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Yesterday, the UK Guardian ran a story headlined, “ ‘Alarming but not unexpected’: NYT lawsuit just latest example of Trump’s presidential lawfare.” President Trump filed a new defamation lawsuit, this time against the New York Times, alleging $15 billion in damages— which exceeds the Times’ entire net worth.

Apparently, even applying its incredibly broad definition of ‘expert,’ the Guardian was still unable to find a single ‘expert’ who liked Trump’s lawsuit or thought it had any merit. (Portlanders: in other words, the article was completely one-sided, violating who knows how many journalistic ethics rules. But never mind.)

Trump’s new 85-page case was filed in the sunny climes of Tampa, Florida. The next step will be for the Times’ lawyers to move to dismiss, probably arguing that President Trump failed to sufficiently state a claim for defamation. But, as the story admitted, so far, three major news platforms have settled similar cases with Trump for millions.

Call it turnabout or FAFO, but it’s fun. The Times used to throw office parties whenever a new lawsuit was filed against President Trump. But now, he files one case against them, and you’d think it was the End of Democracy or something.

Do the managers of The New York Times actually still believe the Russia Collusion story they were awarded a Pulitzer for, or their 1619 Project Woke-rewrite of US history? Or their mulish defense of the Covid vaccines. Or their florid esteem for the leadership of “Joe Biden.” Or are they simply ruled by blind Trump derangement? (Or do they receive instructions from nefarious others about how to report and opine on things?)

For most of my life, nasty progressive reporters have hidden behind an effective framing game called “How Do You Respond.” At press events, they’ll “gotcha” a conservative official by asking a sincere-sounding question like this: “how do you respond to critics who complain your policy stinks like room-temperature French cheese— and kills children?”

It is the laziest reporting imaginable. It’s a fake way to pretend to be unbiased. The reporters aren’t actually quoting critics. They are just making stuff up, fishing for an awkward soundbite, leaving officials fumbling to answer, since they’ve always been forced to be “professional” and treat the reporters’ fake question as if it were perfectly fair and appropriate and not based on a lie.

But this year, Trump officials began pushing back. Now, whenever a reporter starts a question with “how do you respond to critics who say…”, Trump’s officials jump right down the reporter’s throat. They immediately ask, “What critics?” Without waiting for an answer, they demand, “who is saying that?” It is wonderful. The moron reporters are left with an unsolvable riddle. They can either answer, “AOC and Bernie say that,” which will draw a guffaw from everyone in the room. Or, humiliated, they can mumble something illegible and move on, which is what they usually do.

The Times tried to mount a lame defense. It did actually round up a bunch of complaining critics, all of them inherently biased. For instance, the article quoted the president of “Americans United for Separation of Church and State,” an atheist NGO; a VP from a libertarian think tank; and a ‘religion and culture professor’ at a Canadian university. Okay.

The gist of the critics’ complaint seemed to be that federal officials’ mere recognition of the holiday’s religious basis somehow amounted to “establishing a state religion.” Okay again, Scrooges.

This fracas, if you can call it that, evidences the real motive behind the effort to secularize Christmas. It’s never been about being “inclusive.” It is intended to erode the undeniably Christian religious roots of the most popular American holiday of all. Without a secular version of the holiday, how can critics deny the fact that Christmas has always been a national religious holiday— from the first time George Washington slipped on a new pair of military boots?

The bottom line is that a courageous, muscular Christianity is back at the helm. This is not new. It has only returned to active duty.

My favorite thing ever is when the NYT does a profile on a lib that did something bad and needs an image boost. They always have two pictures: the first has the subject in their house wearing a sweater and looking out a closed window. This creates the impression that they are hiding from a mob and just want to be left alone, and the NYT will run this pic regardless of whether the subject started the fight in the first place. The second picture has the subject walking in a park or a garden looking pensive, as if to suggest that they will bravely push through their fear and ultimately triumph over the bad guys.

I won’t spend much time on this developing ICE shooting story, except to say that the real story is the coverage of the story. Here’s this morning’s New York Times home page, with wall-to-wall coverage of the Minneapolis ICE-related tragedy. ...

Notice what’s missing:

no discussion of why the stop occurred,
no analysis of agent threat perception, and
no comparisons with hundreds of similar police shootings, including at least two other recent fatalities involving ICE firing into SUVs. ...

Yesterday, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Renee Nicole Good was Minneapolis ‘ICE Watch’ ‘warrior’ who trained to resist feds before shooting.” She and her lesbian wife recently moved back to Minneapolis from Canada, where they’d briefly relocated in protest of Trump’s 2024 re-election. According to the Post, Good —a mother of three— was a card-carrying, trained ICE-resistance activist.

Good’s wife, Rebecca, was busy confronting ICE agents (outside the SUV) at the time of the shooting. The Post reported she was filmed sobbing, “it’s my fault,” after the shots rang out and she realized Renee had been struck. “I made her come down here, it’s my fault,” she can be heard saying in a video filmed by a local resident.

According to the Post’s story, both women were members of “ICE Watch,” a group that tracks the movements of ICE agents and coordinates ways to interfere with them. For instance, ICE Watch recently shared an Instagram post that encouraged members to bring items to help barricade the streets around where the shooting took place, including suggesting bringing dried-up Christmas trees to burn.

So, they’re not super smart. But still.

The story also noted that, according to DHS statistics, ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by +3,200% over the last year. The agent who shot Ms. Good was himself recently injured in a different car attack last June, in Minneapolis, under similar circumstances. According to a New York Times report, the agent was dragged 100 yards after trying to disable the driver with a stun gun, and required medical treatment.

Notwithstanding the growing evidence that Ms. Good and her wife deliberately intended to get in harm’s way, this media psy-op will probably work to shift the national focus from fraud to ICE enforcement, at least in the short term. Attention, after all, is limited. It’s a zero-sum market. It’s neither good nor bad; it is just how the psy-wars go.

Lesbo who FAFO'd in Minneapolis:

Assuming you are masochistic enough to consume corporate media’s articles, when reading this type of piece, always first ask: “do all the quoted sources agree with each other, and varying expert opinions are conspicuously absent?” If so, you can safely ignore all the quotes and focus just on the factual reporting of what actually happened.

Believe it or not, this kind of reporting is what is most responsible for killing legacy media and driving people to social media for news. On social media, folks actually find the diversity of voices and opinions that is lacking in contemporary corporate media. Even allowing for all the noise of misinformation, outright lies, silliness, and unintelligent commentary, Twitter’s “town square” beats whatever the Times is serving up.

At least the bias is obvious on Twitter/X, which is all anybody asked for anyway.

It would be trivially easy for big news publishers like the Times to give readers right-click access to quoted experts’ biographies, previous comments, publication history, and political donation records. But they don’t. Think about that. And think about the claim that publications like the Times allegedly exist to “inform” us.

How awful is corporate media? Pretty awful. There’s been a lot happening related to the Greenland story, quietly, but not at all hidden— just not spoonfed by government officials to infantile corporate media reporters like mashed peaches. Trump isn’t spoonfeeding them, and as a result, reporters look dumber and dumber.

For example, easily located defense contracts, published right on official US government websites, reveal the United States approved at least six major arms deals with Denmark over a six-week period starting in mid November, 2025. They include $318 million for AIM-9X missiles (Nov. 14), $730 million for AIM-120C-8 missiles (Dec. 11), $951 million for AMRAAM-ER missiles (Dec. 23), $1.8 billion for P-8A aircraft (Dec. 29), $45 million for Hellfire missiles (Jan. 8, 2026), and Denmark was allowed to redeem its expired savings stamps in return for several deluxe family appliances.

For comparison, the six weeks saw about ten times the volume of defense sales to Denmark during the entire previous twelve-month period, when the Nordic nation purchased only a handful of 9mm bullets and a large customized fighting stick that can be affixed to a dogsled.

In other words, while Trump was threatening to invade Greenland “the hard way,” the Danes were paying him billions of dollars. You think those remarkable, multi-billion dollar sales numbers might have been significant to the public’s understanding of the developing “Greenland crisis?”

None of it was a secret. Again, all the deals were published right on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s website. The stories even appeared in the military press. For one example, here’s a headline from the Defense Post, December 23rd:

https://thedefensepost.com/2025/12/23/us-amraam-er-denmark/

US OKs $951M AMRAAM Extended Range Missile Sale to Denmark
December 23, 2025

At this point, it is an open question whether better new reporting is produced by corporate media reporters or blind squirrels.

Yesterday, CNN broke a story headlined, “Alex Pretti broke rib in confrontation with federal agents a week before death, sources say.” In other words, the pugilistic anti-ICE activist was a pro who kept at it and fought through the pain to its predictable, tragic conclusion. But the good news is, media is learning to use AI:




In case you somehow missed it (or live in Portland), last week, a Minneapolis nurse named Alex Pretti blocked an ICE operation, blew his bullhorn in agent’s faces, physically tried to stop them from arresting another rioter, thereby committing a crime (assault on a federal officer), violently resisted arrest in a scrum with a half dozen officers, and after Pretti’s gun went off in the fracas, was shot and killed.

The media spent a week rediscovering Second Amendment rights, polishing Pretti’s resumé, manufacturing a nasty narrative of an unjustified police shooting, and credulously quoting Democrats calling Pretti’s death a “murder” and an “assassination.”

But things became more complicated yesterday. CNN reported that ‘sources’ said that, about a week before Pretti’s death, he was involved in another physical fight with ICE agents. Apparently, federal officers tackled him while he was interfering with their attempt to detain other protesters. Pretti told the source that five agents pigpiled him and one leaned on his back, which, he claimed, broke his rib. (He was released at the scene.)

The source said Pretti told a friend, “I thought I was going to die.” Ironic. But apparently it only whetted his appetite for more.

CNN then said it had “reviewed records consistent with treating a broken rib.” Its source also said Pretti was “known to federal agents,” but admitted that nobody knows whether the officers had ID’d him before last week’s shooting. ...

Had Pretti been arrested the first time around, he might still be here.

The repeated violent encounters suggest that Pretti had conceived a self-image as some kind of heroic, vigilante-style civil rights warrior. ...

Maybe we should dig more into who or what filled Pretti’s head with these fantastical ideas and urged the recently divorced, 37-year-old nurse to reinvent himself as an urban guerrilla. (People reported that Pretti’s ex-wife “hadn’t spoken to him since they divorced more than two years ago.” Oof.)

Sad. But now, having raced out of the gate with its “Pretti the hero” narrative, media’s whitewashing is falling apart like cheap gas station toilet paper. Pretti now sounds more like a despairing, unstable, broken man who might have been inclined to suicide-by-cop, in a vain attempt to infuse his life with final, tragic, victimized meaning.

Every effing time I do all 3 of them are only covering some old lady that got kidnapped

Six corporations control ninety percent of everything you watch, read, and hear in America. Six. Not sixty. Not six hundred. Six.
And those six corporations are owned by a handful of billionaires who attend the same parties, sit on the same boards, vacation on the same islands, and share the same vision for the future of humanity, a future where you are no longer necessary except as a consumer of whatever products they decide to sell you until the day you die.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is publicly available information that anyone can verify in ten minutes of research. Comcast owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Pictures, and dozens of cable channels. Disney owns ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, National Geographic, ...

From the Congressional Record, January 27, 1917:

JP Morgan, Steel, Shipbuilding, and “powder” interests hired 12 high-ranking newspaper execs to determine how to “control generally the policy of the daily press” throughout the entire country.

Answer: They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.…the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly SUPERVISE AND EDIT INFORMATION….

And the first thing every one of these men understands is that you cannot control a united population. A people who see themselves as countrymen, who trust each other, who would stand together against a common threat, that population is ungovernable by a small elite. The math does not work. There are too many of them and too few of you. So before you can rule, you must divide. Before you can conquer, you must shatter the bonds that hold communities together. ...

The billionaires who own your media understand this better than anyone because many of them studied history and political theory at elite universities that most Americans cannot afford. They know exactly what they are doing. They are not stupid. They are not making mistakes. Every story that makes you hate your neighbor, every controversy that splits the country down the middle, every outrage cycle that dominates the news for a week and then vanishes without resolution, all of it is working exactly as intended.

Watch this 24-7 coverage suddenly be dropped if it turns out the old lady was kidnapped for ransom by cartel affiliated illegals. Such kidnappings are common in Mexico and have now spilled into the US, though so far limited to the cartel kidnapping illegals.

The New York Times even spent most of December helping people un-redact the files. They literally ran a story explaining how to recover insufficiently redacted information.

But here’s what happened between “release the files” and “the files should never have been released”: the files worked. They did exactly what transparency is supposed to do. They produced accountability. And Andrew’s arrest —the first royal to be arrested since the 1640s— proves anybody could be next.

Ten months of “release the files now!” One royal arrest. Four days of silence. Then, “actually, you shouldn’t have these.”

The Times isn’t just crying about spilled Little St. James coconut milk. The DOJ is still sitting on an estimated 2.5 million more pages. It looks to me like the Times is reeling in Richman to plug the gap, and stop any more releases. If the first 3.5 million pages are this bad— how much worse are the pages the DOJ might still be sitting on?

The New York Times has now completed the most revealing editorial arc of the decade: two months of demanding Epstein file transparency, followed by a panicked reversal four days after the files produced their first major arrest. The principle was never about transparency.

The principle was: transparency for thee, but not for the people who summer in the same places as our editorial board.

When Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor abruptly crossed the red line from “person of interest” to “person in handcuffs,” somewhere between Windsor Castle and the Times’s opinion desk, someone decided the public had learned enough. So they assigned the op-ed to James Comey’s personal leaker, who wrote it from the unique moral authority of a man who has both leaked classified documents and also had his own emails seized by federal investigators.

The New York Times: all the news that’s fit to print, unless it leads to an elite arrest.

Nobody called it “hysteria” when “Trump appears 1,800 times” was trending.

The timeline tells the story:

Files drop → Democrats crow about Trump being mentioned 1,800 times.

Files actually get read → Trump is exonerated; the real names are Democrats, academics, media elites, progressive foreign officials.

Suddenly → Nine outlets in three weeks: “moral panic,” “witch hunt,” and “everybody calm down.”

The “moral panic” frame activated precisely when the files stopped being useful against Trump and started being dangerous to the establishment’s own people. That’s not a principled stand for due process — it’s a cold, calculated, and probably super expensive psychological operation to change the subject.

In case anyone doubts this, here are the nine stories that I found, across nine different publications...

This coordinated media pushback does not evidence any moral panic. What it shows is elite panic. Someone is spending a lot of money and effort on behalf of elites trying to smother the Epstein story in the crib.

The Epstein files weren’t leaked by hackers or dug up by conspiracy theorists. Congress voted 427-1 to release them! That’s not a moral panic— that’s a bipartisan transparency remedy. And when the most lopsided vote in modern congressional history produces documents that make powerful people uncomfortable, those people don’t get to call the public “hysterical” for reading them and asking questions. The powerful get to explain themselves.

We are not the problem. The problem is billionaires in boardrooms, captive journos on group texts, Manhattan publicists speed-dialing friendly columnists, and sneaky psyops. This is what panic looks like when rich people do it. ...

Whenever you see someone on social media use the term “moral panic,” push back with elite panic.

Last week, Netflix dropped out of its bidding for Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), leaving David Ellison’s Paramount/Skydance as the lead buyer. Among other assets, Warner Brothers includes CNN.

Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and a close Trump ally, has already made clear what kind of media operation he’s building. After buying CBS, he paid $150 million for The Free Press and installed free-speech champion Bari Weiss as CBS News’ editor-in-chief.

If the WBD deal closes, Weiss could run both CBS News and CNN simultaneously. ...

Here’s the strategic reality facing Democrats: Their electoral coalition depends on low-information voters absorbing a left-leaning media environment by default, from screens at the airport and the gym. Democrats don’t need people to watch Rachel Maddow. They need people not to notice that the background news they’re passively consuming has its thumb on the scale.

If Ellison breaks the corporate news monopoly —if CNN and CBS become genuinely competitive, genuinely heterodox, genuinely willing to follow stories wherever they lead— then the 2026 midterms aren’t just about candidates and issues anymore. They’ll be about whether, for the first time in 30 years, the Democrat Party can win elections without the automatic benefit of a media monoculture.

The Skydance/Paramount entertainment angle is a slower burn, but is arguably even more important. If “The Message” dies in Hollywood —if Paramount starts to greenlight content that audiences actually want rather than content that checks diversity boxes— the cultural permission structure shifts even further. ...

We are looking at a potential cultural realignment that could reverse 25 years of increasingly unhinged media. The next Lord of the Rings series might not be written by Stanford’s gender studies department, might not start with a trans love scene, and might not feature a heroic orc trying to liberate the hobbits from human oppression.