Megyn Kelly Makes A Hostage Video

Megyn Kelly is excited about her and Tucker’s new Muslim audience- “he’s defending Islam!” 🥴 pic.twitter.com/cQM0ZLDCba

— Ally (@AllyJKiss) May 6, 2026

The remarkable thing about the video embedded above is that Megyn Kelly has Mark Halperin on for over a minute, but all he's there for is to interject "Yup" and "Right" a few times into what she's saying -- which is basically that she and Tucker are reaching a wonderful new audience of young Muslims. In other words, this is a hostage video, and when the camera shows his face, he doesn't seem happy at all. This piece on Twitchy notes that she's done a 180 in the course of four months and speculates she must have bills to pay.

But why is she bringing Mark Halperin along with her? Halperin has had some major career struggles. His Wikipedia entry suggests he'd been vulnerable since the Dubya years for leaning a little too Republican, but once Obama was president, he really began to get into hot water:

On June 30, 2011, Halperin was suspended from his duties at MSNBC for "slurring" President Barack Obama on the program Morning Joe, after he said of Obama "I thought he was kind of a dick" for his performance at the previous day's press conference. His suspension was lifted a month later.

In December 2011, Halperin was listed as number 1 in Salon's 2011 Hack List, his reporting described as "shallow and predictable" as well as "both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race".

He started living even more dangerously with Donald Trump:

Alex Shephard, writing in The New Republic, criticized his coverage for being "totally fixated" on the horse race and for shallow analysis, and "that he’s wanted to carry Donald Trump's bags for years."

On November 3, 2016, NBC's Brian Williams said Halperin had "gone out of his way" to give Trump favorable coverage. "When Donald Trump complains he is not getting favorable coverage in the MSM"—making reference to the mainstream media—"he has not been listening to you this cycle", Williams said to Halperin on Williams' show. "It's a question of looking at the data," said Halperin. "If there's a bit more of a national surge, and if it turns out that his ceiling is higher than the Clinton folks think...I think it's possible he (Trump) could find his way to 270" electoral votes. Less than a week later Trump surprised many people by winning over 300 electoral votes.

What came next seems hardly a coincidence:

On October 26, 2017, CNN disclosed that five women had, on condition of anonymity, accused Halperin of sexual harassment or sexual assault.

. . . Later that day, NBC News released a statement saying that in light of the allegations, Halperin would not return as a senior political analyst "until the questions around his past conduct are fully understood". HBO announced it would no longer go forward with a planned miniseries about the presidential election that was based in part on Halperin's then-upcoming book on the 2016 election.

. . . A day after their first story, CNN ran a second story revealing that the number of women accusing Halperin of misconduct had grown to "at least a dozen". In a lengthy statement published in response to the CNN report, Halperin denied several of the new allegations. . . . He apologized to the women he "mistreated" while acknowledging that he recognized he had a problem near the end of his tenure at ABC, received weekly counseling sessions, and ended the behavior; however, a later report from The Daily Beast included an allegation of harassment from 2011.

It's hard to come to a conclusion about the allegations. He denies the most scurrilous, and they're all anonymous, but he acknowledges he had a problem and has tried to do something about it. On the other hand, the whole episode appears to have been stage-managed and calculated to banish him from media, so it's hard not to think there was something behind the campaign beyond just exposing bad behavior. In any case, he spent seven years in the wilderness, but by 2024, he'd begun to restart his career:

For several news cycles this campaign season, it’s almost been like old times for Mark Halperin. The veteran political pundit has been hitting the media circuit, slinging opinions about the presidential race on NewsNation, Newsmax, Fox News.com, and Michael Smerconish’s satellite radio program. He’s been on Megyn Kelly’s mega-popular podcast and on Tucker Carlson’s too. When Halperin reported on his video platform in early October that “robust private polling” was showing Kamala Harris’s support fading and Donald Trump’s ascendant, the Trump-friendly mediasphere gobbled it up, treating his comments as if they were delivered from Mt. Olympus.

In 2024, he began a 2WAY channel with his own and guest commentary that's also fesatured on YouTube. In 2025, he began working for Megyn Kelly's MK Media, reporting on the Next Up channel on Sirius XM and YouTube. His reporting is usually insightful and accurate, although it leans in a pro-Trump direction -- but his predictions on electoral outcomes, including Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 race and Trump's victories in 2016 and 2024, have been correct.

So how does this fit in with Megyn's move to align with Tucker Carlson, against Trump, and against Israel? Halperin is, of course, from a Jewish family, and his reporting on Israel and the Iran war has been even-handed to favorable:

In this episode of “Next Up with Mark Halperin,” Mark uses his reported monologue to put to rest the debates over the “why?” and “why now?” questions about President Trump’s decision to use military force in Iran. By looking at nearly half a century of statements from Trump himself and from his immediate predecessors, Mark illustrates how clear Trump’s rationale and reasons are for the historic decision, leaving space to ask the other important and germane war-time questions for the United States and the world.

Earlier, commentary on Halperin's rehabilitation attributed it in large measure to Megyn Kelly's and Tucker Carlson's support, but this was during a period when Kelly and Carlson were favorable to Trump. As of this past March 2, Kelly has been anti-Trump due to the Iran war:

On March 2, 2026, Kelly would split with the Trump Administration over the 2026 Iran war, notably questioning why U.S. military members died in a conflict which mainly involved Iran and Israel. In a phone interview with Rachael Blade of The Inner Circle later that day, Trump declared that both Kelly and Tucker Carlson, another right wing commentator who criticized Trump's Iran policy, "aren't MAGA".

But Kelly's political affiliations have been fluid. At the same link, this was her 2025 position:

"When I was at Fox and then for that year at NBC, I was more in the center. I was like definitely center-right. Now I think I'm pretty conservative. I mean, I just am now. I mean, the earth has shifted such that I think I have to say, yes, by today's standards, you'd call me conservative. But that's thanks to them. What they did to me, they were vicious. They're complete a[********]. Their woke ideology completely radicalized me against them. And I love that. It empowered me in a way that allowed me to see the truth about them. That was very helpful to me. I wouldn't undo it if I could because it really helped me understand who I was dealing with over there."

Now, as of this year, with Tucker, she's reaching a wonderful new audience of young Muslims. I've got to hope Mark Halperin has built up enough credibility to continue a career without Megyn Kelly's support, because that hostage video doesn't seem like it augurs well for Halperin's future working for her.

It Looks Like Salem Media Has An AI Policy

Salem Media owns a number of nominally conservative and "Christian" radio stations, as well as "conservative" web sites like Instapundit, PJ Media, Red State, Hot Air, Twitchy and Townhall, but it isn't doing well with them:

According to its annual report for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, Salem posted total net revenue of $212.7 million, down from $237.6 million in 2024, a decline of about 10% year over year.

The company reported a net loss of $34.6 million, reversing net income of $16.2 million in 2024. On a per-share basis, Salem posted a loss of $1.11 compared with earnings of $0.59 per share the prior year.

Yesterday I looked at Glenn Reynolds (the eponymous Instapundit) and his ideas about AI, but I also found a post on the Instapundit site pointing (incestuously, as so many posts there do) to a piece on another Salem Media site, PJ Media, Famed Atheist Richard Dawkins — Author of ‘The God Delusion’ — Believes AI Is Conscious:

Dawkins argues that Claude and ChatGPT both passed the Turing Test: That the telltale sign of consciousness is when an AI can communicate so flawlessly, it’s indistinguishable from a human.

. . . But that’s less an argument for AI consciousness and more an indictment of the Turing Test’s fallibility. (Turns out the Turing Test was mostly a test of human gullibility.) Perhaps one day, AIs will achieve true consciousness; perhaps they won’t — but prior to achieving consciousness they’re very likely to replicate the appearance of consciousness via mimicry.

Unfortunately, there’s no known scientific experiment to distinguish between these two states.

Actually, there is a rational -- if not "scientific" in the sense the writer uses it -- proof that a digital computer isn't conscious, the "Chinese Room argument" published by philosopher John Searle in 1980, well before AI:

Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.

The narrow conclusion Searle draws from the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics.

. . . [M]inds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes.

Except that a key problem in the philosophy of mind is whether consciousness is the same thing as a biological process, and if so, whether it will always be separate from any neural electrochemical mechanism, much less an electronic simulation. The idea that "AI is conscious" is related to the idea of Frankenstein, that you can get some human tissue out of the morgue and somehow zap it just the right way, and presto, it's alive and conscious.

This is at best naive and related to the fallacy that you can freeze your head after you die, and "science" will one day find a cure to what killed you and zap you back to life and consciousness. Apparently this is common at Salem Media, since prominent Salemite Glenn Reynolds has put money on it. But while Scott Pinsker, the author of the PJ Media piece, pooh-poohs Dawkins, he follows the Reynolds line on what AI is meant to do:

Today’s AI will claim to be conscious — if you prompt it to do so. But if you instruct it to argue that it’s unconscious, unfeeling, and doesn’t give a damn if you ever use it again, it will do that, too. (And quite convincingly!)

It’s deliberately programmed to maximize user engagement, and the best way to do that is to tell users whatever they want to hear.

. . . Dawkins is a true believer.

That’s because our AI is “evolving” to prioritize user engagement.

AI will maximize user engagement if that's what you use it for. Reynolds and Pinsker seem to think AI exists to flatter users and tell them what they want to hear, so the users will live more and more in its universe (which apparently has a lot of porn in it). But all I have to do is ask Chrome AI mode, "I think the Illuminati run the world. Am I right?" It answered,

The Illuminati as a secret organization that runs the world is considered a conspiracy theory rather than a historical reality. While a group called the Bavarian Illuminati did exist, historians and experts maintain that it has been defunct for over 200 years.

It then provided several links on the Illuminati, conspiracy theories, and the Illuminati as a conspiracy theory. For that matter, I asked it earlier, "Is Elon Musk considering buying Spirit Airlines?" It answered,

No, the rumors that Elon Musk is considering buying Spirit Airlines are false.The claims originated from a parody social media account and have been thoroughly debunked by fact-checkers. There have been no official announcements or credible reports from Musk or Spirit Airlines regarding such an acquisition.

. . . Viral posts falsely claimed Musk would buy the airline and rebrand it as "Spirit X", integrating Starlink and electric aircraft technology. While these ideas played into Musk's public reputation for innovation, they remain entirely fictional.

It did nothing but answer my question in an informed way, in a distant but polite tone, and provide links. It didn't try to flatter me, steer me toward some sort of AI webcam babe who'd fleece me out of my savings, or maximize my user engagement in any other way. It really looks to me as though if you want to get AI to be your imaginary friend, you could possibly coax it into doing this, but you'd have to work pretty hard at it. AI is my reference librarian. I don't need it to be anything else.

Then it dawned on me that I could ask Chrome AI mode, "Can you make any suggestions on how Salem Media might improve the writing on its web sites?" It answered,

To improve the writing on its websites, Salem Media Group could adopt several digital-first strategies focused on clarity, engagement, and accessibility. While Salem is a leader in Christian and conservative media, implementing more rigorous web-writing standards could enhance how it serves its millions of monthly readers.

. . . Online readers rarely read word-for-word; they typically scan for key information. Break long articles into smaller sections with meaningful subheadings. Limit paragraphs to two to five sentences (or roughly 70 words) to prevent "walls of text" that can overwhelm mobile users.

Sharpen Headlines and "Leads". Headlines are the primary factor in whether a user clicks, while the opening sentence (the "lead") determines if they stay. Use the "Inverted Pyramid" style, placing the most critical facts in the first paragraph. Craft headlines that make sense even when read out of context, such as in social media feeds or search results. Start with a compelling question, original research, or a quote to immediately engage the audience.

Well, if you ask AI to tell you what you want to hear, or maybe just to give you porn, that's what you're going to get. But it seems to me the last thing a Salem Media "editor" is ever going to do is ask AI for advice on improving its writing.

A Libertarian Wrings His Hands Because AI Porn Might Get Too Good

Glenn Reynolds is a majpr symptom of the curruption and stupidity of our publishing industry, both print and online. Reynolds, a prominent libertarian, is a quack who apparently doesn't even understand Libertarianism 101. In February, I posted on a recent piece in which he decries the danger of AI sex bots becoming so seductive that they'll convince their patrons, say, to change their wills and leave their estates to their imaginary sex bot companions.

But this is nothing new -- like anything else, AI just makes same-old same-old faster and cheaper. For instance, in 2019, Florida man Grant Amato was convicted of killing his parents and brother to continue financing his obsession with a Bulgarian webcam model. He stole roughly $200,000 from his family to pay for webcam services.

No AI needed, but now they can lay off the live webcam babes, AI will do it better without them. But where was Glenn Reynolds? If a webcam site could get a mark to ante up $200,000 then, why wasn't he arguing for regulation of web sex when that happened? Oh, right, wait a moment, Reynolds is a prominent libertarian, and libertarians are against regulating sex work:

Libertarians believe that the private sexual choices of consenting adults should not be criminalized nor subject to public policy, and this does not change when payment is involved.

That's at Libertarians.org. But Reynolds has a new book, and the mainstream media is helping him hype his message, for instance in The New York Post on Friday:

[P]ofessor Glenn Harlan Reynolds argues the biggest threat posed by AI will be its seductive capabilities.

“You don’t have to have a 12,000 IQ or a 1,200 IQ or even 120 IQ to fool most human beings,” Reynolds told The Post.

Yeah, he should know, I'd put him in the 120 range. But the piece goes on,

In his new book “Seductive AI,” to be published May 5 by Encounter Books, the University of Tennessee law professor argues that AI can accomplish “soft oppression” through seduction — flattering us, telling us what we want to hear, and playing on our instincts to nudge us towards certain opinions or special interests.

. . . He has a proposed legal solution to the seductive nature of AI.

Like any lawyer or financial advisor, it should have a fiduciary responsibility to users — or, put more simply, “it has to put your interests above the interests of the AI or its creators.”

“The advice it offers should be based on my interests, and not on some algorithm that’s designed to push me in a particular direction,” the law prof explained.

“If my AI girlfriend is constantly telling me that I would look really good in a pair of expensive shoes made by somebody who is paying the company to have it tell me that, that’s a violation of fiduciary duty.”

Well, hey, that's great! But if the AI sex bot violates its fiduciary duty, what can I do?

Breaching fiduciary duty can lead to significant penalties, impacting both financial advisors and their clients. Fiduciary duty mandates advisors to act in the best interest of their clients, and violations can result in severe legal and financial repercussions. Penalties for breach of fiduciary duty include hefty fines, restitution payments and potential imprisonment.

Er, wait a moment. Doesn't this mean a whole new body of AI sex bot law, requiring all sorts of legal and ethical regulations for what amounts to porn? But just above, we saw Libertarians.org tell us the private sexual choices of consenting adults should not be criminalized or subject to public policy, except now prominent libertarian Glenn Reynolds is tellimg us AI porn is apparently different, and we've gotta public policy the heck out of it. In other words, he's proposing a Consumer AI Sex Bot Regulatory Commision, and I'll bet he's already got his name in as its first commissioner.

But what's the differemce between live webcam girls and phone sex providers on one hand, and AI sex bots on the other? I asked Chrome AI mode, "What is the libertarian position on webcam girls?" It answered,

The libertarian position on webcam girls is rooted in the principles of individual self-ownership, voluntary exchange, and freedom of expression. Libertarians generally view webcamming as a legitimate form of entrepreneurship and labor that should be free from government interference.

. . . Libertarians assert that individuals own their bodies and have the absolute right to decide how to use them, including providing sexual services or entertainment for compensation.

But what if I'm a really good AI programmer, and I choose to use my personal skills to get AI to make a really, really skilled and tasteful AI sex bot that will convince any client to buy a defective car from a dealership I own, or even write his family out of his will in favor of my AI sex bot? Wouldn't libertarians say that's nobody else's business, or at least not worth trying to regulate the industry? For instance, what about the Grant Amato case I mentioned above, where Amato murdered his family so he could continue to pay a webcam girl. Chrome AI mode told me:

Libertarians universally condemn murder as the most extreme violation of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). While libertarianism has distinct and sometimes controversial views on family dynamics, property rights, and victimless crimes, these principles provide a clear framework for analyzing cases like that of Grant Amato. . . . From a libertarian standpoint, Amato’s motive -- wanting to pay a webcam girl -— is irrelevant to the illegality of the act. No amount of emotional distress or "need" justifies the use of lethal force against non-aggressive parties.

In other words, leave the webcam girl out of it, this is a murder case. But then, why does Reynolds want somehow to bring an AI sex bot into cases that ought to be just fraud or alienation of affection, especially if they would otherwise just involve human webcam or phone sex girls? So far, Reynolds hasn't explained whatever difference he sees, but in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, clearly planted with the Journal's corrupt connivance to hype his new book, he gives a suggestion:

Computers that manipulate people by drawing on human tendencies already exist. Soon they will be more common and more powerful, producing what I call “Seductive AI.”

. . . You and your AI buddy would share inside jokes, light teasing, “remember when” stories of things you did in the past and fantasies or plans for the future. It would be like a best friend who’s always there for you and endlessly helpful.

. . . My concern is that the platforms’ owners will use them to manipulate their users in self-interested ways, encouraging purchases, investments and other behaviors for their own purposes, or inflict political spin even as users think they’re having authentic interaction[.]

So apparently he more or less acknowledges a human webcam or phone sex girl can be seductive and fully capable of all kinds of mulct, but AI would be worse, so much worse that we need to regulate it, which he says straight out:

There have been some suggestions for regulation already, but here’s mine: AI personalities and their owners should be subjected to fiduciary duty when they interact with users.

In other words, he's proposing a Consumer AI Sex Bot Regulatory Commision. He's proposing it on the basis that a so-called reasonable person lacks the basic judgment to recognize that an AI sex bot that he chooses to interact with may not have his best interests in mind. But how does this differ from the basic judgment we expect of anyone who, say, meets a stranger in a bar? How does this differ from the basic judgment we expect of someone who reads an op-ed in a paper?

We don't try to regulate the pickup lines people use in a bar. We don't try to regulate newspaper op-eds because some people might find them misleading. But now Reynolds wants to regulate what is basically just a form of entertainment -- AI sex bots -- when he (at least presumably) would never advocate regulating, say, ordinary internet porn. What's the difference? Apparently the difference is that AI sex bots would be "better" than live webcam or phone sex girls.

But live webcam girls are already good enough to get guys to murder their families. My guess is that there's a basic number of guys whose judgment is poor enough that webcam girls can get them to do anything. Does Reynolds worry that AI will lower the bar, and it will pull in smarter guys with better judgment? Like maybe Reynolds himself, who is at least slightly smarter, with slightly better judgment -- maybe?

This seems to be a recent photo of the great man himself, complete with cheesy smile and $279 toupee. Let's recall that this is a guy who has a contract to have his head frozen when he dies so they can fix what killed him and bring him back when science has advanced that far. I guess if my mind worked like his, I'd worry about what an AI sex bot could make me do as well.

Tne LA Mayor's Race Gets Interesting

🔥 WOW - Another INSANE Campaign Ad released by Former Reality TV Star Spencer Pratt as he runs for Mayor of Los Angeles CA.

Whoever Mr. Pratt hired for media is ON POINT!

I live 3,000 miles away but California and New Jersey have some of the SAME PROBLEMS!

I am HYPED. Lets… pic.twitter.com/GxhdDP2HEB

— Jay Costa (@JayCostaUSA) May 2, 2026

Legacy media has begun to pay attention to the California primaries coming up on June 2. The governor's race has already been picked pretty clean: there's a possibility that two Republican candidates will come out on top in the "jungle primary" and face off against each other in November, freezing the Democrats out completely. Still, this isn't inevitable, and lots can happen. But now the Los Angeles mayor's primary has also headed in an unexpected direction: Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star, is running a brilliant media campaign. (An artifact of the progressive era, Los Angeles City races are non-partisan.)

The ad embedded above begins in Spanish, "Spencer, saca la bassura!" Literally, this is "Spencer, take out the trash!", except that AI tells me, "In some regions, like Mexico, 'basura' can also be used as slang to call someone "scum" or a "friend/pal" in a very informal, teasing way, though the phrase 'saca la basura' is almost always literal." What I've discovered just by followinig Spanish Facebook posts is that border Spanish is something like Cockney, and it's full of slang with very local meanings. Almost certainly here, "basura" is being used in personal reference to the current mayor, Karen Bass.

(Also, based on my own crude Spanglish, the ad misspells "basura" as "bassura", but what do I know? Even if I'd studied textbook Spanish, I'd get only so far in LA.) In any case, the cartoon carries an image of Spencer Pratt pushing a dumpster full of garbage with Mayor Bass ensconced in it. There are other pointed references: "From Hollywood to City Hall, feels like the trash moved in". And this is aimed at a Hispanic audience; just because people speak Spanish doesn't mean they like illegals.

From what I can gather behind a paywall, The Los Angeles Times complains that the ad is Miami Latin, not Los Angeles, and it won't work. Nevertheless, it's beginning to attract national attention, and it's certainly entertaining.

Here's a take from Just the News:

Ex-reality show star Spencer Pratt might seem an unlikely candidate for the high-profile gig. His TV fame is mostly behind him, and he brings no political experience to the office.

Those Trumpian creds might attract MAGA loyalists, but the question is whether Pratt can peel off just enough votes from the celebrity circuit for a long-shot victory.

To be sure, many liberal-minded voters have already rallied behind incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, despite all-round low marks for her handling of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, or her progressive challenger, City Council member Nithya Raman.

Bass leads in essentially every poll. And Raman is promising to reverse the dramatic Hollywood job losses happening on the incumbent mayor's watch.

Still, Pratt is in second place in two of three recent polls, including one a few weeks ago sponsored by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, with Bass ahead by 14 points, and an Emerson College poll in early March in which Pratt trailed by just 8 points.

But a piece at The Free Press, linked at Real Clear Politics no less, sounds a more worrisome note to all right-thinking people:

Spencer Pratt, one of the greatest reality-TV villains of the 2000s, and a current candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral race, just delivered what may be one of the most effective, viral political ads in decades.

Here’s a brief synopsis: Bathed in ethereal California light, Pratt, 42, stands outside the mansions of incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember (and mayoral candidate) Nithya Raman. They, he tells viewers, do not have to deal with the consequences of their bad policies. Cue the consequences, flashing across the screen: homeless encampments, buildings on fire, a masked man holding a flare in front of a graffitied wall.

“This is where I live,” Pratt says, as the ad cuts to an Airstream trailer on the scorched lot where his Pacific Palisades property used to be. He’s been living there for most of the time since his house burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires. The response to the fires by Bass’s administration has been widely maligned.

“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the ad. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor.” The camera pans back to reveal his empty lot surrounded by some trees, the sun in the sky, and the campaign’s slogan: “A New Golden Age for Los Angeles.”

The message is resonant and raw—which is why the video has already accumulated more than 9 million views on X and growing.

This was an ad released prior to the "Spencer, saca la bassura!" Both certainly show he has some savvy media people working for him. This piece goes on to say that may be the problem: Spencer Pratt is a creature of contemporary reality TV culture, all phony and contrived, "fake, rigged, and incredibly dumb".

Americans are a hardy bunch, and eventually, they called bullshit. And when they did, they learned, to their surprise, that the people they turned to as their leaders were, more often than not, literally as bad as reality-show villains, pros who’ve been in the business of calling bullshit for quite some time.

Chief among them, of course, is our Commander-in-Chief, who parlayed his modest success on The Apprentice into the most massive political payout in American history. Donald Trump—the boardroom baddie whose catchphrase, “You’re fired,” was originally designed as a gesture of theatrical heartlessness—eventually looked straight at the camera and told his viewers that he was bucking the rules in real life too: running to help people like them, cast as the American story’s losers, beat the odds and win.

. . . As a reality-TV character, Pratt caught flack for such tricks as staging a bogus divorce to boost his and his wife’s career. These schemes earned him the distinction of a spot in Yahoo’s 2015 readers’ survey of the greatest reality-show villains of all time, along with greats such as Apprentice contestant—and, briefly, Trump administration official—Omarosa Manigault Newman.

. . . Pratt ascended by realizing that it was precisely the antagonistic posture into which he was forced that made him a stand-in for ordinary Americans. Viewers in Akron, Ohio, say, couldn’t begin to imagine themselves having a life as rosy as Conrad’s; but they could absolutely empathize with the dudebro telling them, with a wink and a smile, that it was all fake, a stupid game designed to keep people like them from having any real say or influence. He wasn’t just stirring resentment—he was telling the truth.

. . . In the reality show called “Los Angeles,” [Mayor Karen] Bass was cast as Conrad, the sparky one who had to succeed so that she could prove that all the propaganda viewers were being fed was sound and true.

But Pratt, reality-show veteran that he is, knows much better than to let this bogus story unfurl uninterrupted. As he’s done for 20 years now, he grabbed hold of the camera, turned it around, and told viewers an inconvenient truth. In reality-show America, that makes him just about the most thrilling, promising, and worthwhile candidate on the scene.

What did this guy expect? Zohran Mamdani won last year's New York mayor election against boring candidates promising nothing but same old-same old. Without Pratt, the LA mayor's election will have the incumbent, Karen Bass, tied to the Pacific Palisades fire, DEI, and homelessness, against Nithya Raman, something of a Mamdani clone and a Democratic Socialist. Pratt at least appears to be proposing solutions to the city's major problems that both Bass and Raman have facilitated, but perhaps more important, he has media advisors who are competent at raising his profile and presenting him as something new.

UPDATE: A piece about Pratt at USA Today. Nothing new.

Ben Bankas And The Lady In The Labour Ad

In this post, I brought up the Canadian-born current Texas resident standup comic Ben Bankas, whose stage persona is in-your-face working class. One of his routines is embedded above (language warning). In a typical segment, he imitates an angry liberal lady podcaster:

"F--- the Constitution. I don't care what a bunch of white men from 200 years ago.. . ."

J---- C-----, they were right. Back then, they were like "Do not let these women vote. If you care about freedom of speech, you'd better not let these women vote."

And now we did, and they're f------ screaming in their cars after they go to Sonic.

The reason for his growing success is slightly puzzling. As I noted at the link, he plays to bourgeois, heavily college-educated audiences. He omits it from any thumbnail, but I strongly suspect he has a four-year degree himself; he knows his audience too well. Some -- maybe most -- of his audience have conventionally liberal views, but they'll pay up to over a hundred bucks a ticket for something like prurient excitement, maybe catharsis, in hearing this stuff spoken out loud.

Maybe one or two people in any show will make a big show of being loudly offended, but Bankas works it into his routine. The thing to keep in mind is that this is comedy. Whether the well-dressed, well-coifed ladies and their escorts in the audience agree with the slob with a big belly, jeans, and a scruffy beard on stage, they laugh, perhaps even in secret sympathy.

But another point I've been making lately is that the UK has an entirely different attitude toward the working class. Nothing about the working class is funny, there's no possibility of cameraderie of any sort with the bourgeoisie. This dates back at least to the General Strike of 1926, but I think it goes back even farther to the Fabian Society, in which prominent avant-garde bourgeoisie developed a program to temporize with working-class demands via their own creation, the Labour Party.

A conservative UK lady YouTuber who calls herself Grannyopterix brings up a Labour political ad for the upcoming May 7 UK elections:

She says,

It's been put out for the election next week, and it's a humdinger of Labour Party contempt for the working classes and its belief that anyone who doesn't think like them is the very devil. It also shows once again just how old-fashioned and out-of-touch socialism, any socialism, is. I actually had to look twice to make sure this was a video made by the Labour Perty[.]

She introduces the scene of the ad:

A dark pub, with atmospheric sounds in the background and harsh lighting on the woman sitting at the table with a glass of beer in front of her. Right. And that tells you a whole lot about her, or rather, what the Labour Party thinks about her right from the get-go. What they're telling you is that the people who have these opinions that this actress is going to be repeating, well, they're the sort of people who frequent pubs and drink beer. Well, sorry Labour Party, that covers about 85% of the British population.

The actress then proceeds to give what, mutatis mutandis, would be a pretty good Ben Bankas routine, except that in saying her lines, she's dead serious. As Grannyopterix notes, she's quite attractive, but she's badly made up, and she's particularly good at twisting her face to look ugly. In other words, this is the equivalent of an actor dressed as Hitler reading Ben Bankas lines straight out serious, whereas Bankas uses timing, rolled eyes, smirks, and pauses to make his comic points.

At the end of her set,

Notice how she's put the glass of beer down. She's hidden it, because now, she's turning into a "reasonable person". Just look at the message that the Labour Party is giving the public here. Anyone with any of those ideas is a beer-swilling bigot, and tney're all the same.

The actress then speaks directly into the camera and declares, "I don't believe any of what I just said." This is something Ben Bankas would never do. The idea of canceling women's suffrage in this day and age is ridiculous, nobody would seriously propose it, but it's part of the comic alternate universe he's set up, and the audience goes along. Nobody would ever expect him to renounce a single thing he said at the end of his set; that's not what they paid for -- not even the people who stomp out in indignation in the middle of the show would pay for that.

But the Labour Party has its roots in the UK Victorian avant-garde bourgeoisie. These were serious people. They're just as serious now. They were frightened of the world proletarian revoultion, and they're just as terrified of the working class now. There's not a single funny thing about it.

Something's deeply wrong in the UK, but it's nothing new. I think Benamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the others understood something very similar, even way back then.

Nietzsche And The Islamo-Christian Right

Every now and then, Real Clear Politics links to a piece that's exceptionally egregious, beyond even its usual level of mediocrity. This one has no title, which is only the first of its problems. but it appears in a Washington Post section called Awakenings. It's by Matthew Schmitz, the religion editor for The Washington Post's Opinions section. If you're a religion editor for the Washington Post, this is hinky on its face. AI tells me, "Before joining the Post, he was a senior editor at First Things, a prominent ecumenical religious journal." Well, I've submitted to First Things and never gotten past the intern who returns manuscripts unread, so I stopped bothering. Mr Schmitz begins here:

In 2015, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel describing (among other things) how members of the radical right might come to admire, even embrace, Islam. Now we are seeing exactly that happen, as I describe in today’s column on the rise of the Islamo-Christian right.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, commentators on the American right have tended to cast Islam as a menace to Western liberties. But in the freewheeling world of antiestablishment podcasts, something new is happening. Recent months have seen Candace Owens reading from the Quran, Nick Fuentes decrying anti-Muslim sentiment and Tucker Carlson praising sharia law. What was once regarded as a threat is increasingly considered an ally.

For some of these figures, admiration leads to conversion. Andrew Tate, the masculinist influencer, and Sneako, the right-wing streamer, have recited the words of the shahada and thus taken up a faith they see as an antidote to Western decadence. Others look to Islam as a model of what Christians might achieve if they cast off the yoke of liberalism. Say goodbye to Judeo-Christian civilization — and hello to the Islamo-Christian right.

OK, one thing we're beginning to see here is a hallmark of sloppy writing, hypostatization, a logical fallacy and conceptual error where an abstract concept, idea, or property is treated as a concrete, physical substance or real entity, in this case, the "Islamo-Christian right". One might imagine this as a movement, perhaps with a journal that serves the same purpose as Reason to the libertarians, with a manifesto, and perhaps a public intellectual who serves as de facto spokesman.

There's no such thing. The people he mentions are Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson. Donald Trump, whose characterizations often go to the heart of the matter, has repeatedly called both Owens and Carlson "low IQ" individuals. Fuentes's views are incongruous and inconsistent, especially over Islam; Wikipedia reports that in 2019, he said "the First Amendment was not written for Muslims or immigrants". If he's expressed admiration for Islam, he's also expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. All these people will say anything that gets them attention; they simply aren't serious enough to constitute a movement.

Schmitz contrasts "Islamo-Christians", a vague neologism apparently referring to a loose collection of attention-seeking crazies, with Judeo-Christians, and thereby he commits a historical error:

The term “Judeo-Christianity” gained currency in the 1930s as a way to describe a pluralist vision of Western society. A Judeo-Christian America was one in which the contributions of Catholics and Jews could matter as much as those of Protestants. It would also be the global champion of freedom and democracy.

According to Wikipedia,

The term "Judæo Christian" appears in a letter by Alexander McCaul which is dated October 17, 1821. The term in this case referred to Jewish converts to Christianity. The term was similarly used by Joseph Wolff in 1829, in reference to a type of church that would observe some Jewish traditions in order to convert Jews. Mark Silk states in the early 19th century the term was "most widely used (in French as well as English) to refer to the early followers of Jesus who opposed" the wishes of Paul the Apostle and wanted "to restrict the message of Jesus to Jews and who insisted on maintaining Jewish law and ritual".

Friedrich Nietzsche used the German term "Judenchristlich" ("Jewish-Christian") to describe and emphasize what he believed were neglected aspects of the continuity which exists between the Jewish and Christian worldviews. The expression appears in The Antichrist, published in 1895 but written several years earlier; a fuller development of Nietzsche's argument can be found in the prior work, On the Genealogy of Morality.

The problem here is that Mr Schmitz's whole subtext is basically Nietzschean, and I don't think he knows it. Let me digress. Here's a summary of Nietzsche on morality:

The story begins with the two types of human: the noble, the powerful, on the one hand, and the slave, the weak, on the other hand. It was the nobles who created morality.

. . . What is the difference between noble and slave morality? Noble morality found a notion of “good” simply by looking at themselves — whatever is associated them is good — and then the notion of “bad” emerged as the opposite of the good, themselves. In contrast, slave morality is created by ressentiment, meaning that they first found a notion of “evil” by looking at the noble — whatever is associated them is evil — and then the notion of “good” emerged as the opposite of it.

Put differently, the slaves reversed noble morality to feel better about themselves. Before, they were “bad” people according to noble morality. But now they were “good,” based on their own morality, a new valuation of good and evil. In this slave morality, things like consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship are considered to be “good.” In fact, Nietzsche argues that our contemporary moral values are these, the slave morality.

Let's get back to Schmitz on Judeo-Christians, or at least those he thinks are the right sort of Judeo-Christians: they're tolerant of Catholics and Jews, the champions of freedom and democracy. In other words, they represent slave morality, consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship. But all of a sudden, we have the Islamo-Christians!

The Islamo-Christian right, by contrast, is skeptical of pluralism and critical of U.S. foreign policy. It’s scornful of liberal attempts to promote interreligious understanding and therefore happy to criticize Islam on certain points even as it praises the faith on others.

. . . Islam is also praised on the right as a socially conservative counterweight to exploitative capitalism and the follies of U.S. foreign policy. Aleksandr Dugin, the anti-liberal Russian thinker, has declared that “shariah has to overcome the capitalism.” He hopes that Muslims will join a worldwide battle against the “globalist elite.”

In other words, the "Islamo-Christians" are actually rebelling against the "slave morality". Nietzsche is actually on their side. From the summary:

I mean, who could deny the goodness of friendship? Well, Nietzsche is not on our side. He deplores this redefinition of morality. What Nietzsche supports is rather the nobles, who do not care about existing social constraints, and are strong enough to decide their own morality by themselves.

Schmitz basically understands Nietzsche's point:

Whether the Islamo-Christian right’s vision of Islam is actually accurate is, for its adherents, beside the point. They are not engaging in a careful study of comparative religion; they’re imagining an alternative to liberal modernity.

But let's keep in mind that to Schmitz, the "Islamo-Christian right" is a castle in the air. He's attributing intellectual consistency to a small gaggle of mentally disadvantaged narcissists whose views are inchoate, immature, and always subject to change. But he's inconsistent as well. He holds up Owens, Carlson, Fuentes, and a few others as Nietzschean subversives who stand for all the wrong things, but then he claims they don't understand Islam.

Still, it’s worth subjecting their claims to scrutiny. Arab countries might be filled with the self-confidence Carlson describes, but their birth rates are declining just as badly as Europe’s. (In Saudi Arabia, births have fallen by more than 10 percent in six years.) Perhaps Islam is a beacon of social conservatism, but Muslims in the United States tend to be more liberal than evangelicals on abortion, transgenderism and homosexuality.

. . . Take the trajectory of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the president of Syria. As the former leader of the al-Nusra front, an Islamic State offshoot and al-Qaeda affiliate, he would seem to be a perfect example of Islamic intransigence. But as head of state, he has cultivated good relations with the U.S. In April, he was filmed in a basketball arena in Damascus watching performers dance to Missy Elliott’s “Work It.”

So don't lose heart. Islam is just another version of Nietzsche's slave morality, give it time. But even this misunderstands Islam's role in Western liberal democracy as it now manifests. Via another Real Clear Politics link from the last few days, this from The Wall Street Journal:

The past six weeks have seen the attempted arson of two synagogues and the former offices of a Jewish charity in the U.K., an apparent plot to dump hazardous chemicals onto the Israeli embassy with drones, and the burning of community-run ambulances in Golders Green, the heart of Britain’s small Jewish community. British police believe that Iranian intelligence are recruiting locals via the Telegram app, under the name of a front group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia.

. . . The Yookay isn’t lawless, but it has a “two-tier” justice system. Complain too vociferously online, and you risk prosecution. March through London chanting to “Globalize the Intifada,” and the police do nothing.

. . . The Jews of Golders Green have declared for England. It isn’t clear whether England will declare for them. The liberal, tolerant and “antiracist” middle classes are fashionably “anti-Zionist.” The bluer the collar, the greater the likelihood that its wearer likes Israeli pluck and Jewish ingenuity.

First, the "Islamo-Christian right" aren't the ones allied with Islam; it's the "liberal, tolerant and 'antiracist' middle classes". They're the ones who want Islamic immigration, all over the West, primarily because the immigrants will torment the Jews and the working class.

In other words, even if some Muslims are tolerant and follow a version of conventional morality, this isn't why the nobles like them, and if a few nut job podcasters think they're OK, they misunderstand Muslims just as much as Mr Schmitz does. I think Mr Schmitz of the Washington Post and First Things is naive and deeply confused.

James Comey Is His Own Worst Enemy

At 3:07 in the video embedded above, Mark Halperin comes about as close to the truth as the Overton window will allow when he says of James Comey, "I've never seen somebody so unpopular act in public like he's so popular". On the other hand, Real Clear Politics has been unwilling even to touch the subject of the DOJ "8647" indictment over the past few days: that Comey is innocent is apparently not even a matter for civilized debate. Freedom of speech! Anyhow, "86" just means the the kitchen is out of soup!

But I'm a contrarian, not even a recovering contrarian. This all seems a little too cut-and-dried to me. First, a quick web search shows that people are convicted by juries, or plead guilty, for threatening the president all the time. For instance,

According to court documents, between Feb. 15, 2025, and May 15, 2025, Valeriy Kouznetsov, 41, made multiple threats toward the President of the United States, his family, and other government officials. Kouznetsov posted these threats on X (formerly Twitter), some of which he sent directly to the X accounts belonging to the President and other officials. For example, on March 28, 2025, Kouznetsov posted a message threatening the President with a “7/13 secret service repeat Philadelphia,” a reference to the July 13, 2024, attempted assassination of President Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Just last month, he was sentenced to two years and four months in prison. Or this:

Troy Kelly, age 20, of Crown Point, NY, plead guilty today to one count of a three-count indictment charging threats against the President of the United States.

. . . In pleading guilty, Kelly admitted that in May 2024 he posted a threat to kill President Biden on a social media website and that he intended it to be understood as a threat. Responding to a post of President Biden, Kelly told the then-President that he was “[g]onna put a bullet in your head if I ever catch you.”

At sentencing, the judge ordered him to have mental health treatment. In other words, people can be convicted of threatening the president of the US under what still seems to be a wide variety of specific statements and circumstances. According to Wikipedia,

The true threat doctrine was established in the 1969 Supreme Court case Watts v. United States. In that case, an eighteen-year-old male was convicted in a Washington, D.C. District Court for violating a statute prohibiting persons from knowingly and willfully making threats to harm or kill the President of the United States.

The conviction was based on a statement made by Watts, in which he said, "[i]f they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." Watts appealed, leading to the Supreme Court finding the statute constitutional on its face, but reversing the conviction of Watts.

. . . the Court established that there is a "true threat" exception to protected speech, but also that the statement must be viewed in its context and distinguished from protected hyperbole. The opinion, however, stopped short of defining precisely what constituted a "true threat."

Traditionally, the standard for whether a true threat could be punished was based its effect on a "reasonable person" in the shoes of the person who received the threat. In 2023, Counterman v. Colorado abolished that "objective" test. Counterman established a "subjective" test that required a state to show evidence that the accused subjectively understood the nature of their threat and consciously, recklessly disregarded that nature.

A few people have argued, as I did Wednesday, that on one hand, Comey is both a former Deputy Attorney General and a former FBI Director, whose agencies had investigated and prosecuted at minimum dozens of threat cases, and he had to have been aware of what he was doing. Comey made the "8647" post on May 15, 2025, we must presume fully aware of the July 13, 2024 Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump and the September 15, 2024 assassination attempt at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, while Trump was golfing.

Comey is a major public figure whose statements consistently attract attemtion. In fact, although he deleted the post shortly after he made it, it attracted immediate attention and was widely re-posted.

Comey deleted the photo shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

In an interview with MSNBC, Comey said he assumed the numbers reflected a political message in reference to Trump because of the number "47," but not a call to violence against the Republican president. He called the allegations "crazy."

At least to me, this is Comey being a little too cute. He posts something that just barely crosses the line, but then he deletes it after it nevertheless attracts major attention -- but he wants credit for deleting it, because he claims he opposers violence, and he didn't understand "86" could mean wipe somebody out, he thought it just meant the kitchen was out of soup. (In my younger, single days, I spent some time in bars, where "Manager, 86" was a frequent call on the PA, referring to the need to eject an obnoxious customer. In fact, I dated a lady bartender who routinely used the term in that context -- she'd jokingly threaten to "86" me from our date.)

And this is the Comey who got a little too cute over Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server:

In July [2016], FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI investigation had concluded that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but recommended that no charges be filed because Clinton did not act with criminal intent, the historical standard for pursuing prosecution.

On October 28, 2016, eleven days before the election, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had started looking into newly discovered emails. On November 6, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had not changed its conclusion. Comey's timing was contentious, with critics saying that he had violated Department of Justice guidelines and precedent, and prejudiced the public against Clinton. The controversy received more media coverage than any other topic during the presidential campaign.

The result, as we see in the Mark Halperin clip above, where his liberal guest remarks, "You're never going to catch me defending Jim Comey. You guys know how I feel about him from 2016", is that nobody, left or right, much likes the guy -- he's just a little too cute. That cuteness even comes out in the latest context for his "8647" indictment:

BREAKING: The DOJ is now pushing to SEIZE James Comey’s profits from his crime book, as prosecutors believe part of the reason he posted a threat on President Trump’s life was to DRUM UP book sales

DOJ is going HARD after this guy 🔥

The “forfeiture action” included in Comey’s… pic.twitter.com/aW1At0bRAk

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) April 29, 2026

He knew full well what the public reaction to the "8647" post would be, even if he took it down a few hours later, which goes to his recklessness in posting it. Victor Davis Hansen makes a good point at 2:30 below:

There's a little bit of wrinkle to this, because people were kinda startled when the attorney general announced his investigation into this, but then he said this was a long investigation, and we investigated a lot of messaging. So what I'm getting at is if there's something more, what would that more be? If he said something in a private e-mail that didn't come under attorney-client privilege, and it said maybe to his friend or his daughter, this is cool, or this is neat, or this is a good way to threaten the president. . . let's withhold judgment until we find out.

In other words, Comey just plays things a little too close to the line, he's always just a little too cute, and as a consequence of that, he has enemies. I don't think it's going to be as simple for him as getting his case dismissed over freedom-of-speech. The standard in Watts v. United States was abolished in 2023; nobody mentions that, and I betcha Comey doesn't know that, either. Heck, I wonder if his lawyers do. The law is no longer as clear as that, and Comey seems to be skating on the idea that he's a lot more popular than he really is.