Commentary Culture Investigations

MS NOW/SnapStream

On Saturday, former Hardball host Chris Matthews returned to his old network, now under its Versant name of MS NOW, to compare President Trump to past European dictators because of several Trump-designed Washington, D.C., construction projects. Matthews declared he “can’t accuse anybody of being Hitler” before he then compared Trump to former Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.The conversation on Alex Witt Reports was based on more media obsession with the Kennedy Center, as host Alex Witt asked, “How do you view the slew of vanity projects driven by the president, including his efforts to attach his name in one way or the other to the Kennedy Center?”Matthews responded and acted as if he was better than comparing Trump to Hitler: ”Well, you know, we can’t accuse anybody of being Hitler because there’s only one Hitler, fortunately. There’s only one guy that killed all the people and created a war that cost the lives of 50 million people. Not just the holocaust. That war everywhere.” On Saturday, former Hardball host Chris Matthews, talking about new possible monument projects around DC, said one cannot compare Trump to Hitler, but instead said: “I think he is Mussolini.” pic.twitter.com/ySC4z73uGy— Nick (@nspin310) August 31, 2026 However, Matthews has made many comparisons of conservative politicians to Hitler over the years, including last year when he compared Trump immigration policies to the Holocaust.After he sounded sane when he explained how it was plain stupid to compare Trump to someone who directed the Holocaust and started World War II, he  moved to compare Trump to a different dictator:But I think he is Mussolini. I think he loves having big tributes, pretty uniforms, monuments to himself.In contrast with his point of Hitler’s involvement with WWII, Mussolini-led Italy assisted Hitler’s Nazi Germany during WWII.Matthews then moved on to talk of a possible construction of an Arc de Triomphe-like monument near Arlington Cemetery: “He’s going to put an arch, an Arc de Triomphe like there that you can’t even see the Custis Lee mansion, the mansion where Robert E Lee lived. We can’t be able to see the eternal flame. Who wants that?”He continued, as he tried to figure out what word of the five Ws he wanted to use: “Who wants that? And by the way, what victory have we had under Trump? What – Where are we – Why are we having an arch or an Arc de Triomphe when we haven’t had any triumphs? I mean, it’s absurd, and it’s frightening because it’s going to detract from the look of the city.”Matthews later feared the Trump construction projects could not all be gotten rid of after his presidency ends:I know the next president will put the name John F Kennedy back on the Kennedy Center. That will happen pretty easily. They’re not gonna be able to get rid of this ballroom. I don’t see anybody getting rid of that when they come in office. But the Kennedy Center will be restored to performers and live entertainment. The people come back again. We’ll get over Trump there.Matthews added, “But I do worry about these monuments to Trump. They’re awful,” before he asked Witt, “Nobody wants to build monuments, do they? Does anybody out there say, Let’s build an Arc de Triomphe?” Witt responded, “I haven’t heard it.”He then asked, “Oh, by the way, had any triumphs?” Witt laughed and said, “No. Good point.”The transcript is below. Click “expand”:MS NOW’s Alex Witt ReportsAugust 29, 20262:23:21 PM Eastern(…)ALEX WITT: But anyway, let me ask you, this is going to sound superficial, but – as compared to what you just said – how do you view, rather that, the slew of vanity projects driven by the president, including his efforts to attach his name in one way or the other to the Kennedy Center?CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well, you know, we can’t accuse anybody of being Hitler because there’s only one Hitler, fortunately. There’s only one guy that killed all the people and created a war that cost the lives of 50 million people. Not just the holocaust. That war everywhere. But I think he is Mussolini. I think he loves having big tributes, pretty uniforms, monuments to himself. I, you know, I’ve lived in Washington for so many years. And when I drive along the Potomac River, when I come home at night from something, I always looked across the river to the eternal flame for John F Kennedy at Arlington, at the Arlington cemetery. And I always looked and was very happy when I could see it, because it reminded me of what we’ve come through our legacy in this country. He’s going to put an arch, an Arc de Triomphe like there that you can’t even see the Custis Lee mansion, the mansion where Robert E Lee lived. We can’t be able to see the eternal flame. Who wants that? And by the way, what victory have we had under Trump? What – Where are we – Why are we having an arch or an Arc de Triomphe when we haven’t had any triumphs? I mean, it’s absurd and it’s frightening because it’s going to detract from the look of the city. I know the next president will put the name John F Kennedy back on the Kennedy Center. That will happen pretty easily. They’re not gonna be able to get rid of this ballroom. I don’t see anybody getting rid of that when they come in office. But the Kennedy Center will be restored to performers and live entertainment. The people come back again. We’ll get over Trump there. But I do worry about these monuments to Trump. They’re awful. Nobody wants to build monuments, do they? Does anybody out there say, “Let’s build an Arc de Triomphe?”WITT: I haven’t heard it.MATTHEWS: Oh, by the way, had any triumphs?WITT: No. [Laughs] Good point.(…)

Ten organizations — including Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Women’s Law Center — are receiving more than $10 million in donations from Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Festival. More than 45,000 people attended to hear music from Rodrigo and other artists such as Chappell Roan, Mitski and Doechii.

Manifestantes contra o aborto compareceram ao “Daisy Chain Festival”, festival beneficente de Olívia Rodrigo, para protestar contra a cantora.
“Olivia Rodrigo: Apoiar o Planned Parenthood significa matar a sua futura base de fãs!” pic.twitter.com/6RL78zWReB
— StagePop (@stagepopbr) August 31, 2026

On this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Lyrah Margo and Madelynn McLaughlin discuss Rodrigo’s intentions with the concert and the pushback from peaceful pro-life protesters outside the event. Lyrah and Madelynn explain how abortion is not true female empowerment but rather a toxic message that celebrities like Rodrigo are pushing on young women.
Tune in to hear their discussion! 

Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify.

Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.

Paxton’s vulnerabilities, particularly in a year of epic backlash, were simply too risky to cashier a respected incumbent.

The supposed sage of the Democratic Party’s moderate middle has surrendered.

Back in January, the New York Times was recommending tighter sanctions against Iran. Now that President Trump is taking the paper’s advice, the newspaper suddenly has decided it’s a bad idea. It makes the Times look silly—as if it has no principled or reasoned Iran policy but rather simply reflexively opposes whatever Trump does.
Our story begins on January 14, 2026, after Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime killed tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters. The Times mustered a staff editorial with a strong headline: “Iran’s Murderous Regime Is Irredeemable,” that was actually fairly good for a New York Times editorial. It declared “The Iranians demonstrating against their government are displaying awe-inspiring bravery,” and said “The appropriate response from the rest of the world starts with a unified expression of solidarity with the protesters. The Khamenei regime is too depraved to be reformed. It has had plenty of chances to choose a different path.” It faulted Iran for its “misogyny,” its discrimination against gays and lesbians, its support of “the terrorist proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.”
Among the editorial’s recommendations were “diplomatic, economic and potentially military” measures that “have the best chance to strengthen the protest movement and sow division among elites allied with the Khamenei government.”
The economic leg involved sanctions. Said the Times editorial, “The world can also extend the sanctions it has imposed on Iran. The Trump administration this week announced new tariffs on any countries that do business with Iran, and other democracies should impose their own economic penalties. Europe can play a vital role. European leaders have sometimes been naïve about the nature of Iran’s government, and they should step up now. Mr. Trump, for his part, should drop his thorough hostility toward Europe, including his ludicrous ambition to seize Greenland, and recognize the strength of a unified alliance.”
The editorial went on, “One potential policy involves targeting all significant officials in the Khamenei government, and close to it, with individual sanctions and asset seizures. They should know that they will be isolated forever, without the ability to do the luxury shopping and tourism many enjoy, unless they break with the regime. The goal should be to create competing pressures on Iran’s elites and split them. Such moves would make good on Mr. Trump’s promise to the protesters that ‘help is on its way.'”
Now that President Trump and his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, are literally doing, with Operation Economic Outcast, what the Times editorial told them to do, the Times news section is rolling out a campaign of articles explaining why it is a terrible idea that almost certainly won’t work and may even be counterproductive. It almost makes you think what’s driving them is not the substance of Iran policy but knee-jerk opposition to Trump.
The drumbeat of opposition to the Iran sanctions included a news report by Times reporter Michael Crowley in the August 27 print newspaper. It asserted that Trump’s “demands that other nations stop doing business with Iran underscore the difficulty in trying to impose sanctions on Iran’s economy to the point of collapse.”
It went on, “Thoroughly enforcing sanctions is notoriously hard, and in Iran’s case would require messy run-ins with allies and powerful rivals capable of retaliation, most notably China. Imposing a full ban on global trade with Iran, as Mr. Bessent called for, only multiplies those challenges. Mr. Bessent himself admitted doing so could roil the global economy.”
Crowley continued, “Those factors help explain why U.S. officials are still struggling to strangle Iran’s economy despite the mountain of sanctions Washington has heaped on the country over the past five decades … All that provides reason for skepticism about Mr. Trump’s latest plan for coercing Iran through economic pain.”
Where were the worries about enforcement and roiling the global economy back in January when the Times was editorializing in favor of this approach? When it was the Times plan rather than Trump’s plan, the skepticism was absent. The Times news and opinion pages are technically separate, though both report to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, and they share a revulsion to Trump that is widespread among college-educated salaried employees in coastal cities.
A “news analysis” by Steven Erlanger that ran on page one of the Saturday, August 29 print Times recycled Crowley’s point for any readers who might have missed it the first time around. “Iran, already the target of many thousands of sanctions, is considered unlikely to surrender because of a few more. More likely, analysts said, is that the country will respond in time by escalating its attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf and on American allies, which could produce another round of American bombing,” Erlanger wrote. “Is considered” is one of those classic passive voice constructions that Times editors and reporters use to slip their own opinions into the newspaper. Quoting “analysts” to give the reporters’ and editors’ opinion while maintaining a veneer of journalistic objectivity is another trick of the trade.
The analyst that gets served up is “Sina Toossi of the Center for International Policy, a Washington think-tank,” who declares, “The capacity to hurt Iran is clear … The path from pain to capitulation or collapse is not.” Erlanger might as well have just directly quoted his colleague Crowley from a day before about “the difficulty in trying to impose sanctions on Iran’s economy to the point of collapse,” rather than laundering the point through some think tank analyst.
Erlanger is based in Berlin, a place where the fall of the Berlin Wall and the East German Communist regime it symbolized might reasonably engender some humility about the endurance of brutal tyrannies.
It all looks difficult and unclear until suddenly the dictatorship collapses. That happened to Bashar al-Assad, whose Syrian regime was subject to U.S. sanctions. It happened to Mikhail Gorbachev, whose Soviet Union crumbled in part because of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment denying trade benefits to Moscow. It happened to Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, whatever concerns people may have about what followed. Venezuela had also been subject to U.S. sanctions.
Sure, sanctions alone won’t do the trick. But many of the same people opposing Trump and Bessent’s sanctions against Iran are also among the first to credit divestment for toppling the Apartheid regime in South Africa and also to advocate for economic warfare against Israel. It suggests the real driver of reaction to the policy is less the efficacy of economic measures and more how people feel about the administration being targeted or imposing the sanctions.
I’m not so cynical as to think the Times newsroom is desperate to prevent a successful Iran regime change (and concomitant drop in gas prices) before the October 27, 2026, Israeli election or the November 3, 2026, U.S. election. But if the economic pressure does help decisively to defeat “Iran’s Murderous Regime” between now and then, it’ll be something to celebrate. At that point, if the Times editorial board, or Crowley and Erlanger, are looking for “analysts” to explain how the unlikely outcome came to fruition—well, we’d be happy to suggest some sources. Or just the underlying principle, which is that as much as brutal dictators determinedly cling to power, once the people rise up with “awe-inspiring bravery,” when America and Israel both decide to help, things can move quickly in the direction of freedom.
The post On Iran Sanctions, New York Times Makes a Dramatic About-Face appeared first on .

Screenshot via NBC News NOW/Snapstream

In April of 2020, San Clemente, CA, dumped 37 tons of sand into a skate park to keep teenagers out. Down the coast, deputies arrested a man for paddleboarding alone in the Pacific Ocean. Towns unbolted basketball rims. The mayor of Los Angeles told Angelenos that snitches get rewards, and, God help us, people snitched. Then Gavin Newsom went to dinner at The French Laundry.All that explains two fights now burning down county commission meetings, fights that look like they have nothing to do with COVID: data centers and Flock cameras.In March of 2020, Americans closed their businesses, closed schools, and canceled funerals because they trusted their institutions. Those institutions destroyed the trust Americans placed in them.The virus came. The data came. The virus mutated. The data changed. The people in charge did not.We learned early on that children were not meaningful vectors of spread. The teachers’ unions kept school doors locked anyway, and a generation of students regressed. We learned the virus spread indoors, and California kept filling in skate parks. When Brian Kemp reopened Georgia, The Atlantic called it an experiment in human sacrifice. Georgia recovered first. CNN put Chris Cuomo on the air nightly to interview his brother Andrew, whose nursing home order killed the elderly. Rachel Maddow promised the vaccine would stop the virus, and when it did not, no one apologized to the people who were fired for refusing it.Then the cities burned, and the same experts who called small business owners selfish for wanting to make a mortgage payment decided mass gatherings were a moral necessity. That was the moment millions of Americans concluded none of it had been about science. Officials who denied the lab leak in public believed it in private. Fifty-one intelligence officials signed a letter that throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before an election, and they are still on television telling us what to think.Now come the data centers and the cameras. I am for both. I am directly impacted by the data center growth. My backyard is about to be dug up for a natural gas pipeline needed to expand power for a data center hundreds of miles away. We need the compute power. If we do not build it, Beijing will, and Beijing will shape the century. Our towns are short of police officers; a friend of mine had a kidnapped child recovered in two hours because of Flock cameras, and there’s no expectation of privacy on a public road. You already hand your location to China every time you open TikTok and to your cell phone provider every time you use your phone.I, however, understand the opposition. Every argument against data centers was made against fracking, which gave us the cheapest energy in the developed world. The difference was never the facts. It was the messengers. The oil men knew their towns and knew the country. The AI executives are West Coast weirdos who live in a bubble and do not really understand their fellow countrymen. They buy the farmland, sign nondisclosure agreements with county commissioners, then go on television to tell us the machines will take our jobs and ruin our children’s future, but we will love it.Our present moment requires AI executives and camera supporters to proceed in ways to earn back trust. Publish the water consumption data on data centers and the power ratepayer numbers. Stop the nondisclosure agreements that keep local elected officials from talking to voters. Put a mandatory minimum prison sentence on any police officer who abuses Flock camera data, make vendors liable for false matches, and ban private facial recognition in public rights-of-way. Our license plates have no right to privacy, but we do. Enforce the laws you passed, especially the ones your own team finds inconvenient.The politicians, experts, press, and elite need to build back the trust they destroyed. Until then, their credibility sits in a sand-filled skate park, on a beach where a man was arrested for floating alone, and under a rimless basketball goal.

Screenshot from PolitiFact

On Friday, PolitiFact posted a story headlined “Why Republicans are focusing on transgender issues in competitive 2026 campaigns.” The headline could have been “Republicans are using misleading anti-transgender rhetoric.” That was their argument. Caleb McCullough began: A recent Kansas ad targeting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, shows him standing in front of footage of dancing drag queens and says he “preaches the gospel of woke.” The ad, one of many using anti-transgender rhetoric to attack Democrats in competitive midterm elections, misleadingly stitches together clips to make the case that Hamilton is out of touch with voters on social issues. When the ad quotes Hamilton saying, “How we define gender… we have a whole array of sexualities,” it is combining separate sentences he said in an interview to create a quote he never said. PolitiFact linked to the transcript of this interview online. There was some eyebrow-raising stuff about God: “I know this is not as simple as ‘God said it. I believe it. That settles it.'” Later, he added: “you find yourself saying, ‘okay, I have to recognize the Bible wasn’t dictated by God.'” Apparently God is “learning and evolving” with the Christian church. Democrats want to have it both ways — selling the moral authority of the pastor, without anyone digging into the content of their preaching. Here’s Hamilton’s remarks in more context, where he’s clearly suggesting a gospel of wokeness, which Politifact insists isn’t “out of touch” with Kansas: HAMILTON: How do we look at God’s children who are gay and lesbian? How do we think about human sexuality? And so there’s that central conversation that started with gay and lesbian people, then it moved to transgender, which is a little more confusing for people. And then we have a whole array of sexualities and orientations and gender questions that most of us weren’t thinking about a few years ago….I was talking with a group of, I won’t name the denomination, but a more conservative denomination, recently some of their some in their denomination and they’re like, you know, “We’re just 10 years behind you as Methodists with the conversations. We’re having the conversations. We’re gonna be where you are in 10 years.” And, you know, “We’re preparing ourselves for that and trying to figure out what does this look like.” And you know, the Episcopalians were 10 or 15 years before the United Methodists were. So there’s that — the fact that it is a conversation in every church at some level. And then there are the other conversations about how do we understand transgender and then what do we think of, you know, how we define gender. [CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me. And then we’re thinking about things like polyamory and then, so it really, there are pieces of it where I feel like we’re afraid… You know, we’re, well, I’m going to stop there. McCullough tried to make Hamilton sound like a moderate, and somehow not woke: “He expressed clear support for same-sex marriage and challenged more conservative Christian views. But he didn’t outline specific transgender policy positions and said the church shouldn’t make decisions based on public opinion.” He lamented the trend:The Kansas ad mimics others across the country. In Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas, ads targeting Democrats over transgender athletes’ sports participation and gender affirming medical care for minors have become commonplace. The ads often omit context about a candidate’s votes or statements to make a sweeping policy attack. The truth-defying term “gender affirming” appeared four times. The “independent fact-checkers” get very alarmed when Republican ads work on transgender issues, and they seek out experts to talk about how the voters need to get over their “anxiety” about “change.” Gender policy issues can also represent broader voter anxiety about rapid cultural change, experts said. “There’s a general cultural milieu on the right that the world as they know it doesn’t exist anymore, and I think trans people offer an anchor to put a lot of those anxieties on,” said TJ Billard, a Northwestern University communications studies professor and executive director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.Billard’s current research project has a title: “Cisinformed: Disinformation and the Media War on Transgender Rights.”

The stated justification for it is more and more self-referential.

He’s sorry if you misinterpreted remarks he shouldn’t have to apologize for at all. He’s sorry if you’re hung up on the anti-American ‘streamer’ he campaigned with.