WASHINGTON—In a town where access is everything, if you want to be influential, you have to go to all the right events. It’s why people lined up for hours in the freezing cold to get into last year’s Inaugural Balls. It’s why, as we speak, congressional staffers and think tank flaks are jockeying to get invites to all the swankiest Christmas parties. And it’s why a couple of legacy media outlets are reportedly spinning their wheels to get invited to this Sunday’s Kennedy Center Honors. The Associated Press and New York Times “are scrambling and begging” for press credentials just days before the event, Kennedy Center Vice President of Public Relations Roma Daravi wrote on X this week. “The date didn’t sneak up on anyone,” she added. “They knew it was coming. They just didn’t bother.” The @AP and @nytimes are scrambling and begging for @kencen Honors press credentials at the last minute. 3 days before the show… It’s the 48th Honors. The date didn’t sneak up on anyone. They knew it was coming. They just didn’t bother. — Roma Daravi (@romadaravi) December 4, 2025 This year’s class of honorees includes Michael Crawford, the Tony Award-winning singer who originated the titular role of the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway; disco legend Gloria Gaynor and country music star George Strait; “Rocky” star Sylvester Stallone; and the band KISS. The Kennedy Center Honors are always a star-studded affair, and this year is no exception. Expected guests include Tommy Hilfiger, Kurt Russell, and Garth Brooks, The Daily Caller reported this week. Inside-the-Beltway VIPs include House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. President Donald Trump will host this year’s honors in lieu of a celebrity master of ceremonies. First Lady Melania Trump is also expected to be in attendance. This year also marks the debut of new medals for honorees, designed exclusively for the Kennedy Center by Tiffany & Co. This year’s honors, which will air on CBS on December 23, come at a pivotal time for the Kennedy Center. Trump has made overhauling the cultural institution a priority in his second term, as The Daily Wire has chronicled extensively. Trump and Kennedy Center Director Richard Grenell have pushed to rectify the Kennedy Center’s financial situation and revamp its offerings. The Trump administration’s reform efforts have made the Kennedy Center a political flashpoint. Recently, Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) claimed that the Center was “being looted to the tune of millions of dollars in foregone revenue, cancelled programming, unpaid use of its facilities, and wasteful spending on luxury restaurants and hotels — an unprecedented pattern of self-dealing, favoritism, and waste.” “The press and the Senator should be ashamed of the lies they print and reprint — we want a cultural center for all Americans but they push lies to sow division amongst Americans for their selfish moment in a headline,” Daravi said in response to Whitehouse’s allegations. Sources close to the matter tell The Daily Wire that the Times and the AP claim they missed the email inviting them to apply for press credentials. While neither outlet responded to a request for comment, Daravi addressed the missed email claims, saying simply, “They’ve had 48 years to prepare.” Full disclosure: The Daily Wire will be in attendance at the 48th Kennedy Center Honors. We didn’t miss the email.

Ratings are down. Cultural prestige? Sinking as we speak. Yet the Best Picture race is one even casual movie fans tend to track. It’s the night’s biggest honor, and having a Best Picture logo next to a film title still holds some sway in the culture. That’s even though most people didn’t see, or can’t remember, the last few Best Picture winners. And, each awards season, experts track which film has the best chance to win that Oscar trophy. It’s the ultimate horse race, with box office results, critical reviews, and cultural resonance influencing the outcome. Is this year’s race over already, weeks before some Oscar-bait films have even reached theaters? It sure looks that way. Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” stars Leonardo DiCaprio and has already won multiple honors, and the awards season has barely begun. The film swept the National Board of Review’s 2025 honors, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor (DiCaprio). That’s in addition to best picture wins with the Atlanta Film Critics Circle, the Gotham Awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle. The film also scored big with Sight and Sound’s 2025 Best Films Of The Year List, topping its 2025 chart. More will follow, no doubt. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures – copyright Warner Bros. Pictures “One Battle After Another” stars DiCaprio as a bumbling protester who hangs up his revolutionary jacket to raise his mixed-race daughter (Chase Infiniti). His radical past comes back to haunt them when a racist, out-of-control Colonel (Sean Penn) tracks his daughter down for nefarious purposes. It doesn’t take Peter Falk’s iconic Columbo to sleuth out why “One Battle After Another” is generating so much critical adoration. Yes, Anderson is a top-tier filmmaker, and some of the sequences in the film prove exhilarating. The film’s political point of view is pure catnip to a community wedded to progressive ideals. The story’s heroes are anti-government radicals who will do whatever it takes to free illegal immigrants taken into U.S. custody. If that means holding U.S. officials at gunpoint, setting off fireworks, or bombing buildings, so be it. The U.S. forces shown throughout the film are almost uniformly cruel, callous, or just plain evil. A subplot involving a White Nationalist group feels too extreme even for your average MS NOW anchor. It wasn’t for movie critics, apparently. They’ve endlessly praised the film to the tune of a 94% “fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes.com. The general public liked it, albeit less, via an 85% “fresh” score. Some scribes have tried to downplay the film’s far-Left politics, a funnier take than any late-night monologue. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures – copyright Warner Bros. Pictures It helps that no other 2025 release has “Best Picture” written all over it. Director Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” is getting early raves, but the film has barely registered at the box office ($1.7 million to date) and offers a maudlin subject. The film imagines what William Shakespeare and his wife endured after the loss of their son. The Boss biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” flopped in theaters and didn’t get enough critical love. Art remains subjective, but Hollywood politics are another matter. Not only does “One Battle After Another” reflect the industry’s hard-Left embrace of open borders, it’s a thumb in the eye to both ICE and President Donald Trump. The latter will be irresistible to Academy voters. And, chances are, the film’s key stars will lean into that sentiment during awards season. The various arts honors do more than help predict which films and actors will emerge triumphant on Oscar night. They let the early winners test out their acceptance speeches, another unwritten part of their Oscar campaigns. Uncork a few fiery “thank you… and” speeches, hitting all the “approved” targets along the way, and a star’s Oscar chances perk up. Now, imagine what DiCaprio would say at the Oscar podium while collecting his second Best Actor statue for “One Battle After Another.” He used his 2017 podium time to promote his Climate Change agenda. Kevin Winter/Getty Images There’s less than zero chance he won’t blast President Trump’s attempt to enforce immigration laws in any 2026 speech. And he won’t be alone. Recent Oscar ceremonies have dialed back, to a degree, on the hard-Left polemics. Even far-Left host Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t leaned into his progressive bona fides in recent years. That will change in 2026 after a full year of President Trump’s return to the White House. Is there a better film to reflect that “resistance” than “One Battle After Another”? That’s rhetorical. We still have a few more weeks before the year ends. Films like “Marty Supreme,” starring perennial Oscar-bait Timothee Chalamet, hit theaters on Christmas Day. Still, anyone who grasps Oscar culture knows a heavy favorite when he or she sees one. There is one dark path forward that could derail “One Battle After Another.” The film’s gauzy framing of violence against immigration enforcement took an ugly turn when real attacks on ICE agents broke out close to the film’s release. The September attack on a Dallas-based ICE facility didn’t kill any U.S. agents, but it did leave two illegal immigrants dead. The media complex didn’t connect the attack to “One Battle After Another,” but if similar events follow, the connection may be unavoidable. Hollywood may want to shrug off any ties between the film and actual carnage, but it might be enough of a problem to coax Oscar voters to select another, less incendiary film. * * * Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic, and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at HollywoodInToto.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. * * * 50% off DailyWire+ annual memberships will not return for another year, so don’t miss this deal! Join now at DailyWire.com/cyberweek.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether President Donald Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship is legal, according to reports. Upon re-entering the White House, Trump signed an executive order to prevent the children of illegal immigrants or foreigners with temporary visas from receiving citizenship upon birth. It quickly faced a slew of lawsuits arguing that the order violated the 14th Amendment, which affords citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The high court is now expected to decide in late June or early July on the longtime interpretation of the 14th Amendment, according to The New York Times. In June, the high court justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines to allow Trump to try to end birthright citizenship in some parts of the country. 50% off DailyWire+ annual memberships will not return for another year, so don’t miss this deal! Join now at DailyWire.com/cyberweek. The ruling, however, did not address the question of birthright citizenship itself, which is the practice of granting automatic citizenship rights for babies born on United States soil, regardless of their parents’ citizenship status. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court in September to take up the case after several lower courts paused the order. “The lower court’s decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the President and his Administration in a manner that undermines our border security. Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people,” the Justice Department wrote in the appeals at the time.

Grand jury documents related to investigations into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein will be made public after a federal judge in Florida ordered their release on Friday. U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith granted a request from the Justice Department for the documents to be released months after another federal judge in Florida said she did not have the legal authority to make the grand jury information public. Smith ruled that the bill calling for the release of the Epstein files signed by Trump last month prevails over the normal rules safeguarding the secrecy of grand jury documents. In July, U.S. District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg said that she could not grant the Justice Department’s request because “the Court’s hands are tied,” a point that the federal government conceded at the time. Rosenberg added that the Justice Department did not provide sufficient arguments for unsealing records protected by rules that “emphasize a presumption of secrecy” and protect participants from disclosing information given to a grand jury. In Smith’s order on Friday, the judge did not set a date for the release of the documents, which stem from investigations into Epstein from 2005 and 2007 that were conducted in West Palm Beach, Florida, NBC News reported. The Justice Department first moved to unseal the grand jury documents after controversy erupted over the Trump administration’s July 6 memo, which concluded that there was no “credible evidence” to prove that Epstein kept a client list. 50% off DailyWire+ annual memberships will not return for another year, so don’t miss this deal! Join now at DailyWire.com/cyberweek. The release of the Epstein grand jury documents could reveal more information to the public about the financier’s crimes and connections. The Epstein controversy has plagued the Trump administration for much of the president’s second term. Congress finally passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last month, and Trump signed the bill into law, giving the Justice Department 30 days to release the evidence and records it has compiled on Epstein. The president signed off on the release of more Epstein files after months of pushing back against calls for their release and calling the focus on the Epstein files a “hoax” pushed by the legacy media and the Democratic Party. Democrats and Republicans released additional pages of documents from Epstein’s estate last month, some of which included emails from Epstein discussing Trump. Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to Epstein’s crimes, and Epstein’s victims have not made any allegations against the former president. Epstein was also close to powerful Democrats. Last month, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s ties to Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton and former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers.

The Small Business Administration on Friday ordered all companies that get preference for government contracts due to their status as “socially disadvantaged” minorities to provide detailed financial information to show they are not defrauding the program, The Daily Wire has learned. The change represents a move to reevaluate a decades-old program that Washington insiders have long recognized as openly corrupt. The 8(a) program is one of the largest and oldest DEI initiatives in the country, affecting contracts at almost all federal agencies. SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler said there is mounting evidence that minority contracts had become “a pass-through vehicle for rampant abuse and fraud,” especially after the Biden administration raised the target for contracts that are “set aside” for minorities from 5% to 15% of all contracting dollars. “We’re committed to thoroughly reviewing every federal contract, contracting officer, and contractor — while working alongside federal law enforcement,” she said. The records will shed light on the extent to which companies are subcontracting out the work to non-“disadvantaged” firms, while keeping a cut for serving as a middleman or “front” company. That would defeat the purpose of the program and result in higher prices for government services across the board. Undercover journalist James O’Keefe caught employees from one such firm boasting that they did exactly that. O’Keefe Media Group published a video exposing ATI Government Solutions, an 8(a) firm based on Native American ownership that is run by whites. Anish Abraham, senior director at ATI Government Solutions, acknowledged that his company was a “pass-through” that got a $100 million contract, kept $65 million, and paid another firm $35 million to do the work. Such reports “have raised questions about widespread misconduct within the 8(a) Business Development Program, adding to years of credible concerns that the program designed to serve ‘socially and economically disadvantaged’ businesses has become a vehicle for institutionalized abuse at taxpayer expense,” the SBA wrote to each of the 4,300 “disadvantaged” contractors. The letter, exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, requires that the companies upload their general ledger, bank statements, payroll register, subcontracting agreements, and other detailed internal information to the agency. Those who do not comply by January 5 risk losing their eligibility for contracts. Most of the records are requested in the computer-friendly CSV format, which may suggest a plan to use artificial intelligence to help find “pass-through” abuse. Loeffler said SBA’s top-to-bottom review of the so-called 8(a) minority contracting program, which has been in place since 1978, began in June after a criminal case revealed that one such firm had received more than half a billion dollars in USAID contracts after bribing a government official with $1 million. The 8(a) program is also called “set-aside” contracting because contracts are set aside from open competition and can be “sole-sourced” to a specific company, without needing to show that it’s the best qualified or provides the best value. Without the 8(a) program, the contracting officer would have had difficulty following through on the bribe because he would be tasked with running a competition and awarding the work to the firm that was objectively best. Pleading guilty were USAID official Roderick Watson; Walter Barnes, founder of Vistant, a company whose business model was getting contracts based on “disadvantaged” status and pairing with other companies who did the work; and Darryl Britt, founder of 8(a) form Apprio Inc. Britt was, at the time of his guilty plea, a member of Carnegie Mellon University’s Business Board of Advisers. A mark of how minority set-aside contractors routinely game the system is how small companies receive contracts for widely divergent fields of work — a sign that they are simply having others do it or hiring staff afterwards with little knowledge of the subject area. Apprio’s contracts with government agencies range from developing websites to medical care to human resources to “ebola efforts.” Other USAID contracts to Vistant include a $15 million contract “to help protect cyberspace and communications network domains to block the spread of insecure information.” A $28 million USAID contract was for “lab institutional contractor – mega bridge contract,” and a $40 million contract was for “creation of the PDEX award.” A $204,000 contract was for a “senior advisor to the Belarus country director.” Even after Barnes’s misconduct had been detected, a joint venture between Vistant and a “small business” operating out of a home, called CollaborateUp, was awarded potential work up to $800 million to solve “the root causes of irregular migration from Central America to the United States.” Since the O’Keefe exposé of ATI Government Solutions, whose website openly advertised its main selling point as its ability to easily win government contracts through its affiliation with a Native American tribe, the SBA suspended the firm and a slew of others tied to its chief executive, Firmadge Crutchfield, who is white. Tribe members emotionally said they were victims of the pass-through scheme, and that if a contracting program intended to steer work to Native Americans, that work should actually be done by Native Americans. The minority set-aside program will need to be re-evaluated anyway because of recent court rulings blocking the government from doling out benefits based on race.