Last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA finally ended what many of the President’s supporters saw as a “judicial insurrection.” Upon assuming office, President Trump issued a number of executive orders involving a variety of issues. They were immediately challenged by lawsuits filed in a select group of district courts, virtually all of which issued universal injunctions that seriously impeded implementation of the President’s agenda. Such injunctions have long been criticized by numerous legal scholars and several members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Kagan would never be dumb enough to overtly attack her colleagues in the way Jackson did in Trump v. CASA. Nonetheless, her politics are no less dangerous. Justice Kagan has been particularly trenchant on this subject. During a 2022 seminar at Northwestern University’s School of Law, for example, Kagan succinctly explained her view on the issue: “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.” Friday’s ruling, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, validated Kagan’s position: “These injunctions, known as ‘universal injunctions,’ likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Yet Kagan refused to join the majority. Instead, like Justice Jackson, Kagan joined a dissenting opinion in which Justice Sotomayor accuses the Trump administration of gamesmanship for using Trump v. CASA to challenge the jurisdiction of district courts: “Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along. A majority of this Court decides that these applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all.” Why would Kagan join such a dissent? She knows perfectly well that, from 1789 to 1963, district courts never issued universal injunctions. As Justice Barrett writes: The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority … That the absence continued into the 20th century renders any claim of historical pedigree still more implausible. Even during the deluge of constitutional litigation that occurred in the wake of Ex parte Young, throughout the Lochner Era, and at the dawn of the New Deal, universal injunctions were nowhere to be found. Kagan’s refusal to join the Court’s six-justice majority is particularly strange considering a point she made about “forum shopping” during her remarks at the Northwestern University seminar noted above. One reason the Court’s six-justice majority ruled that district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions is that it encourages plaintiffs to “shop” for judges they know will rule against Trump on virtually any issue. As Attorney General Pam Bondi pointed out at a Friday news conference, of 40 nationwide injunctions issued since Trump returned to the White House, 35 emanated from only five liberal district courts. Justice Kagan is easily the smartest of the three left-leaning justices that declined to support the Court’s majority, and her public remarks have made it clear that she thoroughly understands the constitutional nuances of the issue. Consequently, it’s all but impossible to escape the conclusion that her primary motivation is political. She, like Sotomayor and Jackson, is not guided by a consistent or even coherent judicial philosophy. Nor does she feel a duty to adhere to the language of the Constitution. Nonetheless, Kagan is too intelligent to join the deliberately disrespectful dissent presumably penned by Justice Jackson. The majority’s ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate. The very institution our founding charter charges with the duty to ensure universal adherence to the law now requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness. With deep disillusionment, I dissent. This last sentence, like most of Jackson’s dissent, is clearly meant as an insult to the six justices who made up the majority in this case. The traditional Supreme Court verbiage used in even the most indignant dissent goes as follows, “I respectfully dissent.” Justice Jackson was plainly at pains to make it blindingly obvious that she neither agrees with nor respects Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, or Thomas. This was too much for Barrett: “JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too.” Kagan would never be dumb enough to overtly attack her colleagues in the way Jackson did in Trump v. CASA. Nonetheless, her politics are no less dangerous. Her principles, like those of Jackson and Sotomayor, are purely transactional. The obvious reason she objected to universal injunctions in 2022, yet reversed her position in 2025, is that the President in the former case was a Democrat. Now that a Republican resides in the White House, such injunctions are needed to check his power. She couldn’t care less about hypocrisy. This is, for her, nothing more than a bourgeois concept with no meaning in the real world. READ MORE from David Catron: No, Trump Didn’t Violate the War Powers Act The Sanctuary State Confederacy The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

A New York Times article last Wednesday teased both a fascinating mystery and its solution, “Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?” But the author, Joseph Bernstein, delivered neither, only a rambling circumstantial essay full of standard feminist drivel and distortion. The most popular novels in the 19th Century, for instance, were not written by women as Bernstein claims but by men like Dickens, Tolstoy, Dumas, Collins, Twain, and many more. The works of now beloved female novelists such as Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) and Bronte sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) took much longer to be recognized as classic — in Emily’s case, after her death. The women who “dominate the publishing industry” are the same kind of women that dominate Hollywoke — man-bashing, woman-mutating feminists. But then the title of the piece is false. Novel-reading men have not disappeared. Novels for men have — from mainstream publishers, if less totally than male-driven fare from Hollywoke. Bernstein touches upon the reason then instantly excuses it. “Starting in the 1980s, a new generation of women came to dominate the publishing industry.” The idea, he adds, “that liberal politics have destroyed the space for male readers — seems like a huge oversimplification. And many people who care about the future of the male fiction reader are keen to avoid it.” Well, I care about the future of the male fiction reader. My career as a male fiction writer depends on him. So, I won’t ignore the point, I’ll address it directly. Liberal politics have destroyed the space for male readers. The women who “dominate the publishing industry” are the same kind of women that dominate Hollywoke — man-bashing, woman-mutating feminists. They’re the reason my four novels thus far aren’t published by major presses like Hachette, Harper Collins, and Random House but by boutique publishers (very discriminating ones). A quick Groking of the Hachette Books hierarchy tells the tale. Publisher Mary Ann Naples “has extensive experience, having served as publisher at Disney Book Group (alarm bell right there) and Rodale Books … Her focus on diverse, impactful storytelling supports feminist literature.” Let’s try Hachette‘s second-in-command, Associate Publisher Lauren Marino. “Marino’s work emphasizes platformed authors with bold ideas, often addressing gender and social issues, making her a key figure in feminist publishing.” Hachette may as well post a “Male Authors — and Readers Not Wanted” warning. That includes me. My last novel, The Washington Trail, is a private-eye mystery in the tradition of Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Fleming. None of those legends would stand a chance in today’s publishing monolith, nor would their famous heroes. All would be considered unprintably sexist. In fact, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are currently being re-edited to remove offensive content. And if James Bond can’t escape the harpies’ claws, what chance does my detective Mark Slade have? All they do is help pretty damsels in distress and appreciate femme fatales, both endeavors disallowed as toxic masculinity. The prime reason the major publisher book is not completely closed to male fiction readers is the roster of enough moneymaking veterans in the field, like Lee Child (Jack Reacher), Stephen Hunter (Bob Lee Swagger), Jack Carr (James Reece), and Andrew Klavan (Cameron Winter). Some of these guys are getting on, however. Two modern masters of the hard-boiled genre — Nelson DeMille and Robert Parker — are dead. Replacements for them are unwelcome. That is unless they tow the progressive line, which comes naturally to too many of them. Parker’s successor on the Spenser books, sportswriter Mike Lupica, has no regard for what made Spenser work — the spirit of Raymond Chandler. And Philip Marlowe would never question his appreciation for a beautiful client the way Lupica’s Spenser embarrassingly does. “A knockout by any measure. It was something I knew I couldn’t verbalize without sounding as if I were objectifying her, and being on my way to Weinstein Island.” Robert Parker must be cringing in his grave. A much better writer of male-driven detective fiction — in fact the most successful author of all time — is a woman, J.K. Rowling. Yet you wouldn’t know it from her hard-boiled main hero, Cormoran Strike, a London P.I. with a prosthetic leg, his real one having been blown off in Afghanistan. Though you might guess it from his smart, beautiful partner, Robin Ellacott. Because, as with her record-setting Harry Potter books, Rowling knows how to appeal equally to male and female readers. Strike doesn’t fret about objectifying girls. Robin doesn’t fight men twice her weight. And Hachette, Rowling’s publisher, isn’t going to tell her to rebalance that. But one San Francisco bookstore won’t be carrying her books. The Booksmith objected on social media to Rowling using her Harry Potter money to finance the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, stating it aims to undermine transgender rights, apparently by protecting women from “transgender women” — or men — invading their spaces. And she also lost another male celebrity, after Boy George two weeks ago, actor Pedro Pascal. Pascal called Rowling a “heinous loser.” Reading her fiction might improve his vocabulary. Boys are better off not reading some children’s fiction, such as Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, Prince and Knight, and Intersection Allies. Until last week, Montgomery County schools were forcing them to do so. On Friday, the Supreme Court decided that they didn’t have to. Now they can read good young people’s novels about manly heroes and their ladies fair. And when they get older, who knows, maybe a Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, or Mark Slade mystery. Whether angry women like it or not. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: My Own Operation Midnight Hammer — Iran Women Who Are Culture War Heroines The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Beginning with Bill Clinton’s statement in May 1995, every American president has pledged to the nation and the world that Iran would not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Those were nothing but words and the Iranians ignored them. They, of course, continued their nuclear weapons development program at all the speed they could muster. That era ended when, on June 22, 2025, President Trump launched “Operation Midnight Hammer.” He has said that regime change in Iran is not his objective. His thinking should change and very quickly. The flying time from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Iran’s nuclear sites is over 18 hours more than enough to dull anyone’s senses. The B-2s were heavily-loaded, each with two of the MOPs: a 30,000-pound ground penetrating bomb. The seven B-2 bombers then had to fly in enemy air space for about 40 minutes and then deliver their bomb loads in about two minutes: 120 seconds. Thanks to the overwhelming professionalism and competence of our air crews, they were able to do that with ultimate precision. At the same time, about 30 dozen U.S. cruise missiles were fired at the other targets in Iran. More U.S. aircraft supported the B-2 strikes in the precision strike. Iran fired several missiles at our Qatar air base, Al-Udeid, in response. Iran reportedly gave Qatar advance warning of the attack. Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said later that some 40 of our young folks manning Patriot missiles shot down all the incoming missiles. It was the biggest engagement of U.S. Patriot missile batteries on record. Our bombs hit the three principal Iranian nuclear development sites, Fordo, Isfahan, and Natanz. It’s possible that the bomber crews managed to “double tap” the Iranian facilities, dropping a second bomb into the crater created by the first. President Trump says those sites were obliterated, which is probably close to the truth. Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, says they were hardly scratched, which is a blatant lie. It’s noteworthy that Khamenei’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, admitted in an interview on state TV that the U.S. strikes caused serious damage. We know we can’t believe anything that comes out of the Iranian government whether it agrees with what we want to believe or not. More sources are coming out to say that the damage created by the B-2 bombs was very serious. Iran is down, but not out. That can come only with the fall of the ayatollahs’ regime. Saudi Arabia said it was following the attack with grave concern. Other Middle Eastern nations said much the same. European reactions, as expected, saw the strikes as expanding the conflict. UK Prime Minister Sir Keith Starmer said that Iran “can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon,” adding that the U.S. action can be seen as an effort to “alleviate that threat.” Starmer urged a return to diplomacy. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called on Iran to “immediately begin negotiations” with Israel and the United States. Right. As if negotiations could possibly be effective to deny Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Last week Trump announced a cease-fire in the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. He also denied that any deal with Iran would include incentives in the amount of billions of dollars to relieve the stress on Iran’s economy. No new negotiations can proceed on that basis. Our media’s typical reaction to the U.S. strikes are consonant with that of CNN. As one wag put it, CNN first denied that Iran was working on nuclear weapons and then, after the strikes, said that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon within days. There are two opportunities here for President Trump. The first is an expansion of his “Abraham Accords” and the second is an order to the CIA to topple the ayatollahs’ regime. The Abraham Accords, by which several Arab nations recognized Israel and made peace with it, are clearly the greatest diplomatic accomplishment of Trump’s first term. After the B-2 strikes on Iran there can be no question of America’s dedication to the defense of Israel. Saudi Arabia, which fears Iran more than most nations, has been playing a very cagey game and it will probably continue to do so. It will probably put off any Abraham Accords agreement, as will several other Arab nations following the Saudi example. If more can be persuaded to join the Accords, cementing those deals would help stabilize the Middle East for many years. This column has repeatedly urged the president to issue a secret Presidential Directive to the CIA to help topple the Iranian regime. Tens of thousands of Iranians have demonstrated against their government. If — and this is a huge “if” — a credible group can be established, and if its leadership can be shown to be worthwhile, it is time to fund, arm, and share intelligence with the Iranians with the aim of removing the Iranian regime. That will be a hard task and the CIA may not be up to it. But we have to try because there is no other solution to the Iranian problem. Trump wants to be a peacemaker. He has the opportunity to pursue peace through an expansion of the Abraham Accords and regime change in Iran. He has said that regime change in Iran is not his objective. His thinking should change and very quickly. READ MORE from Jed Babbin: MOPping Up Iran Iran Miscalculated. The Ayatollahs Must be Removed. The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a number of significant decisions and opinions last week, ranging from landmark rulings on universal injunctions and supporting age-verification mandates for pornography websites to allowing states to defund abortion giants and letting parents opt their children out of LGBT-themed classroom lessons. One of the most significant decisions, though, had little to do with actually interpreting the law and much more to do with lambasting the most junior Justice’s interpretation of the law. We have all encountered someone like Jackson … someone obliviously pretentious, someone who invariably makes herself the center of attention. In the case Trump v. Casa, Obama-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion, arguing against the majority’s holding that universal injunctions have no constitutional basis. Writing for the majority, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett carefully dismantled and responded to Sotomayor’s dissent, placing the dissenting Justice’s arguments on a par with the arguments made in the case before the Court earlier this year and addressing all three (Sotomayor’s, the Trump administration’s, and the plaintiffs’) all together. Barrett also addressed a dissent penned by Biden-appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson, but her treatment of that second dissent was far briefer, and Jackson’s arguments were noticeably not placed on a par with anything. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barret bluntly wrote. “Observing the limits on judicial authority — including, as relevant here, the boundaries of the Judiciary Act of 1789 — is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law. Justice Jackson skips over that part,” wrote Barret, in her curt response to Jackson’s argument. She continued: Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese” … [Jackson] seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” … In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” … That goes for judges too. It is exceedingly rare for a sitting Supreme Court to so thoroughly eviscerate another member of the Court in so public a forum, and rarer still for five other Justices to sign their names to it. Perhaps it’s not a shock — in fact, it’s almost to be expected — that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would greenlight Barret’s dismissive, two-paragraph castigation, but it is something of a shock that Chief Justice John Roberts, so perpetually preoccupied with consensus and the unity of the Court, would put his name on Barrett’s opinion without qualification. The most surprising aspect of the majority’s agreed-upon shaming of Jackson’s “legal reasoning,” if such it can be called, is that it took so long to publish something of the sort. While campaigning for the White House in 2020, Joe Biden promised to nominate a “black woman” to any potential Supreme Court vacancy, should he win the election, thus denoting Jackson as an obvious DEI hire when she was nominated to the Court in 2022. Little surprise then that in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the companion case to the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College decision that struck down affirmative action, Jackson blatantly defended affirmative action. Jackson’s judicial tenure, from the district court-level to the Supreme Court, has been distinguished by much sharing of her own opinion, in addition to tendencies which have earned the online moniker of “theater kid” behavior. Numerous reports and analyses have found that Jackson is the most talkative member of the Court. During the Supreme Court’s 2022-2023 term, Jackson spoke a staggering 78,800 words during oral arguments; the next-wordiest Justice was Sotomayor, at just over 50,000 words spoken, trailing nearly 30,000 words behind Jackson. During the 2023-2024 term, Jackson was once again the Justice who spoke the most. According to a SCOTUSblog analysis, Jackson does not use oral arguments to ask questions but to advance arguments herself and “make substantive points about the case being argued.” Despite her abnormally high word count, Jackson actually speaks less frequently than many of her colleagues on the Court; in other words, while other Justices take turns asking questions and follow-up questions, Jackson launches into monologues and tirades. Even Sotomayor, previously considered the most progressive and activist member of the Court, told Jackson to shut up in a case earlier this year. When Jackson repeatedly interrupted an attorney who was trying to answer her questions, Sotomayor snapped, “Just let him finish.” Jackson also has a flair for high school-style theatrics and what she must consider to be humor. In a 2019 case centered on President Donald Trump’s White House Counsel Don McGahn refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena, Jackson, then serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote, “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.” In her dissent against last week’s Trump v. CASA ruling, Jackson wrote (and I wish I were making this up), “[T]o the majority, the power-hungry actors are . . . (wait for it) . . . the district courts.” The only time that the “wait for it” line was ever even remotely funny was the first time that it was said by Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother — and even then, it was chuckle-worthy at best. In further evidence substantiating the “theater kid” allegations, Jackson appeared in a Broadway performance earlier this year. No, not a beloved classic like The Phantom of the Opera or Les Misérables, but a feminist reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet does not commit suicide, but instead discovers that Romeo was bisexual and thus embarks on her own journey full of feminism, LGBT content, and non-binary allies. Despite having already rapidly advanced through the federal judiciary to a seat on the Supreme Court, Jackson cried out onstage, “I did it! I made it to Broadway!” She has also been known to sing selections from musicals while doing book tours. In her 2024 memoir, Jackson wrote that when she applied to Harvard University, she told admissions officials that “I wished to attend Harvard as I believed it might help me ‘to fulfill my fantasy of becoming the first Black, female Supreme Court justice to appear on a Broadway stage.’” We have all encountered someone like Jackson — whether a coworker, a classmate, a family member, or just someone at the periphery of our social circle — someone obliviously pretentious, someone who invariably makes herself the center of attention, someone who thinks she’s brilliant but has neither the sense nor the grace to recognize when she’s in the presence of genius, someone who mistakes strongly-held opinion for irrefutable logic. Except perhaps in the case of the most saintly among us, we all snap sooner or later. Last week, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority snapped. After only a few years of Jackson’s presence on the bench, the fatigue had become too much to bear. When the rest of us snap, we are likely to be reprimanded by mom, or a teacher, or human resources; it’s not at all probable that Barrett will get a call from H.R. telling her to play nice. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: The Myth of Magic Soil Catholicism Is Not a ‘Foreign Influence’ in America The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

For three decades, Brad Pitt has been punished for the crime of being a good-looking man in an industry that mistakes handsome faces for empty heads. Critics have spent his entire career treating him like Hollywood’s most photogenic prop, as if talent and attractiveness were mutually exclusive. This intellectual snobbery has cost us proper recognition of one of cinema’s most underrated performers. His best roles aren’t just about looking sharp; they’re about exposing the cracks beneath the image, and what happens when the myth starts to lose potency. The man can actually act. Always could. But admitting this means acknowledging our own prejudices. As an Irishman, I’ll even forgive him for that terrible accent in The Devil’s Own, where he plays an IRA gunman who sounds like he learned English from a Lucky Charms commercial (Some cinematic sins transcend nationality). The Brad Pitt rehabilitation project begins, almost inevitably, with Fight Club. I know — every disaffected young man with a bookshelf and a grudge cites it as gospel. But that doesn’t make it any less true. While Edward Norton’s narrator does the philosophical heavy lifting, Pitt’s Tyler Durden steals the show. He’s pure kinetic energy wrapped in a leather jacket. Pitt doesn’t just deliver Palahniuk’s anti-consumerist manifestos, he embodies them with a feral charisma that makes blowing up your IKEA catalogue look like spiritual awakening. Watch him again — really watch him — and you’ll see what so many missed in 1999: Pitt isn’t just playing cool. He’s playing the idea of cool so precisely it becomes performance art. It’s not method. It’s myth-making. And it worked so well that critics couldn’t see past the swagger. This understanding of persona as performance would become Pitt’s secret weapon. In Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, he disappears entirely into Mickey O’Neil, a bare-knuckle boxing “pikey” — a term used, often pejoratively, for Irish Travellers — whose accent is so thick it practically demands subtitles. On paper, it’s a side role meant for comic relief or cartoon chaos. But Pitt doesn’t phone it in; he goes full throttle. His Mickey isn’t just a wild card — he’s the film’s gravitational force, unpredictable and magnetic. It’s a weird, wiry, twitching performance full of physicality and rhythm, all built on the deliberate decision not to be understood. And somehow, that gamble works. Pitt knew exactly what Snatch required: characters turned up to 11. He calibrated Mickey to match Ritchie’s fast-cut, hyper-stylized world — and in doing so, he outshone almost everyone else on screen. It was a supporting role that should’ve been forgettable. Instead, it became unforgettable. But it was Quentin Tarantino who truly unlocked Pitt’s potential. In Inglourious Basterds, Lieutenant Aldo Raine is pure Tennessee theatrics and testosterone, a man who speaks in italics and treats Nazi scalping like a sacred calling. Pitt leans into the absurdity without winking at the audience — a delicate balance that lesser actors would have botched. The “Bon-jorno” scene alone should have earned him an Oscar nomination, but apparently, the Academy doesn’t recognize comedic genius when it comes wearing a perfectly distressed military uniform. Tarantino doubled down on Pitt’s talents in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, finally giving him the role that would earn long-overdue recognition. Cliff Booth is Pitt at his most effortlessly magnetic; a stuntman drifting through the twilight of the studio system with the kind of easy confidence that only comes from a man who’s survived everything Hollywood could throw at him. The performance is so naturalistic it barely feels like acting, which is precisely the point. Pitt doesn’t just inhabit Cliff; he becomes him so completely that you forget you’re watching one of the world’s most iconic actors. The movie star versus actor debate is Hollywood’s most tired false dichotomy. Critics love to draw this distinction as if commanding the screen and inhabiting a character are somehow incompatible skills. Tell that to Cary Grant, who spent 40 years being dismissed as “just” a movie star while perfecting the most difficult acting trick of all — making it look effortless. Or consider Tom Cruise, another victim of the beauty bias, whose commitment to craft gets overlooked because, for decades, he has dared to be both compelling and conventionally attractive. The dirty secret of cinema is that true movie stars are actually the rarest actors of all. Anyone can disappear into a role with enough prosthetics and affectation. But to maintain your essential self while becoming someone else entirely? To project authenticity through the artifice of performance? That’s the kind of high-wire act that separates the wheat from the chaff. Pitt has mastered this impossible balance. His performance in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a master class in controlled chaos. As Jack Conrad, the silent film star watching his world crumble in the face of technological change, Pitt finds the tragedy within the comedy and the dignity within the dissolution. He’s playing a movie star undone by changing times while being, himself, a movie star adapting to an evolving industry. The meta-theatrical elements could have been catastrophic in lesser hands, but Pitt navigates them with surgical precision. It’s a performance that should have launched awards conversations, but Chazelle’s maximalist vision proved too much for mainstream audiences. This brings us to F1, Pitt’s just-released collaboration with Joseph Kosinski, which I had the pleasure of watching. Predictably, the reviews rolled in fast. But as always, some critics still commit the cardinal sin of reviewing the myth instead of the man on screen. The Telegraph called it “Barbie for dads,” a smug, shallow take that says more about the critic than the film. Because F1 isn’t really about cars. It’s about aging gracefully in a young man’s game. About proving yourself when the world has quietly decided your best days are behind you. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up driver stepping back onto the grid — not out of ego, but out of something closer to existential need. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw mocked his “cherubic chops” bulging under the helmet, but even that image conceals a more poignant truth: this is a film about navigating a sport — and a culture — that fetishizes youth and disposability. Pitt doesn’t just play the veteran racer; he embodies the man who refuses to fade quietly. F1 isn’t interested in nostalgia. It’s about relevance, resilience, and the quiet, unglamorous fight to stay visible in a world eager to render you obsolete. That struggle — between perception and reality, between surface and substance — runs through Pitt’s most compelling work. His best roles aren’t just about looking sharp; they’re about exposing the cracks beneath the image, and what happens when the myth starts to lose potency, when the mask no longer fits, and when the man beneath has to answer for who he really is. In a culture obsessed with authenticity, the American has mastered the art of authentic performance — never quite letting us forget we’re watching Brad Pitt, but somehow making that awareness part of the experience rather than a distraction from it. It’s a tightrope act few actors could pull off. And for doing it this well, for this long, he deserves a great deal of credit — and from parts of the media, an apology for spending years treating him like a mannequin with a pulse. READ MORE from John MacGhlionn: He Loved You More Than Life Itself — And It Killed Him Loneliness Is the New Oil The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Zohran Mamdani defeated former New York Governor and Nursing Home Czar Andrew Cuomo in the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary. While we can’t vouch for its authenticity, Mamdani provided the following statement to The American Spectator detailing his plans for New York City should he win the general election. I am not a communist. Don’t believe me? PolitiFact rated President Trump calling me a commie as false. Communism means I would seize New York City’s private property and take control of industry. If there’s one way to globalize the intifada (a phrase I will never denounce), it’s to arrest the chief opposition responsible for genocide in Gaza. I’m certain New York City’s 1.3 million Jews agree. I merely plan to open a “network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit.… (W)ithout having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers.” No longer will food-challenged New Yorkers who wish to nourish their children pay $6 for a box of Twinkies. They will pay, I don’t know, $1? Fifty cents? It doesn’t matter because I don’t care about profit. The finest roast beef will cost negative $7.89 a pound, meaning hungry New Yorkers can get infinite roast beef for their sandwiches. I feel bad for the guy running the slicer, but a sore elbow is a small price to pay for the greater good. If there’s one word socialists love more than “utopia” or “gulag,” it’s “free.” First: Free childcare will be available for children between 6 weeks and 5 years old. Oh, you don’t have the bus fare to take your kid to free childcare? Let’s make the bus rides free, too. Don’t have whatever the hot dog vendor charges for one wiener after you get off the free bus? Free hot dogs. And free salted pretzels! Those massive doughy ones cooked over hot coals. And if you cook the pretzels? Free coal. But who’s going to pay the estimated $10 billion for all this free stuff? Answer: White people. One of my proposals reads, “Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.” While taxing people because they’re Caucasian could result in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown-Jackson dissenting, “Tax the White” makes for an excellent yard sign. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) just ordered 100 of them, and she doesn’t even have a yard. Rich white people making more than $1 million a year can afford a 2 percent tax increase, as can greedy corporations whose tax rate would increase from 9 percent to 11.5 percent. That rumbling sound you hear isn’t a horde of monied white people fleeing New York for Florida; it’s a stampede of unwashed keffiyeh-masked Columbia University protesters keeping the white folks from escaping. Queer liberation means defund the police. While I tweeted that four years ago and still have no idea what it means (like, for gay people to be free, the police shouldn’t be around to protect them? What?), it sounds pretentiously profound and speaks to the deeper issue that I hate police. I deleted the tweet calling the NYPD “racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety,” not because I have newfound respect for police, but because voters inexplicably like them. Fine. Keep your uneducated Gestapo, but I’m cutting their overtime budget and the department’s $80 million communications budget. And while I won’t hire a single new policeperson to keep the community safe, I will spend $1.1 billion to create a Department of Community Safety to focus on mental health outreach teams in subways and to beef up “gun violence interrupter” programs to reduce crime. And by “gun violence interrupter” program, I mean providing free bulletproof vests to every city resident. Trust me: They’ll need them. Despite my dislike for police, I will order them to arrest Jews. One Jew specifically. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas sympathizer Medhi Hassan asked me in December whether I would welcome Netanyahu to New York City. “No. As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu,” I replied. “This is a city (where) our values are in line with international law. It’s time that our actions are also.” If there’s one way to globalize the intifada (a phrase I will never denounce), it’s to arrest the chief opposition responsible for genocide in Gaza. I’m certain New York City’s 1.3 million Jews agree. New York’s Democrats are with me, too. I’ll conclude with what former N.Y. Gov. David Patterson told Politico: “He articulates his points very well, and they make sense. You understand exactly what he’s saying.” Thank you, David! You know quality when you see it. READ MORE from Matt Manochio: Karine Jean-Pierre: A Day With the President Goldberg Wasn’t the Only Outsider on That Message Chain Editor’s Note: Mamdani neglected to include the final sentence of Patterson’s quote: “The problem is: Nobody told him there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before a House subcommittee about the HHS’s proposed 2026 budget on Tuesday, making the case that the department needs to “recalibrate its trajectory so that it transforms our health care system from a sick care system into a health care system.” Kennedy outlined the HHS’s revamped priorities to create wide-reaching reforms to the nation’s food and healthcare system as he characterized the country’s current system as unsustainable. As the MAHA initiative brings new priorities to the table that could provide real results, one would rightly question why those in power hadn’t addressed these priorities before. MAHA’s primary target, according to Kennedy, is “a special focus on the chronic disease epidemic.” He said that the HHS must tackle the problems of debilitating disease, contaminated food, toxic environments, addiction, and mental health. In addition, the HHS aims to maintain “responsible and effective service to the 100 million Americans” on government health programs while cutting costs to the American taxpayer. “We intend to do a lot more with less,” Kennedy promised. The HHS is a massive sprawling bureaucracy with a $130.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2025 (which doesn’t even include $1.7 trillion in mandatory spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs). The proposed 2026 fiscal budget cuts 25 percent of discretionary spending to a new total of $94.7 billion. The largest cuts come from the National Institutes for Health, an agency that had a $47 billion budget. The new budget cuts the agency by almost 40 percent, retaining $27 billion for NIH research. In the new proposed budget, the White House argued that the “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The administration criticized the NIH for engaging in gain-of-function research and “promot[ing] radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth.” One of the White House’s cuts to NIH spending eliminated half a billion dollars from the National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities. On Tuesday, Kennedy said that the NIH was conducting “thousands of studies that were doing nothing to improve American health.” He gave several examples too. One $2.2 million study researched “the effects of exogenous testosterone therapy on communication in gender diverse speakers,” and another “$3 million study at the University of Pennsylvania that studied anti-vaping social media campaigns targeted towards sexual gender minorities teens.” Based on these findings, HHS spending was ripe for budget curtailments. Budget Cuts Are a Drop in the Bucket Compared to Health Problems Much of the discourse surrounding HHS’s plans has focused on the department’s proposed cuts. While liberals are indignant about the cuts, DOGE has touted a major win. Currently, the HHS is No. 1 on DOGE’s agency efficiency leaderboard as the department where the most savings were found. However, as significant as the proposed budget cuts are, they are simply a drop in the bucket compared to the monumental amount that Americans spend on healthcare every year, largely due to chronic diseases. If the Trump administration is to improve America’s financial and health landscape in a significant way, the MAHA movement must successfully begin an overhaul of the country’s entire approach to health. The U.S. spends nearly one-third of the federal budget and $4.5 trillion as a nation on healthcare, yet we remain the sickest of developed nations. According to the CDC, 90 percent of the nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions.  Over 70 percent of American adults and a third of children are overweight or obese, and an estimated 38 million Americans have diabetes. The amount that our country spends on healthcare is unsustainable and continues to grow at an astonishing rate. As Kennedy argued in a post on X, “We’ve thrown trillions of dollars at our health agencies — and the American people have only gotten sicker.” Kennedy said during his opening statement on Tuesday that healthcare costs “are steadily growing at a rate 2 percent greater than the economy.” These healthcare costs have a staggering effect on America’s spiraling national debt and citizens’ medical debts. For example, Americans as a whole owe at least $220 billion in medical debts, and an estimated 12 percent of U.S. adults borrowed an estimated total of $74 billion just in the past 12 months. “If we don’t staunch this hemorrhage we will ransom our children to bankruptcy, servitude, and disastrous health consequences,” Kennedy said. MAHA’s Fundamental Healthcare Realignment Kennedy’s HHS is working to cut wasteful government spending, but MAHA is attempting a more radical realignment that addresses the widespread problems that have plagued the American food and health system for generations. In other words, the decisive question is not whether the HHS spends money or even how much money the HHS spends, but what the HSS spends money on. In fact, the new proposed HHS budget hasn’t simply made cuts. The budget also provides $500 million in new spending for the MAHA initiative, which would “allow the Secretary to tackle nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety across HHS.” Kennedy stated in the Senate’s hearing last month that a priority of his is to conduct research that has been neglected for 20 years: namely, to tackle the epidemic of chronic disease that has caused us “to go from 3 percent of American children having chronic disease … to 60 percent today. I would want to look at the over 10,000 chemicals that are now in our food, most of them have never been tested. I’d want to look at what’s causing the infertility crisis. Why are girls in this country reaching puberty 6 years … earlier than historically. Why do [teenagers] in this country have half the testosterone of a 60-year-old man.” Kennedy has undertaken a paradigm shift in the way that the government thinks about health. For decades, America’s healthcare has focused on treating the symptoms of problems without addressing the real cause. For example, Kennedy has argued that the NIH has done well to help make cancer more survivable, but questions why the NIH hasn’t asked why cancer has become so prevalent. Addressing colorectal cancer in particular, Kennedy said that “this is something that’s new to humanity. It was never known before and now it’s an epidemic in our children.” Citing numerous DEI studies, Kennedy said that much of NIH’s research funding was cut back because “very few of the studies that were being done by NIH were being done on chronic disease.” Instead, “NIH should be telling us: what are seed oils doing to our children? What is corn syrup doing to our children? What are food dyes doing to our children? What is the packaging and microplastics doing to our children? What are pesticides doing to our children?” All of these questions have significant bearing on the lives and vitality of American citizens. And Americans will continue to spend exorbitantly on medical expenses until these underlying issues are addressed. As the MAHA initiative brings new priorities to the table that could provide real results, one would rightly question why those in power hadn’t addressed these priorities before. READ MORE from Jonah Apel: Nobel Peace Prize for Trump? President Announces Congo–Rwanda Treaty After Nobel Peace Prize Recommendation What C. S. Lewis Can Tell Us About New IVF Eugenics Technology As Trump’s Federal Layoffs Continue, Critics Miss This Crucial Point The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Spain has become a “problem” for NATO because socialist president Pedro Sanchez is a problem for Spain. The cold reception he received at the NATO summit in The Hague due to his public rejection of the 5 percent defense spending increase demanded by president Trump may seem embarrassing for the Spanish leader, but could help him domestically by rallying leftist support for his scandal plagued government. Despite his efforts to control the press and social media … Spain’s newspapers, private television news channels, and lively Youtube podcasts air daily revelations of his government’s sordid affairs. While Sanchez was being chastised by Trump, opposition conservative lawmakers in Spain, cried in chorus for his resignation during sessions of Spain’s Parliament. “I only need four more votes to pass a censure motion” said center right Popular Party leader Nunez Feijo. They could come from the four parliamentary representatives of the communist Podemos Party who have distanced themselves from cascading corruption scandals involving Sanchez’s closest aides and relatives. They could stand to gain votes from disenchanted socialists in snap elections, but by confronting Trump and NATO, Sanchez may maneuver them back into his fold. “My Atlanticism does not mean servitude to Trump” Sanchez declared at a press conference following the NATO summit, stating that the increased defense expenditure required by the Alliance does not square with his signature social programs and climate change projects backed by far left and separatist groups. Since winning the presidency with a narrow plurality in 2019, Sanchez has walked a fine line between his European tailored centrist image and the radical leanings of far left groups, regional separatists and former terrorists who support his “progressive coalition.” He has gone all out against Israel over the war in Gaza, maintaining Spanish aid to NGOs identified as fronts for Hamas and even blocking the purchase of Israeli small caliber ammunition for Spain’s internal security force, the Guardia Civil. Sanchez’s first official overseas trip upon assuming Spain’s presidency was to Cuba to embrace Castro puppet premiere Diaz Canel as his socialist representatives voted against denouncing the communist regime’s human rights record at the European parliament. As the EU point man for Latin America, Sanchez slow walked sanctions on Venezuela’s Maduro regime which has laundered massive amounts of money through Spanish banks and has a former Spanish president acting as lobbyist. He has pulled close to China which is investing heavily in lithium battery factories, EV assembly plants and solar parks in Spain. The deals even involve bringing in thousands of Chinese workers slotted to occupy entire towns. He is one of the EU’s most enthusiastic supporters of open borders, encouraging a record flow of African migrants even as other European countries start clamming up. Despite his efforts to control the press and social media using the EU Digital Services Act, which he enthusiastically promoted at this year’s WEF meeting in Davos, Spain’s newspapers, private television news channels, and lively Youtube podcasts air daily revelations of his government’s sordid affairs, which are widely commented on in the European media. The latest and most serious accusations involve efforts to block investigations by the Guardia Civil into systematic kickbacks from government contractors to his transport minister and political right hand man, Jose Luis Abalos. The attorney general is now indicted, the justice minister is being investigated for false testimony, Sanchez’s wife and his brother are indicted on various charges including misuse of public funds. “The entire government has become a criminal organization managing illegal schemes for the enrichment of socialist bosses and underhanded financing of the party,” the head of the international law department at the Complutense University of Madrid, Ramon Peralta, told The American Spectator. But the opposition is stuck. Even with Socialist elder statesmen like Felipe Gonzales, who brought Spain into NATO, calling for the resignation of Sanchez, he remains determined to stay in power. Any possibility that the seven Catalan separatist MPs supporting his “Progressive Coalition” could jump ship was dashed this week when Sanchez won approval for a constitutionally questionable amnesty for separatist leaders charged with treason by packing the constitutional tribunal that judged the case with his judges. “We are seeing a degradation of democracy in Spanish politics” declared Dutch Euro MP Dirk Gotink before the European parliament. “The rule of law in Spain is being dismantled,” concurred his Polish colleague Michal Wawrykiewicz. Spain is becoming the extreme manifestation of a phenomenon running throughout the EU, in which several countries are now imposing contrived governing arrangements blocking surging conservative populist movements from power. Their increasingly brazen modus operandi has clear blessings from the EU commission, whose president, Ursula Von der Leyen, is herself facing serious corruption allegations and is the object of a censure motion presented by more than 80 Euro MPs calling for her resignation. NATO’s problem is not only about defense expenditure. The Western alliance could be undermined by the eroding legitimacy of globalist castes clinging to power in member countries. It’s a situation leading to arbitrary power grabs, distorted policies, and social tensions that can be easily exploited by Russia and China to undermine collective Western defense. Trump has threatened to “make Spain pay” for the increase in defense spending agreed on by other NATO members by doubling tariffs on Spanish imports. Sanchez says that Spanish trade with the U.S. is protected by the EU. But a trade deal with the U.S. being worked out prior to the NATO summit now appears to be on the rocks. Radicalized socialist governments know how to retain power under deteriorating economic conditions that they often turn to their advantage. A prominent lawyer involved in national security matters who requested anonymity, fears that Sanchez sees Venezuela’s regime as a “model.” Any U.S. economic pressures on Spain need to be accompanied by political action. Sanchez could be beaten at his tribal politics. The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) which holds five votes in Spain’s parliament is a Christian Democratic group that opposed the separatist terrorism of ETA , whose political heirs hold six seats in Spain’s parliament highly loyal to Sanchez. The U.S. supported the regional Basque government formed by the PNV by channeling funds for the training of a Basque security force by former British special forces personnel contracted through the London security firm, Control Risks. The U.S. might have ways to leverage the PNV to overlook its historical grudge against the Spanish right due to the repression of Basque nationalism under the Franco dictatorship a half a century ago, and join PP to oust Sanchez. NATO could pay a heavy price if Spain drifts into instability under a leftist megalomaniac seeking to sell his country and Europe to China. A Spanish exit from NATO could endanger Western control over the strategic straits of Gibraltar connecting the Atlantic with the Mediterranean where the Spanish navy has recently detected stepped up Russian naval activity. Putin would be very pleased. In one of the juiciest anecdotes emerging from the latest scandalous saga of Spain’s socialists, a hard drive found hidden in the panties of a girlfriend of former minister Abalos searched by the Guardia Civil as she left his home, contained recordings of pillow talk in which Abalos calls Sanchez “mimundi,” a colloquial term describing someone without power or influence. Sanchez is hell bent on proving that he isn’t one. The future of NATO may depend on making sure he is. READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: ‘Midnight Hammer’ Doesn’t Mean Iran Can’t Hurt Us Putin Caught in an Expanding Spiderweb The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.