The Anti-Communist Counterattack Begins on Screen

 The American Spectator   

"But it’s not the artistry of these films that counts for Hollywood. It’s the propaganda value, even on a small audience. Joseph Stalin understood the mind-influencing power of cinema* . . ."

 

"Still, Wayne was the recipient of several other attempted assassinations in the future, most notably in 1966, when a sniper was caught attempting to shoot the actor in Vietnam. The sniper alleged that Chairman Mao Zedong ordered the shooting. Again, whether this is true or not remains speculation."

"Last week, conservative writer Mark Judge officially announced the first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival — October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. With open or quasi communists taking over the Democratic Party and several American blue cities and states, the festival’s timing is perfect. I know which movie would win the top prize if it had been made already — Operation Cowboy: The Assassination of John Wayne, my Day of the Jackal-style thriller about a real 1950 Stalin plot to murder John Wayne because of his success flushing out Hollywood communists. As more genuine historical sources rip through the cobweb of leftist media lies, two commie-exposing heroes have found new respect as framed victims — Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. To requote The Daily Wire star Matt Walsh in his recent X post, “McCarthy was right and fully justified.”

"For over 60 years, progressive filmmakers have depicted the communist investigations as the Hollywood Holocaust, wherein fascist officials and their studio-mogul acolytes silenced and persecuted Socratic screen artists. It began subtly enough in blacklisted genius screenwriter Carl Foreman’s High Noon. The classic 1952 Western depicted ex-Marshal Gary Cooper forsaken by the townspeople he protected ahead of four outlaws coming to kill him. It was clearly Foreman’s analogy for his abandonment by his peers during the blacklist.

"But when the Democrats took control of Congress in Eisenhower’s second term, and as studio power waned, liberal Hollywood filmmakers and the media got their revenge. They used all their propagandic powers to demean the anti-communist patriots inside and outside the entertainment industry. This included then-congressman Richard Nixon, whom they never forgave for exposing FDR State Department darling Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy.

"And Hollywood led the charge." . . . More...

*as did his two main nemeses in Hollywood, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, which is why he wanted John Wayne dead."

Mail-In-Voting: Appeals Court Hands Trump Big Win

"The court ruled that the USPS may require states to turn over voter rolls before mailing out ballots."

 The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

"The critics of this rule complain that all of this would significantly expand the USPS role in elections. This is nonsense. As Palmer points out, “USPS is already significantly involved in elections because of its handling of millions of ballots." 

"In March of 2026 President Trump issued Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” directing the U.S. Postal Service to create a rule whereby any state that intends to send mail-in ballots to voters must provide a list of those eligible to participate in federal elections or the USPS “shall not transmit” those ballots. The obvious goal of the EO is to keep ballots from reaching people who are not eligible to vote. This predictably produced several lawsuits. On Friday, however, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on a lower court injunction that had the effect of permitting the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with the proposed mail-in ballot rule.

"The court’s order does not resolve the underlying lawsuits but permits the USPS to move forward while the case is reviewed. “This ruling is a win for election integrity and would have significant implications for states like California that refuse to submit their voter rolls to verify compliance with federal election laws,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli. California is not the only state that refuses to allow its voter rolls to be audited. Every “blue” state in the nation is actively flouting the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), both of which require all states to conduct voter roll maintenance.

"Curiously, most states with GOP governing trifectas — those with Republican governors and legislatures — have been transparent with the Department of Justice concerning their voter rolls. An NBC report grudgingly admits that Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana, Texas, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Kansas and Montana are all cooperating. Meanwhile, the remaining red states are negotiating with the DOJ. The Democrat-controlled states are all fighting to hide their voter rolls. California is leading the resistance, and it is little wonder. Its management of mail-in ballots in the 2022 midterms was utterly chaotic. As the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) phrases it: 

 After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them. It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened. Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap. The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient.  . . .More...

German Engineers Tested a Captured Sherman — What They Discovered Stunned Them

Yet for years, the main selling point for any delicate equipment has been the phrase, "German-engineered".

D – News   

"That was the reason a generation of German engineers after the war quietly stopped building tanks the way they used to build them and started building them the way the Americans had." 

"In the spring of 1943, the finest tank engineers in Nazi Germany were handed an American tank captured in the deserts of Tunisia. They spent the next two years trying to understand it. What they wrote in their private reports, in the technical language of men who could not afford to lie to themselves, was something Berlin did not want to hear, and something the American soldiers who had built these tanks and bled inside them would never live to know.

"This is the story of one Sherman and what it did to the engineers of the Third Reich when they finally took it apart. The wind came off the Dorsale Mountains at dusk, carrying grit and the smell of burnt oil. Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, mid-February 1943. The battle was over. What remained was a landscape of dead machines.

American tanks lay everywhere. Some were burned black, hatches thrown open, turrets twisted at angles no factory ever intended. Others sat almost peaceful in the dust, engines silent, tracks intact, as if their crews had simply walked away. Which, in many cases, they had. At Sidi Bouzid and in the days that followed at Kasserine Pass, the US Second Corps had learned what the Afrika Korps already knew, that the desert punished mistakes without mercy, and that green troops paid the highest price. But among the wrecks, a different discovery was being made. German recovery teams moved between the hulks in the early mornings, before the sun turned the metal too hot to touch. They were looking for intelligence, for maps, for anything the retreating Americans had left behind. What they found was a tank, an M4 Sherman, standing upright on its tracks, undamaged, its engine cold, but its interior almost untouched. The crew had bailed out in a panic and run. The machine itself was intact. The men who found it climbed inside. They ran gloved hands over the seats, over the controls, over the strange American labels stamped in English on every gauge. And then, because that was their job, they tried to start it. The engine caught on the first attempt. For a long moment, no one spoke.". . . More...

Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M4A1 Sherman part 1

Part 2

Luigi Mangione and the Madness of Modern America

 Courage. Media  

"Richardson shows how Mangione’s mugshot became iconography, his manifesto fragments became memes, and his crime a kind of collective confession." 

"Luigi Mangione was once the sort of young man about success stories were written: sharp, disciplined, and quietly ambitious. A programmer with promise, he preferred patterns to platitudes, structure to sentiment. Then, last December, he shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street, and the country cracked along familiar fault lines. To many, the then-26-year-old was a cold, calculating killer; to others, a kind of crusader — disenchanted, disillusioned, and reflecting what America has become. He embodied what more and more young Americans feel and now openly confess: they were promised everything, yet are left with nothing.

John H. Richardson’s Luigi: The Making and the Meaning arrives with unsettling urgency. The veteran journalist doesn’t merely recount events, but exposes how a killing became content, how a mind came undone, and how America turned the aftermath into ritual. The book’s most arresting passages trace Mangione’s psychic breakdown: a gifted student who begins by questioning the world and ends by waging war against it. His early journals burn with idealism, but the flame soon dims. What begins as frustration deepens into fury; curiosity stiffens into conviction. Before long, Mangione is reading the Unabomber’s manifesto and echoing it with eerie precision.

The parallels to Ted Kaczynski are particularly striking. Both were obsessive intellects drawn to the purity of logic and the promise of order. Kaczynski wrote from a Montana cabin; Mangione coded from a rented loft. Richardson knew Kaczynski personally — corresponding with him for years — and draws on those letters like confessionals. The author shows the cost of obsession, and what happens when the search for meaning becomes the road to madness." . . .  More...

Senate Republicans Unveil First-of-Its-Kind Plan To Eliminate Fuel Economy Standards That Cost Americans Billions

"Sen. Mike Crapo's legislation would save consumers billions of dollars and prevent future administrations from pursuing a 'de facto electric vehicle mandate'"

Thomas Catenacci   

Update 4:04 p.m.: This piece has been updated to remove mention of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which did not endorse the bill.

"Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) is preparing to introduce first-of-its-kind legislation that would scrap fuel efficiency rules for vehicles, regulations that Republicans say have cost consumers billions of dollars, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

"Crapo's bill would end a decades-old program requiring the federal government to set environmental fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. Crapo, the Senate Finance Committee's chairman, says the bill would save Americans money and ensure the federal government is unable to use the so-called corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) program to implement a "de facto electric vehicle mandate" or other broad climate objectives.

"The bill is not a symbolic one. It has five Senate cosponsors, all Republicans, and strong backing from major industry groups. It's also being introduced in time to clear Congress before any shift of control in January.

"The Biden administration finalized CAFE standards in 2024 that would have doubled fuel efficiency requirements in new cars, something automakers said was unachievable, costly, and designed to incentivize purchases of expensive electric vehicles. Last year, President Donald Trump reset the CAFE standards, calling the Biden-era regulations "ridiculously burdensome" and "horrible."

"Congress created the CAFE program to limit fuel consumption during the 1970s oil crisis, when Arab nations implemented an oil embargo against the United States and other nations that had supported Israel militarily. The United States has since shed itself of dependence on Arab oil, but the CAFE program has persisted and been reimagined as a tool to achieve the left's environmental goals.

"While advocates argue the program saves consumers money in the long run by decreasing their spending on fuel, an increase in CAFE standards of just 1 mile per gallon costs consumers an estimated $24.1 billion and automakers an estimated $5.5 billion over 10 years, even when accounting for fuel spending, according to a 2022 report from the right-leaning Mackinac Center for Public Policy. That's because higher fuel efficiency creates high compliance costs that automakers then pass on to buyers." . . .More...

Meet Sophie Cunningham, the WNBA Superstar and Scrappy Feminist Standing Up for Women's Sports

 Washington Free Beacon  

She found success in a league that has historically excluded attractive white women. Now she's using her platform to 'protect young girls' from 'biological men.'

. . . "Cunningham made headlines this week by using her platform to stand up for female athletes, telling ESPN that transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete against biological girls.

""I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, 'I never once said that,'" Cunningham said. "I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men."

"Cunningham said she is "very much in the middle" when it comes to politics, which makes sense given that her view on transgender athletes is shared by nearly 80 percent of the American public. Most of the WNBA, however, agrees with the radical minority.

"The WNBA All-Star game on Saturday will raise money for Girls in the Game, a Chicago-based charity that boasts of moving "beyond the binary of 'girl'" by welcoming "gender-expansive participants." In 2022, the WNBA players' union issued a statement describing transgender people's participation in sports as a matter of "human rights."

"In a move some have denounced as a textbook example of structural racism and mean-girl pettiness, Cunningham was not invited to participate in the upcoming WNBA 3-Point Contest. It was an obvious snub, given that Cunningham is shooting a career-high 43.7 percent from beyond the arc, second-best in the WNBA. Stats aside, excluding one of the most attractive and recognizable players was an unusual marketing decision for a so-called business desperate to prove it can be profitable someday." . . .

Related: College softball versus the WNBA

The professionals who keep fouling Caitlin Clark could learn something from this college softball game from 2008.

. . . "The inspirational story involved a game between two women’s college softball teams that took place in 2008." . . .

 . . . "The contrast between the actions of Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace and those of the various members of the WNBA who attack Caitlin Clark is striking.  The former shows opponents aiding an injured rival at great personal cost, while the WNBA record shows repeated aggressive cheap shots at a high-profile player, while officials sometimes penalize the victim while the perpetrators are barely held accountable.

"The amateurs at the college level fostered idealism, whereas the professionals exhibit rivalry, resentment, and a win-at-all-costs mentality.  The former reinforces positive values and gains the admiration of the public, whereas the latter alienates fans and damages the growth of the league." . . .

A Rotten Place To Start A Business

 Issues & Insights  

"The question is old, but it still needs to be asked: When is California going to turn things around? The answer is unknowable, but now would be a good time to start, because the bottom is closer than ever and coming up fast."

"Florida Pizza Kitchen. It doesn’t have quite the ring to it that California Pizza Kitchen does. But had the iconic chain been dreamed up in the 2020s rather than the 1980s, it would have been FPK rather than CPK, not because the California Pizza Kitchen’s co-founders moved to Florida, though one did a couple of years ago, but due to the Golden State’s corrosive business policies. 

"Not that long ago, California was “the greatest place to do business,” Rick Rosenfield, the CPK co-founder who fled to the Sunshine State, told Fox News Digital. 

“'If it were me today, I would open in Florida before I would open it in California,” Rosenfield said. “California is less business-friendly today, and they make it apparent.” 

"Rosenfield and Larry Flax started CPK in Beverly Hills in 1985, before the state became a tax-regulate-and-degree nightmare for businesses. Today the state is more well known for the steady flight of companies, capital and vital human resources, all seeking liberalized markets where entrepreneurship, innovation and hard work are rewarded rather than punished.

"That describes Florida, which Rosenfield says is “quite friendly,” and relative to California and the rest of the blue states, an oasis where “there’s less bureaucracy.”

"California is actively hostile to business. Rosenfield told Fox that the business climate sharply changed after COVID, which is true, but it didn’t begin there. Not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of businesses have quit on the state and relocated either fully or partially elsewhere since 2008. The list of high-profile and California legacy companies that have fled, according to a Pacific Research Institute report, includes “Hewlett-Packard, whose founding is recognized as the birth of Silicon Valley; entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX; Charles Schwab, founded in San Francisco in 1971; Mitsubishi; Nissan North America; Toyota Motor North America; Oracle; Palantir Technologies; and Jacobs Engineering.” . . .  More...

California Pizza Kitchen founder says California has become too difficult for entrepreneurs

The Morning Briefing: Hell Hath No Idiocy Like White Libs Playing the Race Card

  PJ Media  

"The truth-challenged propagandists in the MSM aren't being honest with themselves about the fact that they no longer have a stranglehold on narratives and can't get away with just making things up like they used to."

. . . "As has been well documented in conservative media, one of the most fantastic things to watch throughout the tournament was the flood of social media posts by foreign visitors who were overwhelmed and thrilled by seemingly everything about the United States of America. I spent a lot of time during the World Cup scrolling through Instagram and watching gushing testimonials about America's awesomeness.

"Of course, if you're a conservative American, you knew all of that, but it's always fun to see something familiar through fresh eyes. They reveled in all of it. Ranch dressing. Buc-ee's. The sheer size of everything. The generosity and hospitality of everyday Americans. It was a joyful and thorough refutation of everything that the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media have been saying about this country for the last ten years. Because American leftists are such bitter, horrid people, all of that goodwill actually gave them a solid beatdown. 

"Time and time again, one of our European visitors would post about having been lied to by the media — theirs and ours — about the United States. They've been told it's unsafe — the gun haters tried to make them believe they were going to get shot as soon as they walked out of the airport. They were told that the South was racist and wouldn't welcome foreigners. Of course, their leftist leaders and media led them to believe that we were living in dark times because ORANGE MAN BAD.

"A clinically insane USA Today writer (more on her in Friday's Morning Briefing) kicked off her World Cup coverage by writing that we lost before we even started because America is "a hateful and greedy nation" (h/t Guy Benson).

"The truth-challenged propagandists in the MSM aren't being honest with themselves about the fact that they no longer have a stranglehold on narratives and can't get away with just making things up like they used to. They make sure that they only surround themselves with the low-info types who still lap up their nonsense, but don't have any influence beyond that. Still, they see all the evidence of their impotence, like social media being turned into a love fest for America for several weeks". . .   More...

We Can't Believe Gavin Newsom Just Said This About California's Wildfire Management

This man shows no signs of discomfort when he knows he is not believed by his listeners. If confronted with his lies, Democrats will rally for Gavin, chanting their support for him.

We Can't Believe Gavin Newsom Just Said This About California's Wildfire Management   "You have to admit that what Gavin Newsom lacks in brains and sound policy he makes up for in sheer hubris. That's the only reason that Newsom could say with a straight face that his state is a global model for fire management. Perhaps that's true in a sense; Canada was burning so much that people as far south as Virginia were seeing, smelling, and feeling the impacts.

"That's because Canada, like California, refuses to do basic fire management like clearing brush and old growth. This is nothing to brag about, of course.

"But brag Newsom did.

. . . ""I can say this with absolute conviction. We don't imitate; we're a model for others," Newsom said. "We have people coming from all over the United States and around the globe to look at what California is doing in orbit, in the air, and on the ground."

"Many people stop to gawk at a train wreck." . . .

LAUGHABLE: Gavin Newsom Claims That When it Comes to Fire Management, California is a ‘Model for the Globe’ (VIDEO)

"Sometimes, you may forget how utterly shameless Gavin Newsom is and then he says something like this and it all comes rushing back."

Oh, by the way...How to Spot a Pathological Liar: Signs, Causes, and How to Deal 

"If you have a pattern of pathological lying, you may:

• lie indiscriminately about a wide range of topics
• tell untruths about minor events
• feel undeterred by the fear of getting caught
• experience a rush when you get away with lying
• continue to lie even when confronted with the truth . . ."

Five Quick Things: The Increasing Performative Stupidity of Our Friends on the Left

"Today’s progressive playbook rewards those who can deliver the most implausible argument with the straightest face."

The American Spectator 

 "Part of that desire is my increasing distaste for politics as it’s currently practiced in this country. And there’s something in particular that I can’t stand. I’d call it out if I saw it from Republicans, but I don’t… really. I’ve seen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie do this at times, but not that often. But on the Left, it’s non-stop."

Democrats stood on the House floor and chanted “shame” at Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy as
 parliamentary procedure was ongoing after California Rep. Adam Schiff was censured Wednesday.

. . . "This is of a piece with the ridiculous Elissa Slotkin’s argument that passing the bill would ensure Democrats could never win any election anywhere in America. (RELATED: Maybe Shut Up, Elissa)

"Schumer knows that putting extra safeguards in place to stop foreigners from voting in American elections and to encourage clean voter rolls won’t do anything whatsoever to retard the ability of eligible voters to vote. He knows that when Georgia passed some commonsense election integrity reforms in 2021, amid a great deal of caterwauling from his party, voter turnout in 2022 was quite high for a midterm election.

"He knows these things, but he doesn’t care.

"This is more an example of performing for stupidity than performative stupidity, of course, because Chuck Schumer thinks Democrat voters are rubes who can be lied to without consequence.

"But there is stupidity in it as well, and it’s this: by insisting that every warm body, and some cold ones, get ballots, Chuck Schumer is suppressing his own political clout — because the skew in the electorate that you get from an “expansion” in the eligible-voting population makes the Chuck Schumers of the world obsolete in favor of the AOC’s and Zohran Mamdanis of the world.

"Schumer doesn’t do the feigned ignorance thing. He leaves that to others. Instead, he does the too-smart-by-half thing. And if you know what time it is, you realize too-smart-by-half is still stupid." . . . More...

Fetterman "will always be the last man standing within the Democratic caucus in the Senate that's pro-unapologetically standing for Israel."

 John Fetterman slams Mamdani as 'clown' over Netanyahu arrest threat: 'You  can fix a pothole'  

. . . "You can fix a pothole. You can take out the trash. But you can't order people to arrest anybody any more than I could. I couldn't have him arrested if he came to Pennsylvania. It's a joke, and he's a clown."

"Fetterman also challenged Mamdani's statement that Netanyahu was "not welcome" in New York, arguing that the mayor does not have the power to enforce such a position.

"'He also said that Netanyahu is not welcome in New York.

"You can't say that any more than I can say, 'Mayor, you're not welcome in Pennsylvania.' So sit down. I know you're a clown, and you're just going to pander to the fringe because that's part of your base." . . .

Mamdani slow to respond to suspected antisemitic stabbing as Hochul, other NY officials condemn attack   "New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani remained silent for several hours on what officials described as an antisemitic stabbing in New York City on Thursday afternoon, choosing to instead post about his millionaire housing tax initiative — even as the attack drew attention from other state officials.

"I have been briefed on today’s horrifying stabbings on the Upper West Side, where an Asian man and a Jewish man were attacked. According to witness and victim statements, the perpetrator yelled "Allahu Akbar" during both attacks. I am relieved that both victims are in stable condition," Mamdani wrote in a statement.

"The NYPD responded immediately and arrested Raul Morales in connection with both assaults—and I am grateful to the officers for their swift response."

The delayed response from Mamdani played into the fears of some observers that his critical stances towards Israel, views shared by many progressives, are feeding into hesitations about supporting Jewish communities in the U.S.

Mamdani’s Rhetoric Gets Results: Muslim Screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ Stabs Two, Including a Jewish Man – PJ Media

Whatever Mamdani does and says now, one thing is certain: He will not talk about Islamic jihad, or do anything to prevent attacks of this kind in the future. He will not tone down his incendiary antisemitic rhetoric. Does the mayor of the city with the second-largest Jewish population in the world actively want to see Jews subjected to violence? If he doesn’t, what exactly is he doing to prevent that violence?

Tim Walz’s 'worst day' disgrace

 Guy Benson

"Finally, an African migrant has been arrested in Minnesota after allegedly shooting three women to death over a parking dispute. He reportedly told police that he believed he had been “treated unfairly because he is black and an immigrant,” as though that would be a reasonable excuse for committing a triple homicide. Gov. Walz, are we allowed to judge this man based on his “worst day”?" 

. . . “Just weeks ago, a foreign child rapist was freed to once again endanger America’s children after receiving a pardon from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Tou Lue Vang admitted to committing heinous crimes against a 10-year-old girl in Minnesota. He attempted to pay his victim for her silence and dismissed his acts of child abuse as a ‘minor thing.’ Just days before he was scheduled to be deported, the Minnesota Governor pardoned him, setting him free to endanger American families once again. Americans should never have to live in fear that foreign sex predators — shielded from deportation by their own elected officials — could endanger them or their children. That’s why I terminated his legal status in the United States. Vang has now been removed from our country and will never pose a threat to any American ever again.”

"Walz, who did everything within his power to allow this illegal immigrant convicted of sexually assaulting a child to remain in Minnesota, was incensed.

“Did that make us any safer?” he asked. “Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”

"Yes, removing a sexual abuser of children from the community and the country makes Americans safer. How can anyone deny this? Really, how?

"And, actually, yes, we judge people by their worst days all the time. Justice requires it.

"It is one thing for a boss to forgive an employee’s uncharacteristic profane outburst because the employee was having a difficult day. It is another for a police officer to decide not to write a ticket because a speeding driver was going through a difficult time.

"Mercy can be appropriate and good, of course. But describing the felony sexual assault of a minor as merely an offender having his “worst day” is utterly revolting." . . . More...