of peace (please, not hostility) and freedom that we have often enjoyed in Christian-influenced countries.
I objected to how two intersections in Dearborn have been named after the prominent Arab American journalist Mr Osama Siblani. I acknowledged that Mr Siblani has made many important contributions to the community, including bringing attention to the suffering of people in Palestine and Lebanon in the past two years. I mentioned that I have lived in Lebanon in the past, and also briefly in Israel, including an area considered Palestine by many.
However, Mr Siblani openly and constantly promotes Hezbollah and Hamas, even though, as I mentioned, Hezbollah was behind the past bombings of many Americans in Beirut. I read two quotes from Mr Siblani in 2022, one of which glorifies violence and the blood “that irrigates the land of Palestine”.
The other quote could even be interpreted as inciting violence in Michigan:
“We are the Arabs who are going to lift Palestinians all the way to victory, whether we are in Michigan and whether we are in Jenin. Believe me, everyone should fight within his means. They will fight with stones, others will fight with guns, others will fight with planes, drones, and rockets, others will fight with their voices, and others will fight with their hands and say: ‘Free, free Palestine!’”
I clarified that I was not promoting a strongly pro-Israel militaristic stance, but instead that as a Christian I would like to encourage peace and not violence. I referred to Christ’s warning that the person who wields the sword dies by the sword. I described Christ as the Prince of Peace who said “The peacemakers are blessed,” and whose death opened the door to peace between Jewish and non-Jewish people.
My comments were met with significant pushback, but it was the mayor’s response especially which went viral, including the words:
“ … you are a bigot and you are a racist and you are an Islamophobe. And although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here. And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city, because you are not somebody who believes in coexistence. …”
I responded by saying, “God bless you Mayor, God bless you sir.”
Three years before in 2022, I had experienced a similar interaction with the mayor. Dearborn is a city in which enormous Islamic events occur on public premises – 40,000 people in one day, or 55,000 people over one weekend. Of course I don’t object to these. It’s a free country, and people should have a right to do that. What I do object to is double standards: a friend was getting serious resistance while applying to have movie nights showing the life of Christ in a small park shelter. Our team were being slandered as “preying on children” simply because we were offering popcorn and hotdogs for the movie.
I thought it was wrong that he had to defend himself against these accusations at multiple city council meetings while seeking permission for his events, when enormous Islamic events are approved at the click of a finger. I went to the city council and said that I feel as though I live in a Muslim country. I mentioned that I have lived in two Muslim countries: Pakistan for four years, and Lebanon for a year, and that Christians are not allowed freedom of speech and freedom of faith in Muslim countries.
On that occasion too the mayor dramatically shut me down with accusations of “bigotry” and “Islamophobia”. He publicized the encounter to thousands of constituents, many of whom applauded him. But I was also pleased to see that a sizable minority of Muslim Arab neighbours defended my stance publicly on social media.
The mayor’s words on these two occasions are for me personally water off a duck’s back – because I live in America, where my rights are ensured. I hope to become an American citizen this year, in addition to my Canadian and British citizenships.
I choose no longer to live in Canada, or Britain, because my freedoms of speech and of faith as a Christian are no longer fully protected even in those western countries. If we lose these freedoms here in America, then we will have lost them everywhere.
The original Islamic country, Saudi Arabia, where the mayor went on the hajj to Mecca a few months ago, still does not allow even one church in the entire nation. A friend who has been cheering me on by email in the past week has shrapnel in his body from a church suicide bombing in Pakistan. Another friend’s brother was killed after becoming a Christian in Pakistan. Both fled here to America. I have met about five different missionary men who were captives of the Taliban – one of them was murdered. Even the comparatively lenient Lebanon rarely allows the privilege of citizenship to foreign residents. I know a gentle missionary who was expelled from Lebanon after 35 years. Immigration, citizenship and societal influence are a one-way street. It needs to become a two-way street.
Mayor Abdullah Hammoud has been a highly capable, inspiring and accomplished mayor in many ways. These include some very impressive parks and playgrounds. (In one of these, the mayor pushed my happy young son on a roundabout, whom the mayor had met the week before when visiting the Christian pre-school.)
My sincere hope is that Mr Hammoud, and Mr Siblani, will add to their accomplishments by achieving global reputations for promoting, not oppression and hostility, but freedom of faith and peace.
I urgently hope that Dearborn’s example will reverse the trend of closing doors – that the doors of peace and freedom will be opened starting here, continuing back into other western nations, and then out towards oppressed Christian minorities in Islamic countries around the world. -
The decline of sex and the alpha male
Not long ago, early in the morning in Washington DC, I walked past a construction site and a man in a yellow vest whistled at me. I laughed but what really struck me was how rare catcalling has become. Even construction workers, the cliché of crude male attention, have fallen silent as have, it turns out, moans of passion in bedrooms across America. According to new research, Americans have lost their libido – and not by a little.
Only 37 percent of American adults reported having sex once a week or more, down from 55 percent in 1990. Across generations the pattern holds the same. Even within marriage, sex is increasingly confined to holidays. Weekly sex rates for married couples have fallen from 59 percent in the 1990s to below 49 percent today. Among young adults, the story is even grimmer: nearly a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they had no sex at all in the past year, double the rate of a decade ago.
Bourgeois boredom, once the great engine of romance, has been numbed by endless scrolling. In the 19th century, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary blew up their lives for affairs and a century later, Catherine Deneuve’s in Belle De Jour fled her perfect marriage by slipping into a brothel. They fled ennui, turning sex into a rebellion against the social norms and institutions. Over the years, sex was normalized and even adultery no longer shocked the parish priest. Today, middle-class boredom in American cities produces nothing but clicks. Modern Anna does not take reputational, emotional, digital risks by going out and meeting someone, nor does she leap onto the tracks for a lost love, she streams Netflix and chills.
And can you blame her? Over the past decades, women’s emancipation went ahead, while men’s opportunities and success declined. The evidence is everywhere, starting with education, where boys’ academic performance has worsened at every level. Romantic relationships have always been asymmetric, typically a higher-status man with a lower-status woman. The reverse has never been the norm and exceptions only prove the rule. With emancipation, many women have climbed higher up the social ladder. Men, over the same period, have not only failed to keep pace but have slipped downward. The result is a dating market with too many successful women, too many failing men, and a crisis. If modern Anna’s options look like Tim from Tinder, why bother losing a night’s sleep?
The crisis isn’t only in the statistics. It’s visible in the disappearance of small, if imperfect, social rituals that once signaled desire in public space, such as buying someone a drink at a bar. The old moral codes are gone, but they are being replaced with new ones: the parish priest has given way to HR, sexual harassment trainings and viral tweets. Rules have multiplied around sex from verbal consent protocols to workplace regulations. The result is that people grow afraid of the consequences, and sex hardly feels casual, any longer.
The me-too movement that started with a noble aim to prevent sexual abuse, assault and discrimination against women, predictably overreached into structuring desire. The courts of public opinion declare people guilty and turn them into enemies of the society without giving them a fair trial. Some in America have forgotten that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If in the Soviet Union it was your neighbor who brought up your careless word or unapproved behavior to the authorities, now it can be a girl you met at a party ten years ago posting on X.
Not only have politics around sex gone wrong but so have my friends. They’ve organized the search for partners instead of leaving it to chance. A few went full Fiddler on the Roof and hired matchmakers, spending enough to buy a village in a developing country. Another treats a first coffee date like a meeting with the Soviet Central Committee, laying out conditions like where to live, when to have children, what the five-year plan should be. I once saw a girl arrive at a Halloween party dressed as a mummy, wrapped in toilet paper, and joked that nobody would sleep with her because it would be too much paperwork. Same thought comes to mind about sex today, lots of red tape.
A romantic relationship needs ordinary interaction before it can grow into anything deeper. If you don’t know your neighbors, do not go to bars nor appear for benediction on the weekends and have few friends, you are far less likely to meet anyone. I feel exhausted coaxing friends out of their flats, the ones I’ve already half-lost to Netflix. I have been silently punishing them by going alone to the movies. Parties themselves have all but vanished. People used to throw them for no reason at all, now even that chance has disappeared.
But is the situation as bad as we make it out? One may argue there is nothing wrong with less sex. After all, fewer meaningless flings hardly rank as a national crisis. Except less sex is only a symptom of something larger: less life. Along with it comes what has been called an “epidemic of loneliness” and erosion of social life.
What made life tempting is slowly disappearing. A few too many drinks at a bar, a walk with a friend that turned into an unexpected introduction, or an evening that stretched just long enough for bad decisions to look like good ones. Now, instead of calling a girlfriend to wonder if a guy deserves a second date, you get lost in Tik-Tok videos diagnosing him as a walking red flag. Gone are serendipity and spontaneity along with sex.
The fewer casual encounters we have, the fewer chances there are not only for lasting intimacy but even for the brief, reckless kind that leaves you walking home in yesterday’s clothes. And that’s a shame. -
The Facebook police come calling
In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it.
“You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”
They did not.
“I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.
The officer, who seemed to have no idea he’d bumbled into a Key and Peele sketch, sat on an orange blanket and said, “Something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”
“You’re here because somebody got upset?” she said. “Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”
“You’re not being arrested.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
The officer said he wanted her to make an apology to the person she’d offended.
“I’m not apologizing to anybody,” she said. “I can tell you that.”
Well then, said Officer Friendly, perhaps you can come in for an interview. This “allegation,” he said, has been reported to the police.
“So what?” the woman said. “Are there no houses that have been burgled lately? No rapes? No murders?”
“Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”
“Well then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”
“Because I’ve got to investigate everything that’s reported.”
“You’re not investigating houses being burgled?”
“No,” the officer said. “That’s not my job today.”
His job was to be the thought police. That didn’t make our heroine very happy.
“Do you know how many houses in this neighborhood have been broken into?” she said.
“I don’t look after this neighborhood,” he said.
“No, of course you don’t. Unless there’s a tweet. Then you do… you should not be doing this. I’m a cancer patient. You can see that because I’m bald.”
We should point out that the video is from the woman’s point of view, so we don’t see that she’s bald.
“Well, I didn’t know that before I came,” the officer said. “But it still doesn’t say anything. You still can’t break the law. If you don’t break the law, nothing happens.”
Some laws are meant to be broken, she implied, and we agree. In fact, some laws shouldn’t be laws at all.
“The public knows what you guys are doing,” she said. “We know what’s going on in this country.”
Thank you, random Internet lady with cancer. All the people in my feed today – and there are hundreds of them – fulminating about the free-speech violation of Jimmy Kimmel, one of the wealthiest and most prominent voices on the American stage, should take a peek at this case, and hundreds like them, taking place in a country that truly doesn’t support free speech.
As the Free Speech Union points out, the Thames Valley Police is guarding President Trump as he makes his UK rounds this week. Wouldn’t Trump like to know what the cops are up to on their regular rounds? As long as Donald Trump is visiting the British Isles, he should consider staging a bloodless coup to free UK citizens from the busybody free-speech police, who literally knock on doors and tell sick ladies to stop making mean tweets. -
J.D. Vance presents The Charlie Kirk Show
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a shock to the conservative movement and a tragedy for those who knew him personally. For Vice President J.D. Vance, Kirk wasn’t just another conservative influencer – he was a close friend, a mentor and an ally who helped introduce him to donors and gave him a platform when he was still an unknown Senate candidate. Hosting The Charlie Kirk Show from the White House was, in many ways, a natural act of loyalty. It was also a rare moment of vulnerability from a politician often cast as calculating: a man honoring his fallen friend.
But even in mourning, there is a temptation in politics that must be resisted – the temptation to turn personal loss into partisan ammunition. And that’s where Vance’s tribute stepped onto shakier ground.
During the broadcast, Vance vowed to “go after” left-wing NGOs he accused of “fomenting and facilitating violence.” One of his guests, former Trump advisor Stephen Miller, sharpened the point, warning against “unfocused anger” while urging conservatives to direct “righteous anger” against political enemies. The message was unmistakable: Kirk’s death would not only be remembered – it would be weaponized.
This is the wrong lesson to draw from such a brutal killing.
No one should minimize the rage conservatives feel at losing a friend and ally to political violence. But the danger lies in making Kirk’s death the justification for sweeping crackdowns on vaguely defined “left-wing NGOs” or in portraying one side of the political spectrum as inherently violent. Such rhetoric may rally the base, but it also feeds the very cycle of polarization that makes political violence more likely, not less.
The truth is uncomfortable for both sides: violence is not the monopoly of the left or the right. The left can point to January 6. The right can point to last week’s shooting in Utah. Neither side escapes blame. If conservatives want to honor Charlie Kirk honestly, we must be willing to admit that political violence is an American problem before it is a partisan one.
That doesn’t mean ignoring ideology. Kirk’s own career was built on identifying ideological excess – especially in higher education – and rallying young conservatives to push back. But it does mean that in the aftermath of his assassination, our first instinct should not be to widen the political battlefield. Vance’s vow to “go after” NGOs raises more questions than it answers. Who decides what qualifies as fomenting violence? Will this drag in any left-leaning nonprofit that criticizes the administration or stages protests? And do conservatives really want to hand the precedent of government crackdowns on nonprofits to future Democratic administrations?
This is the irony: in trying to honor Kirk, we risk betraying one of the principles he himself championed – free speech. Charlie Kirk was combative, sometimes divisive, but he thrived in the realm of debate. His strategy was not to silence his opponents, but to expose them, ridicule them, and out-organize them. For those who often disagreed with his methods, it’s important to note that Kirk himself built his career not by calling for government crackdowns, but by confronting his opponents directly. His approach was consistent: he thrived in the arena of debate, not in silencing dissent.
If the conservative movement takes Kirk’s death as a license to wield the state against its enemies, it will be pursuing power in a way that Kirk himself never had. Worse, it will entrench the very culture of “us versus them” politics that makes tragedies like this more likely.The better path is harder but more worthy of Kirk’s legacy: to channel grief into discipline, not escalation. That means recommitting to building institutions that last, training the next generation of leaders and modeling the resilience that Kirk himself embodied. It means condemning political violence no matter who the target is, while refusing to let the other side dictate our terms of debate. And it means holding our leaders accountable when they risk turning mourning into opportunism.
To be clear: J.D. Vance’s tribute was not malicious. It was heartfelt, and it reflected real pain. But as conservatives, we must remember that personal grief does not excuse political overreach. The state should not become an instrument of vengeance. The conservative movement should not confuse righteous anger with unchecked power.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a wake-up call. It reminds us of the fragility of civil discourse and the dangers of living in a country where political opponents are increasingly seen as enemies to be destroyed rather than fellow citizens to be debated. If conservatives want to carry Kirk’s torch forward, we must not repeat that mistake.
Let the tribute stand as a reminder of his energy, his influence, and his drive. Honoring his life doesn’t require uncritical agreement with his politics. It requires recognizing the movement he built and refusing to let his death be used as justification for more division. But let us also reject the instinct to weaponize his death. That is how we honor his legacy – not by escalating division, but by proving that even in tragedy, our movement can choose principle over vengeance. -
Chris Pratt, Christianity and Charlie Kirk
Many people reacted differently after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, but the actor Chris Pratt chose to behave in a way that few, if any, of his A-list Hollywood peers would have been comfortable with. The Guardians of the Galaxy star put a short video on X showing him praying, with his eyes tightly closed, and then he directed his fans – I almost wrote “followers”, but he does have over eight million of them on the platform – to go out and do good works. With almost self-parodic seriousness, the erstwhile Star-Lord tells them to “go outside, get some sunshine, touch some grass… you’ve got time to reach out to someone in need and share this prayer with them”, before concluding, naturally enough “Amen”.
There are, of course, many Christians in Hollywood, not least actor-director Mel Gibson, whose eagerly awaited (and sure to be insane) Passion of the Christ sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, has started filming this summer and is slated to be released in 2027. Yet Pratt is different to the Gibsons (and indeed his star, Jim Caviezels) in that he is one of the biggest stars in the entertainment industry with a well-earned reputation for being able to combine action heroics with a gift for comic timing: in other words, just like Robert Downey Jr, who went from being a well-regarded character actor with a narcotics problem to the biggest star in the industry, just because he played Iron Man.
Pratt, however, has always been open about his faith, sometimes to near-comical extremes. He posted an Instagram picture of a shining cross and exhorted his followers to prayer in language that sounded a lot like self-help – “cast down darkness, choose positivity” – and this was all because the post was his 666th. The tension between Pratt’s on-screen persona, all cocky one-liners and lazy charm, and the earnestness with which he conducts himself in matters of God would be detrimental to his career, one imagines, were it not for the fact that he has starred in some of the highest-grossing films of all time, and is, quite literally, too big to fail. If he wants to put a prayer out into the world in memory of Charlie Kirk, he is more than welcome to do so, in the eyes of studio chiefs, as long as he turns up on the Avengers: Doomsday set on time.
It is notable that Hollywood seems unsure as to how to deal with the Kirk situation. His name went conspicuously unmentioned at this year’s Emmys, although the veteran star Jamie Lee Curtis wept on the Marc Maron podcast while talking of him, saying “I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected with his faith. Even though his ideas were abhorrent to me. I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.” This seems to epitomize what many in the industry might feel, at least privately, but few want to be seen to be associated with a man who appeared to represent staunchly conservative values: the antithesis of La-La Land.
Pratt, however, seems to be immune to such criticism. Granted, there are always subsections of the internet and social media that bitch bitterly about him, calling him the “least likeable Chris” (the others being Pine, Evans and Hemsworth) and suggesting that he is a closet MAGA supporter. He may very well be, but Pratt is intelligent enough to know that the grief he would get for expressing his political opinions is not worth the catharsis that he would feel for coming clean about them. (He conspicuously failed to endorse Kamala Harris last year, although he also offered no support for Trump, either.)
Yet whether because his religion is the most important aspect of his life, or because he feels that it is a back way of connecting to his conservative fans, he is unafraid of expressing his faith, and Hollywood, for the time being at least, has to be comfortable with that, too. The industry may not want to “do” God, but Pratt, at least, can do exactly what he likes – as long, that is, as his films continue setting box office records.
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How my sister Ghislaine beat the Epstein conspiracy theories
The nine-hour interview of my sister Ghislaine, conducted under limited immunity by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over two days in late July, generated an all-too predictable uproar. The reaction became still more intense following the release of the associated transcripts and audio late last month.
Having held Ghislaine in torturous conditions of solitary confinement in the run-up to her trial – including waking her up every 15 minutes during the night for 30 months at the same time as they deliberately deprived her defense of exculpatory “Brady” material – prosecutors ensured both Ghislaine and her legal case were effectively hollowed out. Under the circumstances, she could not and did not take the stand. The rest is history.
Her encounter with the Department of Justice’s Blanche was the first time ever she had spoken to a US law enforcement official. In the interview, Ghislaine challenged – if not demolished – the multiple prevailing conspiracy theories and myths surrounding Jeffrey Epstein: from the notorious “client list” to a supposed blackmailing scheme to the way he made his money and the alleged involvement of the Mossad intelligence agency. In regard to the creation of the nonexistent client list, in particular, and other fictions, she highlighted the insidious (and hugely profitable) role of the accusers’ lawyers and the foundational (and also hugely profitable) role of Virginia Giuffre in the whole Epstein mythology. Ghislaine calls it a “narrative” that was “built upon and just mushroomed – basically… a Salem Witch trial.”
We learned late last month that Giuffre’s posthumous autofiction is to be published, which suggests that the Epstein gravy train is still chugging away.
Poor old Todd Blanche. He seems to get parachuted by his ultimate boss into “hot-button” situations: just over three months ago, the President fired the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, citing concerns of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” and appointed Blanche as the new acting librarian of Congress. The trouble is that Hayden’s deputy, Robert Newlen, assumed the role of acting librarian by default on her termination and is publicly contesting the legitimacy of Blanche’s appointment.
Blanche is not the only Todd in the news. Over in France, where I’ve spent the better part of August in Provence, home to my mother’s Huguenot Protestant ancestors – and incidentally, where she is buried – Emmanuel Todd, a public intellectual and commentator, is making headlines. Todd is perhaps the primus inter pares of declinist thinkers, who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and is now suggesting the US is in decline. He has a book, The Defeat of the West, in which he attributes the decline of western civilization largely to the collapse of Protestant values, principally of the work ethic, as well as education and social discipline. Alas, Todd offers no quick “Trumpian” fix, telling us instead we’re all going to hell in a handcart. He may well have a point.
The concept of being “wheeled to hell” as punishment is an old one. In the early 14th century, to escape political turmoil in Rome, Pope Clement V moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon. One morning this summer I found myself wandering the old town, which Petrarch called “Babylon on the Rhône.” But the efforts of various Avignon popes endowed the city with a seriously impressive collection of architectural landmarks. On the opposite side of the river, I would recommend a detour to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, the resort of the French cardinals during the 70 years of schism. The view across the river to the Papal Palace is wonderful.
Provence experienced a heatwave for most of last month, with average daily temperatures well over 90 degrees. Everything and everybody had to slow down just to cope which, to be frank, is not that hard in rural, provincial France with its traditional agricultural landscapes and quiet villages that seem eternal, made for sipping a cool glass of wine in the shade and leaving the world’s troubles to one side.
For whatever reason, however, I found I could not shake the name Todd from my mind. I discovered it comes from the Middle English word “todde” which translates as “fox.” So the name is indelibly associated with the rather foxlike qualities of cunning, intelligence and adaptability.
The late 19th-century American jockey Tod Sloan, the US’s first international sports superstar, had all those qualities in spades but his career finished badly and he was banned from racing and given the cold shoulder. He left his mark on the English language, though, when his first name was adopted into the rhyming slang used by London’s East End cockneys, giving rise to the expression: “Tod Sloan, on your own.” Over the years, the rhyme was lost, but “on your tod” came to mean being on one’s own. That’s a state which, whiling away time on holiday to beat the heat, I can certainly recommend.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
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The truth about the trans school shooter
True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit “I Don’t Like Mondays.” But that was a long time ago. Since then, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in an attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after “Robin” Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis in late August, segments of the media were conspicuously incurious about how “she” came to be consumed by such commonly masculine rage.
This grotesque incident was, as usual, pointless – and as a longtime commentator on such shootings, I despair there are so few, if any, productive observations to advance. While still exhibiting the classic, seemingly antithetical traits of grandiosity and self-loathing, this killer was, to me, uniquely repulsive. Craving distraction, then, I’ve idly kept track of which media outlets have perversely and pugnaciously referred to Robin (né Robert) Westman as female.
Naturally, for the New York Times the transgender killer is “she” or “Ms. Westman.” The BBC has also followed its guidelines to “generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question” – even if the “person in question” committed suicide on site and is no longer in a position to have preferences of any kind.
When Senator Amy Klobuchar bewailed that “this horrific offender… that he… it was all-purpose hate, right?” and called Westman “a madman,” the interviewer from America’s National Public Radio appended: “And just a point of clarification, Senator Klobuchar referenced the shooter as ‘he’. Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.” Yet the shooter having been born male had already been retrieved from the public record. The sheep-in-conservative-clothing commentator on the PBS Newshour, David Brooks, repeatedly referred to Westman as female – no big surprise. But when a Wall Street Journal editorial also reported Westman had “changed her name from Robert,” my jaw dropped. Even Fox News reported the killer “had their name legally changed.” (All italics mine.) I’ve begrudging regard for ABC’s militant neutrality. In fastidiously citing “a person,” “Westman” with no title, “the shooter” and “the suspect,” the network boycotted pronouns altogether. That takes semantic discipline. But the right-of-center New York Post’s flat-out “he,” “him” and “gunman” is more courageous, not to mention more factually informative. At long last, the Daily Telegraph in London dared to identify Westman as male – though for years it referred even to preposterous, manipulative fake-female criminals such as “Isla” Bryson as “she.”
The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged
For journalists to take a trans-mollycoddling stand in the pronoun wars isn’t merely to default to niceness. Misidentifying the biological sex of figures in news stories is an implicit declaration of support for an incoherent, unhinged ideology. This grammatical loyalty to progressive dogma apparently trumps journalistic integrity – the obligation to report the truth – and even decency. Chronicling the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting, the New York Times and the BBC are pandering to the tender feelings of someone who’s 1) a would-be mass murderer (the successful kind, by a rather arbitrary definition, kills four or more); 2) insane; and 3) dead. We alive people resent once-reputable news outlets choosing the occasion of two murdered children and at least 18 seriously injured people to propagandize and yet again defy biological reality.
Media kowtowing to trans orthodoxy alienates their mainstream audience. Incorrect pronouns drive news consumers nuts. Alluding to a burly guy in a pink wig with a five o’clock shadow as “she” makes journalists seem like fools and readers and viewers feel mocked. Even the wussy middle course of calling trans people “they” leads to grammatical confusion. Also late last month, the Telegraph reported that another (male) transgender killer, “Joanna” Rowland-Stuart, “stabbed their partner to death with a samurai sword.” The following para refers to Joanna’s attack in “their Brighton home.” Does that mean the couple’s home, or only Joanna’s?
In that case, the court has deemed the killer Joanna “unfit to plead,” meaning he’s bonkers. Is a pattern developing? Despite multiple cases of trans murderers whose sanity was dubious, I’d not claim, as some conservative pundits do, that trans people are grossly overrepresented in the depressingly long roster of American mass murderers. Yet people who are mentally ill in other respects are consistently the most susceptible to deciding they were “born in the wrong body.” The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged.
We’ve turned confusion about which sex you are into a reasonable, dare I say normal, source of distress that demands redress, not by curing a delusion but encouraging it. Declaring you’re trans is a moment of self-discovery that we celebrate for its “authenticity” and “bravery.” In the olden days of Psycho, a man wearing women’s clothing sent an ominous signal that there’s something off about them.
Yet Westman’s transgenderism was so socially acceptable that it functioned as disguise – cloaking a manic mishmash of malice toward Jews, children, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Donald Trump, doubtless everyone else and, not to forget, himself. Rather than signal there’s something wrong here, Westman’s dressing as a woman actually camouflaged the warning signs that the young man was out of his tiny mind. The seminal mistake in the progression of this demented transgender movement was no longer recognizing gender dysphoria as a mental disorder.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15 2025 World edition.
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Why Anthropic AI is finally paying me
Word came down last week of a court judgment that means, for once, that authors of books are going to get paid, including, most importantly, me. A federal judge ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a class action lawsuit under the Copyright Act, that the AI company Anthropic had taken books from pirate websites, including one called Library Genesis (LibGen), without authorization. Anthropic, which has more money, apparently, than all the gods put together, will have to pay at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars to all the authors who it robbed.
When I saw news of the judgment, my first thought was, well, I’ve written some books. What’s in it for my bottom line? I emailed my agent, Murray, who sent me to a LibGen search engine published by the Atlantic. Generally I don’t like to read the Atlantic unless I’m hate-scrolling Covidian propaganda. But I went to the search, and, magically, more than a dozen titles with my byline popped up. Three of them appear to be repeat uses of my book Never Mind the Pollacks, which is a great American rock and roll novel, but we also published it under several different titles during a period where my career was swerving all over the place like a drunk who’s stolen a sportscar. A few of them are book reviews that I don’t even remember writing. But most of them are novels or memoirs that I actually do remember writing, for the most part.
The news is all good. Once the dust settles from the settlement, I’m set to receive $3,000 per book. Cha-ching! Daddy’s getting paid and going to Sandals. The irony in all this is that I’m not one of those writers who huffs and puffs about AI. I don’t believe that I’m some sort of irreplaceable, magical being. People still ride bicycles in the age of the automobile. As long as writers accept the fact that we’re potential roadkill at any moment, we can still go about our business.
I would have happily agreed for Anthropic to use my books to train their lit-robot of the future. But they needed to ask, which, I guess, is the entire point of the lawsuit. If they had asked, I would have said, how about using only my books to train the robot? Then I’d have a friend to talk to who would get all my jokes and would understand why people were mean to me when I was a sensitive young man. Instead I’m all virtually gummed up with Clive Cussler and Jonathan Safran Foer and Jesmyn Ward and whoever else Anthropic stole from the pirates.
Besides, I didn’t get into the writing racket for the money. I did it for the glory, the fame, the freedom, and, for many years, the drugs. With the Anthropic lawsuit, I now stand to make more off my books than the advances for my last five novels combined. My yearly royalties for three decades of prodigious literary output total about $100. A five-figure outlay just because an AI company got greedy means I can finally buy the Japanese toilet of my dreams.
OK, now, let’s run a test. Grok, write a couple of sentences in the voice of Neal Pollack celebrating his financial return from the Anthropic lawsuit:
“Hot damn, the Anthropic lawsuit paid off big time, and I’m grinning ear to ear with this sweet financial win! Time to pop some champagne and keep writing – those AI pirates just funded my next masterpiece!”
That doesn’t sound like me at all. That’s the Impossible Burger version of me. My AI search engine says I don’t have to pay taxes on class-action settlements that cause me “emotional distress.” And those above sentences are quite distressing. I’m going to fight the IRS on this one. I’m a writer. Do they think I’m made of money?