Day: December 19, 2025
Aging-related joint disorder increasingly affects people under 40, study finds
A global study reveals an alarming rise in gout cases among young people aged 15 to 39, with rates increasing 66% from 1990 to 2021 across 204 countries worldwide.
Trump administration targets Maduro’s inner circle, family in major narco-state crackdown
Treasury sanctioned seven family members tied to Maduro’s regime as the Trump administration escalates pressure on Venezuela’s corrupt leadership networks.
Down the tubes: Flailing Oscars leaving ABC, moving online
And now … your Oscars host … Mr. Beast!
The Academy Awards, facing diminished ratings and cultural clout, is moving to YouTube starting in 2029. Yes, ABC didn’t fight hard enough to keep the once-mighty telecast on its airwaves, paving the door for the Google giant to take over.
If Marvel really wants to bring back disenchanted fans, just say Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel got lost in a black hole and can’t make the sequel.
And as one internet wag cheekily put it, calls to “smash that ‘like’ button” may blend with the boilerplate political speeches sooner than later.
It’s a sign of the times, of course, on two fronts. YouTube is a major part of the digital landscape, and ABC understands the Oscars’ cache isn’t what it used to be.
The funniest part? A Variety scribe cheered the news, hoping for an even longer Oscars telecast.
“The Oscars on YouTube could bring an unlimited runtime, unfiltered hosts, and the show we’ve always wanted” reads the hysterical headline.
Imagine enduring a three-and-a-half-hour celebrity lovefest and thinking, “More, please!”
Boulevard of memes
Hollywood could really use some good news at this point. Enter a spanking new study that shares a surprising take on Gen Z. Turns out the youthful demographic’s movie theater attendance climbed by 25% over the past year.
Video game-inspired films like “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” and “A Minecraft Movie” certainly helped, but the image of phone-obsessed teens eschewing theaters for their comfy couches may come with a caveat.
Speak to us directly, and we’ll line up to see what you have to offer. Imagine the lines around the block to see “6-7: The Movie” …
‘Peanuts’ allergy
Coming soon: a reimagined take on the Red Baron where he’s the hero and that dastardly Snoopy is the heel.
Sound crazy? Well we just saw a movie greenlit based on the villainous Gaston character from “Beauty and the Beast.”
“Wicked: For Good,” which makes the Wicked Witch of the West our unfairly maligned heroine, is crushing the box office.
And another reimagined classic spun from “Cinderella” will make those nasty stepsisters the heroes. It’s called “Steps.” Really.
So why wouldn’t Snoopy’s archnemesis ever get a cinematic closeup? It feels inevitable, especially after Sony purchased the rights to the “Peanuts” franchise for a cool $457 million.
Rats.
Who will stop team Sony from following this corrosive trend? And should it draw a crowd, expect more re-imaginings, like Brad Pitt playing a spiffed-up Pig Pen and Lucy joining the NFL …
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Fathom Entertainment
Avengers: Payday
The MCU is in full course-correction mode. But is it too late?
The mega franchise has stumbled in recent years following the two-part “Avengers” saga against Thanos. That coaxed Disney suits to call in reinforcements — AKA Robert Downey Jr.
But wait? The charismatic star’s alter ego, Iron Man, died in “Avengers: Endgame.” Disney craved his sweet, sweet name recognition so badly it brought him back for next year’s “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Except this time, he’ll play the villainous Victor von Doom.
If that decision didn’t reek of flop sweat, the latest MCU news sure does. Chris Evans, who memorably played Captain America in nine MCU films, was given a poetic send-off in “Endgame.” The actor hung up his shield, eager to tackle roles where he doesn’t squeeze into unforgiving leotards.
Except he didn’t really go away. He’s back, according to the just-released “Avengers: Doomsday” teaser trailer. (Imagine the zeroes on the paycheck written to Mr. Evans.)
If Marvel really wants to bring back disenchanted fans, just say Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel got lost in a black hole and can’t make the sequel …
Kamala klarity
Kamala Harris may have been the most qualified person ever to run for the White House. Just ask her.
Yet the former vice president is still struggling to answer softball questions. During the campaign, she famously bungled a layup from Sunny Hostin of “The View.”
“How will you be different than President Biden?” Swiiiiiing and a miss.
This week, far-left “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel teed up another question for the ex-veep to swat out of the studio. Why didn’t the Biden-Harris administration release the Epstein files?
“To give you an answer that will not satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you, we, perhaps to our damage, but we strongly and rightly believed that there should be an absolute separation between what we wanted as an administration and what the Department of Justice did. We absolutely adhered to that, and it was right to do that,” Harris told Kimmel.
“The Justice Department would make its decisions independent of any political or personal vendetta or concern that we may have, and that’s the way it worked.”
Harris is rested and ready for the 2028 presidential campaign, no doubt.
DEI hustlers lash out after Trump official solicits discrimination complaints from white men
In his damning Dec. 15 article in Compact magazine titled “The Lost Generation,” Los Angeles-based writer Jacob Savage detailed the disenfranchisement of white male Millennials and their systematic exclusion from various industries, especially academia, entertainment, medicine, the news media, and tech.
While America has long been reckoning with the fallout of the DEI war on meritocracy, Savage’s viral article — which journalist Matt Taibbi indicated was initially accepted by the Atlantic on the condition that it avoid making the bigger societal point — crystallized for many, with the help of statistics and personal accounts, the extent and true impact of that racist campaign.
‘This was an injustice, plain and simple.’
After Vice President JD Vance weighed in on the article and the discrimination discussed therein, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairwoman Andrea Lucas released a video on social media imploring white men to seek damages — a video that Vance subsequently shared.
“Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws,” said Lucas, a Republican critic of DEI and mother of two who was appointed to lead the EEOC by President Donald Trump in January.
The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to probe and litigate against private companies for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Image
Lucas, who previously noted that Savage’s article told “a story chock full of unlawful discrimination,” said in the video that it was imperative that those keen on taking action contact the EEOC as soon as possible, as “time limits are typically strict for filing a claim.”
The EEOC chairwoman also noted in a follow-up message, “You may have waived your right to money, but you still have the right to blow the whistle and participate in the EEOC process — and EEOC can sue on behalf of a class.”
Lucas has made no secret of her contempt for DEI.
In a May 2024 speech — nearly a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard/UNC, banning race-based college admission — Lucas stated:
Race or sex cannot be even a plus factor, a tiebreaker, or a tipping point in the employment context. People sometimes think that race or sex can be part of the equation for an employment decision if race or sex is not the sole factor, the exclusive factor, or the deciding factor. That is dead wrong. If race or sex was all or part of an employer’s motivation, that violates federal employment law.
She noted during the Q&A following her remarks that “many employers, by doing lazy, high-level virtue signaling, paint-by-numbers DEI, have mass discrimination.”
Proponents of the DEI regime were evidently prickled by Lucas’ latest remarks.
David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the NYU School of Law, told the Associated Press that Lucas’ recent posts demonstrate a “fundamental misunderstanding of what DEI is.”
“It’s really much more about creating a culture in which you get the most out of everyone who you’re bringing on board, where everyone experiences fairness and equal opportunity, including white men and members of other groups,” Glasgow said. “If DEI has been this engine of discrimination against white men, I have to say it hasn’t really been doing a very good job at achieving that.”
RELATED: Trump takes a wrecking ball to the woke campus economy
Photo by Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Image
Jenny Yang, a former EEOC chairwoman who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, similarly complained, suggesting it was “problematic” for Lucas to speak out about the disenfranchisement of white men.
“It suggests some sort of priority treatment,” said Yang, who served as deputy assistant to former President Joe Biden for so-called racial justice and equity. “That’s not something that sounds to me like equal opportunity for all.”
Hours ahead of Lucas sharing her video to social media, Vice President JD Vance noted on X that Savage’s article was “an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.”
“A lot of people think DEI is lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games,” Vance wrote. “In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”
“This is why the Trump administration has so dedicated itself to eradicating racist discrimination. We’ve eliminated funding for DEI, required government grantees to certify that they’re not engaged in DEI, fired a number of DEI employees, and asked the great [Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon] to aggressively prosecute all forms of racial discrimination,” the vice president continued. “For too many Democrat leaders, racial discrimination was bad unless it targeted white men. This was an injustice, plain and simple.”
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Senate confirms more Trump nominees, surpassing Biden-era confirmation pace after deploying nuclear option
The Republican-held Senate approved a third batch of nominees Thursday night, surpassing the confirmation pace from previous presidencies.
Under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), the Senate confirmed 97 more nominees in a 53-43 vote. In 2025 alone, the Senate confirmed 417 of President Donald Trump’s nominees, leaving just 15 nominees on the docket.
‘It’s a pettiness that leaves desks sitting empty.’
This confirmation rate greatly outpaced former President Joe Biden, who had 365 nominees greenlit through the Senate in 2021.
This unprecedented confirmation pace came after Thune deployed the nuclear option in September to address the ballooning number of nominees awaiting their confirmations over the summer.
RELATED: John Thune to use Democrats’ own ‘nuclear option’ to defeat Senate confirmation blockade
Allison Robbert/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Thune changed the vote threshold in September for sub-Cabinet level positions, allowing nominees to be confirmed in large groups as opposed to individual, tedious votes Democrats consistently tried to obstruct.
“It’s delay for delay’s sake, and it’s a pettiness that leaves desks sitting empty in agencies across the federal government and robs our duly elected president of a team to enact the agenda that the American people voted for in November,” Thune said in an op-ed for Breitbart.
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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
“Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this obstruction any longer,” Thune added. “We have tried to work with Democrats in good faith to batch bipartisan, noncontroversial nominees and clear them expeditiously, according to past precedent. Democrats have stood in the way at every turn.”
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‘Money hungry Jews’: Mamdani appointee abruptly quits after her anti-Semitic online posts resurface
An appointee for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, abruptly resigned after the Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey exposed her past anti-Semitic social media posts.
On Wednesday, Mamdani announced that Catherine Almonte Da Costa would be his director of appointments.
‘As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.’
The ADL responded to the nomination by highlighting Da Costa’s numerous anti-Jewish online comments.
“Her social media footprint includes posts from more than a decade ago that echo classic antisemitic tropes and otherwise demean Jewish people. … We appreciate Da Costa has relationships with members of the Jewish community, but her posts require immediate explanation — not just from Ms. Da Costa, but also from the Mayor-Elect,” the ADL wrote.
The ADL continued, “Vetting the appointment of city leaders will be Ms. Da Costa’s responsibility and the Jewish community deserves to know: 1) Were these comments previously identified by the Mayor-elect’s team? If so, why were they excused? 2) What will be the policy of the new Administration if comments like these are discovered during the vetting process?”
The ADL’s post included screenshots of three X posts from Da Costa’s account, which has since been removed.
RELATED: Mamdani dares ICE to come get him — and throws the Constitution in the trash
Zohran Mamdani. Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
“Money hungry Jews smh,” Da Costa apparently wrote in January 2011 on then-Twitter, presumably using an abbreviation for “shaking my head,” an expression of disapproval.
“Woo! Promoted to the upstairs office today! Working alongside these rich Jewish peeps,” she apparently wrote later that year.
“Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” a third post read from June 2012.
In 2020, Da Costa posted anti-cop sentiments, calling for the defunding of the New York Police Department by $1 billion in the upcoming fiscal year to “get cops out of our schools & subways,” the New York Post reported.
L to R: Zohran Mamdani, Jahmila Edwards, Catherine Almonte Da Costa. Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
Da Costa announced her resignation on Thursday, following the resurfaced posts.
“I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Da Costa said. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”
In a separate statement, she contended that her “tweets from well over a decade ago … do not in any way, shape, or form reflect who I am or my views and beliefs today.”
Mamdani called Da Costa’s past remarks “unacceptable,” adding that the posts “absolutely do not represent him or the values of his administration.”
“Catherine expressed her deep remorse over her past statements and tendered her resignation, and I accepted,” he added.
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Socialism didn’t win New York. Marketing did.
I oppose Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist agenda. But if Republicans are serious about winning elections next year and in 2028, they need to take a hard, unsentimental look at how he just won one of the most consequential mayoral races in the country.
This was not an ideological earthquake. New York did not suddenly “discover” socialism. What happened was a marketing and mobilization breakthrough. Mamdani’s campaign understood attention, simplicity, participation, and distribution better than anyone else in the race.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
Joe Perello, the city of New York’s first chief marketing officer, noted in PRWeek after Mamdani’s victory that the campaign did more than communicate a message. It built an engine that converted online engagement into real-world turnout.
“For marketers and strategists alike, the implications are clear,” Perello wrote. “Growth hacking, iterative testing, and data-driven amplification can convert digital sentiment into real-world behavior. In Mamdani’s case, that meant converting hearts, clicks, and hashtags into ballots.”
Here is the part many on the right do not want to hear: Mamdani did not spend his time lecturing working-class voters about the virtues of socialism or defending failed economic theory. He focused on immediate, kitchen-table concerns and paired them with simple, slogan-ready answers.
Is halal food expensive? Make it cheaper. Struggling to get to work? Free buses. Grocery bills too high? Government-run grocery stores.
He took Bernie Sanders’ 2016-era talking points and filtered them through a polished, Obama-style optimism that voting-age New Yorkers were willing to engage with.
Most voters do not have the time — or patience — to think through how these promises would actually work. They just want to hear that someone intends to make their lives easier.
As Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney observed during Mamdani’s surge in the polls, the public’s lack of understanding about how government operates — and how socialism consistently fails — created the political environment Mamdani exploited. He did not create that environment. He mastered it.
Republicans’ digital blind spot
For years, Republican campaigns have treated digital media as messaging rather than infrastructure. Social platforms are used as megaphones for press releases, fundraising tools, or dumping grounds for cable-news clips. The underlying assumption is that persuasion happens elsewhere — on TV, at rallies, through mailers — and that digital simply amplifies those efforts.
Mamdani reversed that logic. Social media was not an accessory to his campaign. It was the campaign.
His approach drew praise even from outlets like the Guardian, where journalist Adam Gabbatt noted that Mamdani “has won social media with clips that are always fun — and resolutely on-message.”
His team treated TikTok and Instagram like serious growth channels. Short videos were not vanity content; they were experiments. Different neighborhoods, different faces, different tones, different pacing. What held attention? What sparked comments? What traveled across boroughs? Each post generated data, and each data point informed the next iteration.
This was politics run as a full-funnel acquisition strategy. Awareness led to engagement. Engagement led to identification. Identification led to turnout. Republicans can mock the aesthetics, but the mechanics work.
Energy is a signal
One of the most underrated elements of Mamdani’s campaign was how it looked. He was constantly in motion — walking Manhattan, running a marathon, bouncing between boroughs. Rarely behind a lectern. Rarely static. Always visible.
That energy communicated youth, optimism, and confidence in the same way John F. Kennedy outperformed Richard Nixon on television in 1960. A similar contrast appeared in 2024, when Donald Trump’s unscripted, high-visibility media strategy stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ tightly controlled appearances.
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. ‘That’s just TikTok nonsense.’ ‘Our voters aren’t like that.’ Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
In an age of low trust and low information, energy reads as competence. Movement suggests effort. Visibility substitutes for familiarity. Mamdani’s omnipresence created the impression — fair or not — that he was accessible and engaged with everyday life.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
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Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
From supporters to fans
The most uncomfortable lesson for traditional campaigns is that Mamdani did not just mobilize voters. He activated fandom.
Much of the campaign content that flooded social media did not come from official accounts. It came from supporters remixing clips, creating fan art, cutting moments to music, and sharing them within their own networks. The campaign made Mamdani easy to clip, easy to celebrate, and then got out of the way.
Wired magazine described it as a rare case of participatory political culture usually reserved for celebrities.
This matters because peer-to-peer persuasion scales faster and carries more credibility than anything a campaign can manufacture. Fan-made content travels further, feels more authentic, and costs nothing. Republicans, by contrast, tend to over-police their messaging, choking off organic enthusiasm in the name of control.
Younger voters understand fandom instinctively. They grew up online. Mamdani did not lecture them about politics; he gave them something to belong to.
The wrong reaction
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. “That only works for Democrats.” “That’s just TikTok nonsense.” “Our voters aren’t like that.”
Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
Trump understood this dynamic in 2024 when his campaign was largely shut out of legacy media. Figures like Charlie Kirk reached millions of Gen Z voters by blending serious political content with the humor and energy of youth activism.
Algorithms do not have ideologies. Participation is not a left-wing monopoly. Visibility, simplicity, and community are not progressive inventions. In a low-information, high-attention environment, the side that understands distribution wins.
The real danger is not Mamdani’s policies alone. It is a Republican Party that keeps confusing being correct with being effective.
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Blaze Media Illustration
What Republicans should learn — now
First, treat digital as organizing, not advertising. Stop thinking in posts and start thinking in systems. How does attention become action?
Second, simplicity wins. Republicans often pride themselves on being right — and then lose because they are incomprehensible. Clarity scales. Long explanations do not.
Third, loosen control. Let supporters remix, clip, and share. Reach matters more than perfect phrasing.
Finally, build communities, not just campaigns. Email lists decay. Ad budgets run out. Communities endure.
The bottom line
I do not agree with Zohran Mamdani’s politics, and I do not want his policies implemented anywhere. But ignoring how he won would be malpractice.
He demonstrated how power is built today — not through party machinery or television dominance, but through attention, participation, and relentless simplicity. Republicans can learn from that reality, or they can keep losing to it.
Disagree with his ideology. But study his marketing. Ignore the lesson at your own risk.
