movies seen (letterboxd Diary 2026 edition)

 

What Did Democrats Say in Their 192-Page Autopsy?

 

The Democrats have an autopsy report that was just released that supposedly would explain why they lost the 2024 election. They were shocked. Remember the NPR poll, for example, on the eve of the election, said that Kamala Harris was beyond the margin of error. 

In other words, she was ahead by more than three points just before the balloting began. Remember the Iowa poll that said that Kamala Harris was going to win by three points, and she lost by eight or nine, I think. So, the point is, they were shocked, and they wanted to know what happened. And they should want to know what happened because they had more money. 

She raised a billion dollars. If you look at the aggregate Biden-Harris total campaign chest, they outraised Donald Trump by a billion dollars. Donald Trump was also, for much of 2022, 2023, and 2024, sidelined off the campaign trail dealing with five criminal and civil lawfare suits. So, they thought they should have won. 

And that’s in addition to the media. You remember the debate with JD Vance and Tim Walz and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris debates with Donald Trump. The moderators were more or less on the side of the Democrats. 

 So, they had all these advantages, support, and they lost. So they wanted to know why. Well, you and I know why they did. 

Because they had an agenda, and what was that agenda? The trans issue, the open borders issue, the 10 to 12 million illegal aliens issue, the 500,000 criminals who came across issue, the highest urban crime rates in a generation issue, the war on fossil fuels issue, the 9.2% inflation in 2022 under Biden and, in the aggregate, on key staples, maybe a 20% or 30% rise in prices, the catastrophe in Afghanistan, the sense of appeasement that allowed [Vladimir] Putin to think he could go into Ukraine. 

I could go on. Two theater wars, one in Ukraine, one in the Middle East, etc., etc., etc.  

They didn’t mention any of that. They didn’t mention any of that because that is the agenda, the platform, the policies of the new Democratic Party. They feel that the Green New Deal is great and we should war on fossil fuels, cut back on gas and oil production. 

They believe that there are three sexes and that biological men have a perfect right to dress in girls’ dressing rooms or compete in women’s sports.  

They believe the border should be open. They believe that 10 or 12 million illegal aliens wasn’t enough. They believe that it was good to get out of Afghanistan the way we did. 

They didn’t criticize that. They believe in DEI and racial preferences. So, they weren’t going to say that that agenda, none of it , which is supported by the American people, was the undoing.  

They also didn’t say that the party that talks about democracy and that Trump is a dictator didn’t talk about the manner in which Joe Biden, who won 14 million votes in the primaries, was forced out by a bunch of backroom insider politicos. 

One day he was there, one day he was forced off the ticket, and almost within 24 hours, Kamala Harris was coronated as the nominee. Everybody came in lockstep, endorsed her. The vote at the convention a few weeks later was pro forma. And guess what? She had run in 2020 against Biden and had not gotten one delegate. 

So that was an entire coup, so to speak, that was contrary to the perception of the Democrats that they were the party of democracy. They weren’t going to talk about it being far left.  

So, what did they say in this 192-page, poorly written report? It was written by Mr. [Paul] Rivera, who’s a politico analyst, an activist, an analyst, a friend of Ken Martin’s who did it. 

The report has misspelled words. It’s kind of incoherent. There are no footnotes. He didn’t want to release it, but he was forced to because he had earlier made a promise that he would. Those were the admissions. Well, what was the commission? Well, it was that you didn’t attack Donald Trump hard enough. They attacked him all the time. 

They called him a fascist. They called him a liar. They called him a dictator. But they had to say that.  

And then, second of all, they said that they didn’t properly prepare Kamala Harris. They did prepare Kamala Harris. They kept her out of reach from media and the public for 30 or 40 days. They did all they could to coach her. 

They had private planes for her staff. They had wardrobe consultants. They had speech consultants. They had Hollywood producers advise [her]—they had everybody. But they couldn’t do it, not because they didn’t try, because Kamala Harris was one of the most inept candidates that we have seen in modern political history. 

Any time that she got on the stage and she started talking about metaphysics, time, being, thought, her eyes would sort of go into a corkscrew and “Twilight Zone” music would come on, and she was just, you know, coconut palms and being and what could be and all.  

And it was just embarrassing. It was so embarrassing that people thought she was intoxicated because her sentences, her paragraphs, her grammar, her syntax made no sense. 

So, it wasn’t that they didn’t prepare her; it’s that they handed a nomination to someone who was selected after the aftermath of George Floyd on the basis of her gender and race, and she had nothing, nothing in her past that would show that she was qualified.  

She did have one thing. She was the most left-wing senator based on her voting record, to the left of Bernie Sanders, in the entire U.S. Senate. 

So what would an accurate autopsy say? The accurate autopsy would say our message is too far left and nobody wants it, so we have to disguise it. 

And then it could say, look what Joe Biden did. He got elected, and he turned out to be the most far-left president since FDR. 

Now, how did we do that? We did that—forget about the balloting and elections and changing the voting laws and all the things that Molly Ball bragged about in her Time essays of cabals and conspiracies. 

They did it because Joe Biden served as a waxen effigy. Old Joe Biden from Scranton, the good guy, the union guy, the lunch-bucket guy. It was all a myth. And then the Obama team came in and used him as sort of a puppet, pulled the strings, and then rushed through this agenda. And it took four years for people to catch on to what was happening. 

This guy was non compos mentis, and they couldn’t believe it, that he was president, but it served a purpose. And a lot of candidates saw that. [Abigail] Spanberger in Virginia saw that. And it looks like some of the Democrats running for the mayorship and the governorship in California see that. 

In other words, they feign like they’re moderates. They suggest they are moderates during the campaign, and then when they’re elected, they have the socialist redistributionist agenda.  

So, in conclusion, if the autopsy wanted to be accurate, it would have done this. We lost the 2024 campaign because we had a radical agenda that reflects the Jacobin neo-socialism of the new party. 

For us to get elected on a national basis, we have to hide that agenda. We have to hide that agenda, lie to the people, act like we’re moderates, say we’re for fracking, close the border, say we are not objecting to deportation, tough on crime, don’t defund the police—all of that Kamala Harris was not able to do. 

She may have tried here and there, but she did not modify or hide or mask or disguise that agenda with a veneer of moderation. 

Second of all, she should have never been nominated. She was completely unqualified to be a presidential candidate. She had run in 2020. She was the weakest of eight or 10 candidates. 

She dropped out before the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses, and she didn’t get a single delegate. That should have told them something.  

And number three, Joe Biden had a terrible record. Terrible record. And the Democrats did everything they could to demonize Donald Trump, to make the campaign about Donald Trump, to keep Kamala Harris out of reach, to hide her so people wouldn’t find out how crazy and inept she was. 

That was not enough.  

And so, all they had to do was say we can’t change our message; it’s toxic; let’s hide it. We can’t get good candidates, and we anoint them, and that was another problem. So we need a better candidate that can better mask and disguise this radical socialist agenda that we have until he or she is elected president. 

That would have been honest.  

Saluting Tulsi, Slamming Schiff

 

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person 1: Well, person 2, let’s get you to talk about Tulsi Gabbard, who is resigning for—her husband has a rare form of bone cancer. Some people have been nasty. Let me read one of the nasty things, if I can find it. You’ll forgive me, my notes are all jumbled. But our favorite person in the world, the state— the senator from California, the—

Yes. Here’s what Adam Schiff had to say. I can’t stand this guy. “My thoughts go out to Tulsi Gabbard and her family, and her husband battles a serious health problem. I hope and pray that he makes a speedy—” Where’s the but? Yeah, a but’s coming. “But let’s be clear, Tulsi Gabbard’s only positive contribution to our nation’s national security is her resignation. She politicized intelligence. She dismantled …” Who is he to say that? “She dismantled critical agencies keeping America safe. She weaponized the IC to pursue baseless election fraud claims and more. We must ensure that her tenure represents a terrible exception at DNI and not the new normal,” blah, blah, blah.

Shut up, Adam. Your thoughts?

person 2: Adam, you were censured by the U.S. Congress. You were censured. And the reason you were censured is you lied under oath. You were on the House Intelligence Committee. You knew that Eric Ciaramella never heard one word of Donald Trump’s phone call to [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, not one word.

It was—I think I got to get this right ’cause he corrected people. Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindman, who was on the call, it was a classified, confidential call. He had no business disclosing the contents outside the National Security Council secure room. He did. He called or met with Mr. Ciaramella and said, “I think we have a way to get Trump because I’m interpreting what he said about holding up weapons, holding up weapons deliveries based on the investigation of corruption that pertains to the Biden family.”

And then Mr. Ciaramella says, “OK, I will be the whistleblower to protect you, and both of us will go to Adam Schiff, and we will coordinate how we can get this out in the public.” And then they ask Adam Schiff, “Did you meet with the,” and he said, “No.”

And he cooked the whole thing up. And the irony was that what they charged Donald Trump with in the first impeachment was exactly what Joe Biden did.

The only difference is Donald Trump didn’t say, “Well, I went over there to Ukraine, and I said, ‘You fire the prosecutor for what he’s doing,’” i.e., the prosecutor was looking into Hunter Biden and Burisma. Or, “You know, I’m looking at my watch,” and I’m going to leave here in about an hour, and I’m not going to give you your 4 million, 40 million, 400, whatever it was.

And then he’s bragging to the Council on Foreign Relations, in which this conversation took place. And he goes, son of a blank, and they paid. Ha ha, tough Joe. I shook them down so Hunter got protected, and they wanted their congressional. And what was the impeachment? Donald Trump suspended congressionally approved aid.

That’s exactly what Joe Biden did. Exactly. Only Trump didn’t brag about it. And Trump released it. And Trump was the first president to really give them offensive arms, which neither [Joe] Biden nor [Barack] Obama had approved. So, he’s a real scoundrel, Adam Schiff.

person 1: Any thoughts about Tulsi Gabbard’s performance overall?

person 2: She came from the—originally from the Tucker [Carlson], Joe Kent wing of MAGA. It was kind of, she was a Democratic, eccentric, and that eccentricity on the Democratic side, a radical libertarian, I suppose you’d call her, dovetailed with the Rand Paul school of MAGA. And she got along with Trump for that reason.

But when she went into the office, she was very good. I can remember last June, last July, she was releasing all the stuff about [James] Clapper and [John] Brennan. Everything we know about what Obama did in the transition, that he brought Clapper and [James] Comey and Brennan in and said to all three of them, “I want some connection and proof for this collusion narrative that we’re gonna spring to.”

This was after the election as well, “that we’re gonna do to basically ruin Trump’s transition and first year.” And they said, “Well, what do you want us to do?” Just ignore what your case officers say and give me what I want. She released all that. She released all that about Kevin Clinesmith and Judge Rosenberg and all of that stuff.

Comey. So, she did a very good job. The problem that I think she’s having is she doesn’t believe in optional military engagements in the Middle East, and she was—had a service. And she’s not Tucker or the others who are just screaming and yelling, and she’s not going to do what Joe Kent did, resign and then turn on Trump.

I don’t think she is. She’s got a lot more character than that. And so, it—I take her at face value that her husband’s very ill and he needs a caregiver. I’ve been dealing with cancer. I know how you get needy, and you need somebody to help you.

If I go out and try to prune a limb that I could do 100 of them before, all of a sudden, I get dizzy. So, things like that. And so, she needs to get back, and that’s what she’s talking about. At some point there was going to be a collision had she stayed, that being said, because she did not believe in preemptive military engagements in the Middle East.

person 1: Right.

person 2: The other thing I’ve mentioned on our podcast before, she’s a very nice person. I went to a—we were the co-speakers, and it was in a little town in Texas, but a very big crowd, and they wanted their money’s worth, and they got it.

They wanted a meet and greet in the afternoon. They wanted pictures. They wanted a VIP reception. They wanted a regular reception. They wanted a dinner. They wanted one spot talk, two talks, and then an after-dinner greet. And book signings, and I was with her on our feet for maybe five hours.

And she never complained one bit. And when people came up at dinner, she sat next to me, we’re talking, and people, “Could you sign this? Could you—” Not one bit. And people say, “Why should she? That’s your job, person 2.” I said, “I know it is my job. That’s her job.”

But you would be surprised the people who think their egos are so big that they snap at people who want an autograph or snap at people who want to talk, and she didn’t. And she was smiling the entire time. So I thought she was very authentic.

America Being Overtaken? We’ve Heard That Before

 

The recent Chinese-American summit, as I’ve spoken elsewhere, has raised anxieties that there is a tension between an establishment United States and a rising power, China. And a lot of people who I would call declinists say, “Well, China’s gonna replace us.”

A lot of people on Wall Street are afraid of that, a lot of people in the military, a lot of people on the left, a few people on the right, but we’re not looking at it empirically.

So there are two things to be cognizant of. Number one, there’s about eight or nine ingredients that allow a society to flourish, to advance, to expand, that are critical to this argument.

And they cross time and space. They’re ancient. One is fuel. The United States is the largest producer of gas and oil in the world right now. Another one is food. The value of our agricultural products is at an all-time high. We’re completely self-sufficient in food, and we’re, in terms of the value of the exports, the biggest exporter of food.

So, food and fuel. How about education? The Times Educational Supplement that studied the top 50 universities in the world—if you look at the United States, 90% of them are here in the United States, especially in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are at the top in the world.

So, in higher education, we’re there.

Fertility—we’re not at 2.0 anymore, but we’re much better than Europe at 1.3 and much, much better than China at 1.0, which is a shrinking and aging society. We’re not at 1.7. It’s about as good as you can get in the Western Hemisphere.

In terms of the military, we’re going to spend the largest amount of money we ever have in real dollars and the largest in many years as a percentage of our budget. We invented the aircraft carrier. We’ve got 11 carrier groups. We have the most sophisticated weapons in the world.

As far as space goes, we have a NASA program and then we have SpaceX, and SpaceX on its own is superior to most space programs elsewhere in the world.

So, by any fundamental evaluation, the United States is not in decline. So, why do people say that? Usually, they say it because they’re unhappy with the other party.

So, most of this is now coming from the Left. If you’d watched MSNBC, which I’m forced to do sometimes to get a different view, and CNN, they’re all saying that the summit was a disaster.

[Chinese Leader Xi Jinping] had all the cards. [President Donald] Trump was played. That’s not true. I just explained why it isn’t. But Western declinism is kind of intrinsic in general to Western societies that are paranoid about decline, and particularly in the United States.

And let me just finish by giving you a few examples.

During the Great Depression, which started in 1929 with the stock market collapse and continued all the way to 1940, unemployment was 25% at some point across the United States.

People said look at Europe. There is a new paradigm. Fascist Italy, fascist Germany. They have wonderful infrastructure programs. Hitler is building autobahns. Mussolini is building rail tracks. They didn’t suffer the Depression like we did.

They have a new formula. They’re rearming. By 1939 and ’40, Charles Lindbergh said we couldn’t win a war against Germany. The Luftwaffe is invincible compared to our decrepit forces. In fact, at the outset of 1939, when the war broke out in Europe, our army was smaller than Portugal’s, 19th in the world.

So, everybody said, our system doesn’t work. We had a Depression. Now we’re unprepared. And four years later, we destroyed all of our enemies, and the U.S. economy was larger than all of the economies of the belligerents in the war put together.

And the U.S. Navy was the largest navy in history, and it was larger than the Russian navy, what was left of the German, Japanese, Italian navies, and the British navy all together—the U.S. Navy, one navy.

So, that was just a passing paranoia, but it was typical.

The next thing happened after World War II. Our ally, the Soviet Union, suddenly switched sides. It became an enemy even after we supplied 25% to 30% of its Lend-Lease effort to win the war.

And yet, they started the Cold War, and then people got very scared because they said this totalitarian command economy is very, very efficient. It’s better than ours. Look what’s happened. They’re ahead of us in the space race. They ignited a hundred-megaton bomb, the biggest in history. There was something called the missile gap.

They have twice the missiles that we do pointed at us. That’s what John Kennedy got elected on. It really didn’t exist, but that’s what he was about to convince people about. So, the Soviet Union, in the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “We will bury you.”

And what happened? It imploded two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then we found out that it was completely overrated. It was a rotten system. The CIA estimates of its military power and its economic vitality were all wrong. It was a pathological society, and it broke apart.

That didn’t stop the declinists. Then they said by the 1980s and the 1990s, right after the Soviet collapse, well, we have a new problem. Our capitalist free-market democratic society is not as efficient as what’s going on in Japan.

They called it Japan Inc. Look what Japan has done. They’ve got more money than we do. Their cars—the Honda, Toyota, Lexus—are all better than our cars. GM is through. Ford is through. American Motors is through.

And then what happened? An aging, shrinking Japanese population backed by unwise government and corporate policies went into a period of about 15 years of destructive deflation.

And today it’s a strong economic power. We’re friends with it, but no one in their right mind thinks Japan Inc. is going to replace the United States.

And then at the millennium, we were told the European Union was the new paradigm. Four hundred and fifty million people, one continental nation-state. But it wasn’t a nation.

And today, the EU with 450 million people has an economy about 65% the size of ours, and no one thinks the EU is going to take over. In fact, we’re worried that Europe is in rapid decline.

I say all this because what we are saying now about China is not new. It’s an old phenomenon of pessimism and declinism in Western civilization, particularly in the United States.

China is not the new rival that’s going to replace us. It is the new version of Germany and Italy and Japan and the Soviet Union and Japan Inc. and the EU—the pseudo threats that we’ve all seen before.

 

There’s been a very strange story that was printed not long ago by the liberal opinion journalist Nicholas Kristof. Now, apparently, he’s been retired. He’s written for decades at The New York Times.

He’s sort of a social activist. He does some good things sometimes, but he tries to draw attention of The New York Times readership to supposed crises of morality all over the globe, such as the so-called genocide. And it depends on who you talk to. In Darfur, he visited it very many times. But he’s had a checkered career.

During the anthrax scare near the millennium, he wrote a series of articles suggesting that a government scientist was responsible for sending that deadly anthrax bacillus in the mail to particular people.

There was no real evidence of that. The person was never formally charged. And there was litigation back and forth.

He also ran for governor of Oregon, where he moved as a young man, and his family has a farm. But he hadn’t lived there. He’d been, of course, living on the East Coast because he was working at The New York Times. The Democratic secretary of state disqualified him from trying to run for governor in 2022, arguing that his main residence was elsewhere, out of state.

She was a liberal Democrat like he is, and yet he got very angry and accused her of being politically biased and corrupt. The Oregon Supreme Court, very liberal, upheld that decision, so although he’d raised $1.6 million, he could not stay—he could not run for governor.

But here’s what he’s done recently. He’s written an article that alleges that prisoners following the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews in Israel by the Hamas terrorist organization and people of Gaza, who tagged along. Many of them were caught in jail, and some directly involved in the assault, some just in the subsequent operations in Gaza itself.

And he’s interviewed them. Many of them are anonymous. And he says that they have been systematically raped, molested, tortured.

But what got the sensational coverage for these allegations was that he said that in some cases, and one in particular, a former Hamas person said that he had been raped inside an Israeli jail by a canine, by a dog. And that this was a part of an Israeli policy to train canines to rape inmates and to abuse them.

There’s a lot of things wrong with that.

First of all, most of the sourcing for the article either came from the Euro-Med website, which is hard-Left, anti-Israeli, and founded by someone who’s closely connected with Hamas.

Second, most of the sources were anonymous. Third, the ones that were not, are affiliated in many cases with the Hamas terrorist group.

But most strange of all, there is no scientific proof that a trainer or an owner can prepare a dog to commit sexual intercourse against a human’s will or against a human at all.

Dogs don’t rape people. To the degree that there has been any recorded incidents of dog-human sexual content, it’s in the context of bestiality.

That is, an owner coaxing a dog in some fashion to have intercourse, but there’s no … Dog sexuality is so different from humans. You can’t just say to a dog, “Achieve sexual preparedness and go have intercourse in a forcible manner against that victim.”

It doesn’t happen. And yet, Nicholas Kristof doubled down and said there was scientific evidence that it happened, and it didn’t. That was a complete fabrication.

And when he said that it wasn’t necessarily the rule in Israeli jails, he said it was systematic. So the article is self-contradictory.

It’s based on either left-wing, anti-Israeli sources or pro-Hamas informants. Most of them anonymous.

He has a history of not being reliable, even though his reputation is one of being a global humanitarian who tries to draw our attention to abuses.

There’s one final thing. It wasn’t just a sin of commission. There was a sin of omission. Let me define what I mean by that. He knew, as did The New York Times, that Israel had been conducting an exhaustive investigation, exhaustive, over almost two and a half years, to find out what actually happened on Oct. 7.

And they had all sorts of evidence. They had prisoners who confessed to what they did. And remember, these didn’t need to be coerced. In the Hamas mindset, they want to brag on what they did. They’re proud of it. They had instruction booklets telling them how to say, “Spread your legs,” and other commands in Hebrew.

They were greeted as heroes by Gazan civilians when they came back and heard the story. When they brought back over 240 hostages, the hostages were in danger of losing their lives from an angry mob.

So, there was no reticence on the part of cooperating with the Israelis. Then they had people who survived the attack who had testimonies. Then they had extensive photographs of the bodies of the slain.

They had camera footage from the Hamas terrorists who were so exuberant and happy to kill Jews that they actually filmed it on their military helmets.

And they collated all of that evidence together, and the result was medieval. It was a story of people losing their limbs, of women being raped repeatedly, gang-raped, being shot, being mutilated, being sexually—in a sexually perverted manner tortured, children beheaded. It’s horrific beyond words.

That systematic report was coming out and has now appeared.

And so, the supposition is that Nicholas Kristof, who’s very anti-Israel, cooked up an idea that he would preempt this story by an even cruder, weirder, surreal story that, well, whatever Hamas did to the Israelis that you’re going to read this week, that’s the implication—not explicit, but implicit.

It’s not going to be as bad as what I’m going to tell you, because the Israelis train dogs to rape people.

That is the biggest blood libel and slur against the Jewish people that I’ve ever heard. And yet, The New York Times, which always brags about fact-checking, didn’t fact-check it at all.

And the result is he is now being sued by the Israeli government and the Netanyahu administration. I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere. It’s very hard for a foreign country to sue an individual, especially when the prime minister is in the public realm. But it’s going to draw attention to The New York Times in general and Nicholas Kristof in particular.

He has skated on thin ice for a long time. And he’s not a reliable opinion journalist. And this confirms that he should not be writing for The New York Times.

It’s a free country. If they want to peddle these lies and these libels, they’re welcome to. But it’s going to destroy their reputation if he comes back again and pursues what he’s been doing for a long time.