Category: Entertainment
The Spectacle Ep. 313: Here’s What We’re Leaving Behind in 2025
What didn’t work in 2025 and still won’t work in 2026? DEI, transgender ideology, vaccines — just to name a…
LAUGH FACTORY: Carbon-copy comics cry ‘Epstein’ on cue
Late-night hacks didn’t get the memo.
Sure, Democrats have been using the Epstein card for the better part of the year. Whenever President Donald Trump does anything they don’t like, which is anything, period, they claim it’s a distraction from the Epstein files.
Pratt wouldn’t be the first reality-show star to make waves in politics. Turns out that guy was a natural, in between McDonald’s shifts …
Because — all together now — the walls are closing in.
Except the Biden administration had access to said files for four years and never released them. Because, as we know, if there were incriminating details about Trump within them, Team Biden would have kept them safely tucked away from sight.
Sure, Jan.
Except now the “distraction from the Epstein files” defense is even sillier than ever. Why? We’ve already seen some of those files, and so far the only politician whose reputation suffered a hit was President Bill Clinton.
So what happened when Team Trump expertly corralled the criminal Venezuelan strongman Nicholas Maduro in a lightning strike they’ll make a movie about some day?
Team Late Night said the stunning raid was … no, really … a distraction from the Epstein files.
Kimmel. Fallon. Colbert.
Same talking points. Same complete lack of shame …
The timing couldn’t be better.
Move over, Tim
Our political culture is teeming with jackasses, from code-switch princess Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) to Minnesota’s soon-to-be-unemployed Gov. Tim Walz (D). That title might be too mild for former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann.
Now, the professionals are coming back to stake their claim to the moniker.
A fifth “Jackass” movie is heading our way this June. The surprise project finds 50-something Johnny Knoxville and friends returning to their painful shtick that started on MTV too many years ago to count. OK, the show debuted in October 2000.
The boys have done everything from covering their bathing-suit areas with bees to literally sticking together courtesy of superglue.
What’s left? Maybe they can watch CNN for 24 hours straight without losing what’s left of their concussed minds …
Smear factor
One of the best running jokes in “This Is Spinal Tap” involves the group’s drummer. Or drummers, to be more precise. Sadly, playing the skins for the heavy metal band meant putting your life on the line. Literally. Think spontaneous combustion and choking on someone else’s vomit.
And, even more strange, a bizarre gardening accident.
On that scale, it’s a miracle that Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear is still with us. The 66-year-old rocker “smashed the s**t out of his foot” while gardening, at least according to the band’s Instagram account.
The Foo Fighters did star in the horror comedy “Studio 666,” so they have a healthy sense of humor. Did they turn a generic accident into a Tap-like riff?
Either way, he’ll be replaced on the current tour until his bones heal up. Let’s hope the band cranks it up to 11 upon his return …
From ‘The Hills’ to his honor?
Reagan. Ventura. Schwarzenegger. Franken. Trump. Pratt?
Reality-show veteran Spencer Pratt has been a thorn in the side of California Democrats following last year’s devastating Palisades fires. Pratt saw both the devastation left by poor land management and the feeble rebuilding efforts in his state.
Now, he’s doing something about it.
Pratty announced he’ll be running against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in the city’s next election.
“Let’s make LA camera ready again!” he posted.
Pratt doesn’t have any real political experience, but could he be any worse than the current clown car running roughshod over the state? And, to be fair, he wouldn’t be the first reality-show star to make waves in politics. Turns out that guy was a natural, in between McDonald’s shifts …
RELATED: BURN NOTICE: ‘Hills’ heel Spencer Pratt to run for Los Angeles mayor
Photo by MEGA/GC Images
McCarthy’s ‘View’ rue
Jenny McCarthy has singled out “The View,” and it ain’t pretty.
The model turned actress recalled her time on the feminist talk show on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” noting how its tone morphed during her one-year stint with the ABC chatfest.
She joined the gaggle to talk pop culture and other frothy subjects. Instead, the show took a political turn. No thanks, she said at the time.
“They’ve asked me to come back for, like, reunion shows,” McCarthy said. “I was like, over my dead body would I ever step foot in that place.”
Here’s betting Meghan McCain has a similar take on any reunion talk.
How the right got Dave Chappelle wrong
For years, Dave Chappelle has been treated as a kind of honorary dissident on the right. Not because he ever pledged allegiance, but because he irritated the correct people. He mocked pronouns, needled sanctimony, and refused to bow. That was enough. In a culture addicted to easy binaries, irritation became endorsement. Chappelle was recast as the anti-woke jester, the last free man in a room full of rules.
“The Unstoppable…” puts an end to that fantasy.
The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns.
As the Netflix special begins, Chappelle emerges on stage wearing a jacket emblazoned with Colin Kaepernick’s name across the back, a symbol doing more work than most monologues. It is declarative. Kaepernick, a distinctly mediocre quarterback who parlayed a declining football career into a lucrative role as a full-time political brand, has long functioned more as an abstraction than as an athlete. His protest became performative, his grievance a commodity, his kneel a credential. Before a word is spoken, the audience is told where power, sympathy, and grievance will be placed. Identity is not the backdrop. Quite the opposite. It’s the billboard.
Black and white
From there, the special settles into a familiar groove. Race becomes the organizing principle, the master key, the lens through which every topic is filtered and fixed. America is again framed as a racist hellscape, a uniquely cruel experiment, a place where whiteness looms as a near-mythical menace.
This is not observation so much as obsession. The fixation risks alienating white viewers almost immediately. Some in the audience likely sense it. Others — liberal self-flagellators by instinct — laugh along anyway, even as they become the punch line of nearly every joke.
Chappelle takes aim at Elon Musk, at Trump, at the culture of DOGE-era absurdity, but the jokes rarely travel. They circle. Musk becomes less a human eccentric and more a symbol of tech-bro whiteness run amok. Trump is reduced to a prop, wheeled on whenever the set needs a familiar villain. That might be forgivable — useful, even — if the material pushed somewhere unexpected. It doesn’t. For a comedian of Chappelle’s ability, too much of the set feels curiously unambitious.
Left hook
The most telling moment comes in Chappelle’s account of Jack Johnson. Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, endured explicit racism. That history is real. That is not in dispute. What is striking is how Chappelle treats that history. Johnson becomes less a man of his time and more a stand-in for black people in the present, besieged by the same “demonic white man.”
And so Chappelle conflates Johnson’s struggles with with the lives of rappers T.I. and the late Nipsey Hussle — and celebrates all three heroes for opposing white America.
As BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock recently posted on X:
This comedy special exposes [Chappelle] as highly controlled opposition, the ultimate plant, a fraud. He pretends to be a fearless speaker of truth to power. It’s laughable. No one with a brain can witness the Charlie Kirk assassination and then argue/suggest that Nipsey Hussle, T.I., and Jack Johnson were/are the real rebels, the real threats to American hegemony. Dave quoted Jack Johnson as saying his life was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. He was a boxer with the worldview of a modern gangsta rapper.
Some kings?
And then comes Chappelle’s praise of Saudi Arabia.
Not cautiously. Not ironically. He recounts performing at a comedy festival in Riyadh, openly boasting about the size of the paycheck. He describes feeling freer speaking there than in the United States. Freer. In a society where speech is monitored, dissent is criminalized, and punishment still includes public canings and amputations.
The audience laughs on schedule, applauding with the enthusiasm of trained sea lions. I found myself wondering why.
There is something almost surreal about hearing a man who has spent years describing America as uniquely oppressive extol the virtues of a monarchy where speech is tolerated only when it is toothless. The contradiction is never addressed. It simply floats past, buoyed by bravado and bank balance.
This isn’t hypocrisy in the cheap sense. It is something more revealing — and easier to miss because Chappelle is such a gifted orator. His moral compass isn’t anchored to freedom, but to grievance. America is condemned because it fails to live up to an ideal. Saudi Arabia is praised because it pays well and demands little beyond discretion.
It would be easier if “The Unstoppable…” were simply bad. It is not. Chappelle remains a master of timing. His cadence still carries. The problem is less talent than trajectory.
RELATED: Dave Chappelle faces fierce backlash over criticism of US while performing in Saudi Arabia
Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
Punching inward
What once felt dangerous now feels dutiful. What once cut across power now reinforces a different orthodoxy. Chappelle no longer punches up or down so much as inward, tightening his world until everything is interpreted through race alone.
The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns. When he mocked trans men in women’s sports, it landed during a moment of peak absurdity, when the subject was everywhere and ripe for satire. It was easy. It was funny. But it was never a statement of allegiance.
“The Unstoppable…” makes that clear. The jacket, the Johnson parable, the Saudi sermon, the relentless racial framing — all of it points in the same direction.
Comedy, at its best, unsettles everyone. It exposes what our certainties conceal. In this special, Chappelle appears more interested in confirming his own.
Unstoppable, perhaps. But no longer subversive.
WATCH NOW: Singer-Songwriter Jon Kahn Debuts Haunting New Song One Year After Losing Home in L.A. Fires
One year after losing his home of more than 20 years in the Palisades fires, Breitbart’s Jon Kahn is turning devastation into a new song and video:
Forget ‘Die Hard’ — ‘Brazil’ is the ultimate Christmas movie
The cultural powers that be determined long ago that a film needn’t deal directly with the Nativity of our Lord and Savior to qualify as a “Christmas movie.”
Many films apparently qualify simply by virtue of their plot events’ proximity to December 25, their festive backdrops, and their occasional visual reference to Coca-Cola Claus, starred pines, and/or the birth of God.
In a way, the Christmas imagery does visually what the movie’s eponymous theme song does sonically: tease at something lovely and wonderful beyond the nightmare.
Rest assured as the bare-footed cop wastes German terrorists at his estranged wife’s office party; as the two burglars repeatedly fall prey to an abandoned adolescent’s mutilatory traps; and as the inventor’s son unwittingly turns his Chinatown-sourced present into a demon infestation — these are indeed Christmas movies.
Given the genre’s flexible criteria, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece “Brazil” also qualifies.
State Santa
In truth, the Python alumnus’ film about a bureaucrat’s maddening investigation of his totalitarian government’s execution of the wrong man is a far stronger entry than “Die Hard,” “Home Alone,” “Gremlins,” and other such flicks.
Not only is there Christmastime imagery throughout, but such visuals are also of great importance, providing insights both into the treachery of the film’s principal antagonist — the state — as well as into what appears missing in Gilliam’s dystopian world.
In the opening scene, a man pushes a cart full of wrapped presents past a storefront window framed by tinsel and crowded with “Merry Christmas” signage, television sets, and baubles.
Next we enter an apartment where a mother reads “A Christmas Carol” to her daughter, a father wraps a present, and a boy plays at the foot of a well-dressed evergreen.
After numerous scenes featuring gift exchanges, mutterings of “Happy Christmas,” and Christmas trees, we meet a kindly faced man dressed as Santa.
Jingle hells
This is, however, no feel-good Christmas movie.
The storefront window is firebombed.
Armored police storm into the family’s apartment, jab a rifle in the father’s gut, and take him away in a bag while his wife screams in horror.
The gifts exchanged and piling up throughout the film — besides the offers of job promotions and plastic surgery — appear to all be versions of the same novelty device, a meaningless “executive decision-maker.”
The kindly faced man dressed as Santa is a propaganda-spewing government official who rolls into the protagonist Sam Lowry’s padded cell on a wheelchair to inform Lowry — played by Jonathan Pryce — that his fugitive lover is dead.
With exception to the heart-warming domestic scene interrupted by the totalitarian bureaucracy’s jackboots at the beginning of the film, the Christmas imagery rings hollow and for good reason.
Extra to dehumanizing workplaces, purposefully meaningless work, bureaucratic red tape, and paperwork that’s so bad it ends up killing Robert DeNiro’s character — at least by the tortured protagonist’s account — the regime’s population-control scheme relies on consumerism.
The regime has, accordingly, done its apparent best to empty Christmas of the holy day’s real significance and meaning, donning it as a costume to sell and control.
RELATED: Santa Claus: Innocent Christmas fun or counterfeit Jesus?
Beyond the nightmare
“Brazil” is not, however, an anti-Christmas film.
The emptiness of the costume prompts reflection about its proper filling — a reflection that should invariably lead one to Christ.
In a way, the Christmas imagery does visually what the movie’s eponymous theme song does sonically: tease at something lovely and wonderful beyond the nightmare Gilliam once dubbed “Nineteen Eighty-Four-and-a-Half.”
“I had this vision of a radio playing exotic music on a beach covered in coal dust, inspired by a visit to the steel town of Port Talbot. Originally the song I had in mind was Ry Cooder’s ‘Maria Elena,’ but later I changed it to ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ by Ary Barroso,” Gilliam told the Guardian.
“The idea of someone in an ugly, despairing place dreaming of something hopeful led to Sam Lowry, trapped in his bureaucratic world, escaping into fantasy.”
Whereas the recurrent theme from the samba references a fantasy the regime can crush, the various indirect reminders that Christmas is about more than presents and half-hearted niceties reference a hidden truth and source of eternal hope: that God was born in Bethlehem.
The Weekend Spectator Ep. 53: Ranking the Best Christmas Movies of All Time
With Christmas quickly approaching and endless movie choices, it can be difficult to decide which of the greats to watch….
