On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio upset European socialists by announcing he would “bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States.” The New York Times provided an unintentionally laughable headline on Christmas Eve: They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship. The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States. Yes, censorship is defined by the Left as “tackling disinformation and abuse,” or “curbing online hate,” but it’s still suppressing and punishing speech. Imagine if European socialists censored The New York Times website or their social-media communications. But they don’t – they’re censoring “the Enemy,” the haters. So it’s all good. The headline in the paper on Christmas was "5 Fighters of Online Hate Are Barred From the U.S.," those poor hate fighters. Times reporter Adam Satariano began by painting the European censors in positive terms: Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg lead a German legal aid organization that assists individuals facing online abuse and violent threats. Clare Melford runs a British group that helps identify disinformation. Imran Ahmed is a British activist who runs an organization that has chronicled anti-vaccination content on social media. On Tuesday, the Trump administration accused all of them of a campaign of censorship against Americans. The four individuals, along with a former senior European Commission official, Thierry Breton of France, were barred from entering the United States after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “radical activists” who undercut free speech. Again, this is not merely an accusation. It's a reality. Notice that other than Rubio's "radical activists" citation, none of them are identified as leftist ideologues. It never happens in this story. They treat Rubio's accusation as dubious. Ballon and von Hodenberg's group is called HateAid. Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index. We especially call out Imran Ahmed, who runs the “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” which in 2021 tagged NewsBusters as one of the “Toxic Ten” for pushing “climate deniers” like our friend Marc Morano and his book Green Fraud. The reporter laments “Mr. Trump and others on the right have successfully pushed social media firms to roll back moderation rules that they viewed as silencing conservative voices.” They viewed? Imagine a reporter spending an entire article presenting the sun coming up as an allegation. Speaking of "silencing conservative voices," Satariano's article never quotes Rubio or any other conservative. We just get a press release for these censors. The prime minister of France turns it upside down: “These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Mr. Macron said on social media." Censorship is "digital sovereignty." The Europeans aren't just trying to "curb online hate," as you can see: The issue came to a head this month when the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X $140 million. The commission said that the site had violated the Digital Services Act by selling verification check marks that allow users to mislead others about their identities, by maintaining opaque advertising practices and by refusing to provide researchers with data access. This isn't just about fact checking or hate fighting. It's about using the power of government to aggressively supervise speech on social-media platforms, and especially conservative speech.

On Christmas Day 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem we now know as the song “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Earlier in the year, Longfellow had unsuccessfully pressured his son, Charles, not to join the Union Army. On Christmas Day, Longfellow learned his beloved son had been critically wounded at the Battle of New Hope Church. “I heard the bells on Christmas Day / Their old, familiar carols play, / and wild and sweet / The words repeat / Of peace on earth, good-will to men! “And thought how, as the day had come, / The belfries of all Christendom / Had rolled along / The unbroken song / Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” Longfellow’s life had been one of tragedy. His first wife died in childbirth. His second wife, Frances, whom he adored, burned to death in an accident. Someone dropped a lit candle on the dress she was wearing. It went up in flames, killing her. Now, Longfellow’s son’s fate was unknown on a battlefield. In a letter dated March 14, 1863, Charles informed his father that he had joined the Union Army, where he would quickly get promoted to lieutenant. “I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer,” Charles wrote. “I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good.” As Longfellow wrote on Christmas morning, feeling overwhelmed, worrying about his son and the Confederacy seemingly on the verge of winning the war, his poem turned dark. “Then from each black, accursed mouth / The cannon thundered in the South, / And with the sound / The carols drowned / Of peace on earth, good-will to men! “It was as if an earthquake rent / The hearth-stones of a continent, / And made forlorn / The households born / Of peace on earth, good-will to men! “And in despair I bowed my head; / ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said; /’”For hate is strong, And mocks the song / Of peace on earth, good-will to men!’” This year seems genuinely insane. We have an armada surrounding Venezuela. Jews fear for their lives even in the United States. Violence seems to be everywhere. People are hating their neighbors instead of loving them. Some Americans worry about Washington. Others worry about making ends meet. Everyone seems to be filled with anxiety. Despair comes easily at Christmas as we all idolize a perfect Christmas memory we live perpetually to duplicate and never quite can. This Christmas, as I write this, my wife, with stage four lung cancer, is battling the flu. My kids are sick. Bills are due. Presents must be ordered, even still, and wrapped. Balancing work and family and travel is wearing me out. Two thousand years ago, a couple had to travel from their home in Nazareth to the town of Bethlehem. With no rooms available due to local crowding, the very pregnant wife gave birth in a food trough in a barn to the King of all creation. God, who wandered the desert with the Israelites, came to the planet fully man, born in a barn. He wants a relationship so badly with us; he did that, lived a perfect life, died as if he were a criminal, then conquered death for us. We do not get to escape the troubles of the world. But God came into the world, experienced those troubles as we do, and conquered death. This world is the worst we will ever have it. Eternity calls. We just have to have the courage to make it through this world, as he did. Longfellow knew that. On Christmas Day 1863, under the weight of worry and grief, he concluded his poem thusly, “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: / ‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; / The Wrong shall fail, / The Right prevail, / With peace on earth, good-will to men.’” Merry Christmas.

Global business leader Hilary Fordwich, who won the praise of President Donald Trump for defending his foreign policy agenda, lambasted the growing anti-Semitic hatred against Israel being fomented by the world media. Fordwich, who was one of the delegates on the Newsmax Mission to Israel trip attended by MRC staff in August, sat down for an interview with MRC Business during the 2025 Jbiz Expo event organized by the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce in Atlantic City, New Jersey. MRC addressed Fordwich’s stern rebuke of the student-led Oxford Union during an interview with Sky News Australia for having the audacity to declare Israel as being a greater threat to regional stability than the terrorist state of Iran (yes, really). As Fordwich told MRC, this case was emblematic of a “disturbing trend” that is being driven in large part by “jealously” of the success of the Jewish people over the course of history, despite many hostile nations’s attempts to destroy them. Fordwich pointed the “politically incorrect” factoid out that “Ashkenazi Jewish people are amongst the most intelligent in the world. So I think Jewish intelligence, Jewish drive — basically doing the right thing by business — has been so successful; I think there’s a lot of jealousy in the world.” This is not just conjecture. A research paper published by the University of Utah’s Department of Anthropology found that “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, combined with an unusual cognitive profile.” Fordwich went deeper, arguing that religious hatred is also a fundamental factor in why the Jewish people are targeted so much today, such as what is furthered by radical Islam and revisionist interpretations of Christian theology by the anti-Semitic Groyper movement on social media: I also see the root and evil of a lot of religions. There’s a lot of religions that have wanted the death of other religions. And I think it’s fine to have your own personal beliefs, but I think it’s very wicked. As Fordwich concluded, “I think historically, you’ve seen so many religions be evil. No. Have your beliefs. Believe in your god and don’t kill other people.” Fordwich then turned her sights on the leftist reporters and anchors that have done nothing but regurgitate Hamas propaganda to continuously smear the state of Israel following the horrific genocide perpetrated by the terrorist group on October 7, 2023: “I want to ask every one of those anchors, are they either an idiot or have they just gotten amnesia?” She continued her excoriation of the media: Do they not know what happened on October 7? So maybe they should learn about not only October 7 but about Hamas. Not only was it the militants that went in and massacred innocent people and committed atrocities. But when I was in Israel, we actually saw that Hamas instructions that were to burn and that were to rape. And I don’t remember military history where you actually see those kinds of military instructions. That’s number one. Number two: What we also learned was a truth — was that after the wave of militants there was a wave of [Gaza] civilians that went in for fun to rape, and to burn, and to kill and murder. Do you think the media care about any of this? Not likely. Fordwich argued that this is all a result of “media amnesia” and “media selective reporting that they’ve just chosen to ignore facts. They’ve chosen to ignore what is now recent history?” And “Why,” asked Fordwich rhetorically. “It’s anti-Semitic and I think it’s very sad. There is no other reason other than that people have poor judgment. They have warped values and their particular religion may have taught them that they should be saying this and doing this.” Fordwich also reasoned that the vast hatred against the Israeli state is also being stirred by generational brain rot, particularly amongst Palestininian children. “I feel actually sorry for little Palestinian children,” Fordwich lamented. “When they grow up — everyone that they love and everyone that they trust has been telling them to do and telling them that they can become a martyr for committing such atrocities. So you almost can’t blame people that are being brainwashed since birth.”  But it’s not just Palestinian children that are being brainwashed. It’s the next generation in developed countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. as well. Fordwich’s rebuke of Oxford Union is a case-in-point.  When asked what strategies could be implemented to reverse the growing resentment against the Jewish people and Israel amongst young people, Fordwich reasoned that leaders and educators should meet them where they’re at on “social media” and capitalize on the “effectiveness of soundbites.” “When you hear people chanting, ‘From the river to the sea,’ I don’t believe they know which river, which sea and I don’t think they know their history,” Fordwich argued. “But it’s easy to remember and it’s easy to chant. What is Israel chanting right now? I don’t know their chant and I know my history.”  Fordwich pointed MRC Business back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. “You can actually see that this is not a recent phenomenon. This was many, many years ago where there needed to be land carved out for Jewish people. Anti-Semitism has been pervasive for many centuries — for longer than that, even.” Her advice for Israel and the Jewish people was that they “need to have effective soundbites and more effective social media. And with the brilliance and the brains in Israel, that’s something that I think that the Jewish population and the Israeli leadership should focus on.” Fordwich likened this strategy to the marketing campaign that drove American voters to elect President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952,  Bill Clinton in 1992 and Trump in 2016. “Always remember that President Eisenhower was elected simply because Americans wore a button that said, ‘I Like Ike.’ President Trump was elected because he said, ‘Make America Great Again,’ and Bill Clinton was elected because he said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ We can remember those, why — because they were soundbites.” Israel, as Fordwich concluded, “needs to think ‘I Like Ike,’ and think, ‘What is our soundbite comparable to refute, ‘From the river to the sea,’ and that is meaningful, is historically accurate and that would help Israel.” 

Few things better illustrate why there has been a steep decline in the quality of writing at The New Yorker under the editorship of David Remnick than his absurd reaction to finding out that a letter supposedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to convicted serial sex offender Larry Nassar which implicated President Donald Trump in something bad has been determined to be fake. On Tuesday, Remnick revealed just how sadly his obsession over his Orange Whale has overwhelmed him to the extent that he has laughably lost whatever sense of rationality he might have left as you can see in "Trump, Epstein, and the Women." For the first several paragraphs the furious Remnick hurled charge after charge against Trump before he touched on the supposedly damning Epstein letter to Nassar: On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.” The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.” It appears that even Remnick accepts that the Epstein letter is fake. So did that cause him to even reconsider his charges against Trump? Nope. And here is Remnick's twisted rationale: "The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence." So fake but accurate? Remnick then digs himself even deeper into a hole by claiming that we don't really need no stinkin' documents since he somehow knows that Trump is guilty... of something: ...As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms. What has driven Remnick's latest descent into TDS darkness has been the fact that like the rest of the left, he had placed his fervent hopes on the released Epstein files implicating Trump in misdeeds. Unfortunately for poor Remnick the Epstein files revealed no such thing which appears to have caused his absurd embrace with sheer irrationality. The upside to Remnick's irrationality is that it has inspired widespread mirth such as this:   The Nassar letter—genuine or not, it almost doesn't matter in the end!.... Remnick goes all Hitler Diaries on us. https://t.co/llFlyWYm28 — Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) December 24, 2025

It was a challenging task, but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors, led by MRC President David Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker, boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2025 and on December 17 announced The Media Research Center Award for Worst Quote of the Year.   Of course, every year, there is way too much bias for just one category. So we broke down the Worst of 2025 into five additional categories (The Craziest Analysis Award; The Trashing Trump Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The ICE Breakers Award for Hating Trump’s Deportation Policy; and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).  Today, we present the WORST OF 2025: The Craziest Analysis Award.  Without further ado, here is the winner (followed by the top runners-up): WINNER     “This is not a media failure. This was a failure of the Democratic Party. And I just sort of, sort of the virtue signaling that some people have done to try to say that the media missed this story [Joe Biden’s decline]. They didn’t miss this story….I just refuse to accept this, this stupid premise because it’s a right-wing manufactured, right-wing premise in order to, to stain in the media.”— Former NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd on Chris Cillizza’s Substack podcast, April 28.   RUNNERS-UP   Former hostage Keith Siegel: “The terrorists became very mean and very cruel and violent.”Correspondent Lesley Stahl: “More so?”Siegel: “Much more so. They were beating me and starving me.”Stahl: “Do you think they starved you or they just didn’t have food?”Siegel: “No I think they starved me and they, they would often eat in front of me and not offer me food.”    — CBS’s 60 Minutes, March 30.   “It angers me when people are, like, ‘this woke stuff's gotta go.’ That’s telling me that you don’t care about my lived experience! You don’t care about the oppression of the LGBTQ community! You don’t care about the oppression of the disabled! You don’t care about the oppression of immigrants! You don’t care about your fellow neighbor, and that is ungodly! That is not Christian!”— Co-host Sunny Hostin on ABC’s The View, February 24.   “So you’re going to see women, especially that feel like, ‘Oh, my god, right. Like, here’s this man [CEO killer Luigi Mangione] who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems this like this morally good man,’ which is hard to find.”— Former Washington Post columnist/New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz to correspondent Donie O’Sullivan on CNN’s Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, April 13.