CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: The dawn of the anti-woke era.

In late November, a California judge rejected a demand by several women’s volleyball teams to disqualify a transgender player for San Jose State before this year’s tournament. Six opponents have forfeited games against the team this year rather than collude in what they see as cheating. The larger question of transgender athletes in college sports will be decided later, but the judge is defending a lost cause. Fewer than a quarter of Americans (23 per cent) support allowing transgender athletes to play on women’s teams. Teams that do field trans athletes are sometimes booed off the pitch. Such feelings go a long way towards explaining Donald Trump’s resounding win in November’s presidential elections.

Washingtonians are often asked what it feels like to watch the second age of Trump dawn. Oddly, it does not feel much like his first arrival in 2016. It feels more like Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1992 – less a political than a social revolution, in which philosophical habits will be broken along with political hierarchies. This particular social revolution owes most of its energy to a revulsion against woke. That is the source of the new era’s promise and danger.

There’s way too much here for me to quote; definitely read the whole thing.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: The Biden Legacy Unmasked: If You Thought Antisemitism Was Bad Before, Hold Onto Your Yarmulkas.

Each year, the oldest generations cede new ground to the youngest. By the end of Trump’s second term, the Democratic Party will be — overwhelmingly! — anti-Israel.

It didn’t have to be this way.

During the first few years of the Biden administration, the moderate wing still had enough power to stave off the antisemites. Biden still had the stature to win the debate — and to defeat and discredit the Antifa-inspired radicals. He could’ve used his age to his benefit by describing the rising tide of Jew hatred in personal, emotional language, making it perfectly clear that there’s no place for antisemitism in the Democratic Party — and YES, treating Israel dramatically differently than you treat China (*cough* Tibet and the Uyghurs), Iran (*cough* terrorism), Russia (*cough* Ukraine), Cuba (*cough* human rights), and so on IS A FORM OF  ANTISEMITISM.

Back then, it was still a winnable debate.

But today, the political climate and Democratic demographics have shifted: The anti-Israel movement is ascending. The anti-Hamas opposition is dying out. And the impulse to define yourself by doing the opposite of Trump will be too irresistible to resist.

Which is why 2025 will be a banner year for antisemitism. And it’s also why 2026, 2027, and 2028 will be even worse.

That’s the final legacy of the Biden years: He mainstreamed antisemitism in the Democratic Party. And unlike most of his “legacy,” this one will last for decades.

John Gill smiles.

READ THE ROOM: Even in a Crisis, the LA Times Makes Sure Its Evacuation Advice Remains Stupidly Woke:

A year ago, Victoria Taft asked: The Lefty L.A. Times Is in Hospice. Could There Be a Death Bed Conversion?

In 2018, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the newspaper. The South African-born emigre discovered a drug to slow metastatic cancer and became a billionaire. He believed it was his civic duty to take over the troubled newspaper as online news and social media platforms eviscerate print journalism.

The newspaper went even more woke. Soon-Shiong was derided as an absentee landlord and excoriated by the newspaper’s union shop. The clashes continued and so did the layoffs. This week’s layoff, which goes into effect in March, was the worst in the paper’s history.

* * * * * * * *

What good is a regional newspaper if it tells only one point of view and chooses stories based on young, dumb, activist reporters’ confirmation biases? As a result, the Fourth Estate has become the Fifth Column. These flaws are the reason PJ Media and other conservative media exist.

Soon-Shiong has vowed in the weeks leading up to the election and afterwards to reduce the activist journalism at the L.A. Times — and yet this sort of leftist Newspeak “unexpectedly” keeps getting past his paper’s editors.

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Cabinet of the Canceled.

One could say many things about Trump’s cabinet picks. At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled: an assemblage that doesn’t need to be reminded of the administrative state’s ability to coerce the American public by calling in favors from Big Tech or pulling the levers of regulation, audit, or investigation. Many have experienced such treatment firsthand.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a government watch list, she says, for criticizing Kamala Harris. The Biden White House and surgeon general pressured social-media companies to censor Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya’s attempts to warn the public that the Covid lockdowns were the biggest policy error in American history; Trump named Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. And Elon Musk, appointed to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, knowingly overpaid for Twitter to give Americans a sphere for free speech. At takeover, Musk immediately released the Twitter Files, revealing a coordinated effort by the Biden administration to censor the speech of Americans whose views it disfavored. The Biden administration repaid Musk by targeting his businesses with unprecedented levels of regulatory harassment.

One wonderful thing about Americans: we despise being bullied by our government. Not even our Anglosphere allies share this aspect of our national character. Yet, over the last decade, for anyone with views departing from progressive orthodoxy, American life has become increasingly suffocating. Our posts have been censored on social media—or labeled “misinformation” by “fact-checkers”—as mine were, for criticizing Biden administration policy on boys participating in girls’ sports. We got booted from Twitter for opposing gender ideology or expressing skepticism about Covid vaccine safety.

Read the whole thing.

FIRE SAFETY IN BUILDING DESIGN: A THREAD.

SF CHRONICLE: Private firefighters protected a Hollywood talent manager’s home. Why are some people so mad?

As [Miley Cyrus’ manager Adam Leber] rushed his family to safety amid a broader firestorm engulfing wide swaths of Los Angeles County, a private firefighting service arrived to ensure his 6,000-square-foot home — once owned by filmmaker Preston Sturges and “rumored to be the site of Charlie Chaplin’s first wedding,” according to an old real estate listing — remained standing.

Leber is one of a growing number of Californians who, faced with the growing threat of wildfires in populated areas, have turned to private firefighting teams as an added layer of protection. Supporters of private firefighting teams argue they can augment the work of government-run efforts, stepping in to fill the cracks caused by depleted city and state budgets and an ever-worsening climate crisis.

But not everyone is a fan of private firefighters, particularly those that contract directly with homeowners outside of insurance, like the company Leber hired. Critics contend that when wealthy individuals hire their own firefighters, they compete with public teams for precious resources such as water, and could potentially interfere with those teams’ efforts by, for example, blocking or crowding narrow access points.

Moreover, they say, private firefighters widen the already-vast chasm between rich and poor, safeguarding the interests of the former at the expense of the latter.

“The rich suffer zero consequences of anything, even cataclysmic natural disasters,” one user wrote on X, responding to a video the Chronicle posted showing private firefighters saving Leber’s house. “Private and firefighter should not be in the same sentence,” wrote another.

As Jon Levine of the New York Post tweets, “Imagine paying into one of the highest tax cities in the nation, and then none of the municipal services you pay for are there for you when you need them and so you have to resort to private services — and then are shamed for doing so!”

Between championing riots and looting that destroy local businesses (recall Tim Walz’s wife saying, she kept her windows open to “smell the burning tires” during the 2020 BLM riots), cheering on Luigi Mangione after he assassinated an insurance company CEO, and now wishing that the wealthy lose their homes in the L.A. fires, American leftists are now reduced to being the crusty conservative in the “Point/Counterpoint” segment of Airplane:

UPDATE: And again: Billionaire tycoon is blasted after hiring a private fire crew to protect his luxury outdoor mall as devastating wildfires continue to rip through LA.

Los Angeles residents are furious a billionaire tycoon spent thousands of dollars on private firefighters to help protect his business while emergency services struggle to contain the flames.

Billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso is receiving backlash online after the New York Times reported that he had hired private fire crews to protect Palisades Village – an upscale outdoor mall owned by the businessman.

‘So Rick directly or indirectly contributed to the fires by diverting resources to himself and away from the greater population. I think this needs to be investigated ASAP’, one user wrote on X.

Another said: ‘We cannot survive the billionaire class’. A separate account commented: ‘Dystopian capitalism’.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Caruso’s team.

Fire crews for hire can cost between $3,000 and $10,000 a day and are mostly contracted with insurance companies or the government.

Shana, they bought their tickets…

UPDATE: “They genuinely want you to die.” Exactly:

WHEN THERE’S A DISASTER, LOOK WHO’S ALWAYS THERE BEFORE FEMA NOW:

UPDATE: From the comments: “Compare and contrast with ‘I don’t know how the water gets to the hydrants.'”

OBVIOUSLY, EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED IN LOS ANGELES IS THE FAULT OF REPUBLICANS:

ROGER KIMBALL: Merchan’s Verdict: A Conviction Without Consequence.

Jimmy Carter’s administration is remembered as a period of “malaise” and waning American prestige. Because Donald Trump is not shy about repeating himself, everyone now knows that the Panama Canal, one of the great engineering feats in all of history, cost some 38,000 American lives. The transoceanic passage was built by Americans, paid for by Americans, and was undertaken to serve a vital national security interest. In 1977, Carter sold the canal to Panama for one dollar, thus marking one of the nadirs of his term in office.

The “vibe shift” that Trump’s victory precipitated is, first of all, a matter of feeling and emotion, not doctrines.  As with Reagan’s “morning in America” motif, the MAGA moment involvespolicies.  But it is fired by an uptick in energy, enthusiasm, and cultural confidence.  From where I sit, it seems like “morning in America” on steroids. Donald Trump will not be sworn in for another week, yet already he has utterly changed the conversation on both domestic issues and, especially, foreign affairs. He has spoken early and often about retaking the Panama Canal, absorbing or otherwise laying claim to Greenland, and making official Canada’s status as a dependent of the United States. World leaders and various celebrities have flocked to Mar-a-Lago to receive his blessing or just to bask in the reflected glow of “the Trump Effect.”

All of which makes John Roberts’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s defection to the anti-Trump wing of the Court puzzling. Merchan sentenced Trump to—nothing. No fine, no jail time, no probation. Only the obloquy, such as it is, of having officially been found guilty by Juan Merchan. As the judge put it in delivering the sentence, “The only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge.”

“Unconditional discharge.”  Is that what these months of harassment have been leading up to?

In passing sentence, Merchan indulged in a bit of stern-sounding legal persiflage about the rule of law, the gravity of Trump’s offenses, and the distinction between the privilege due to the office of the president and that due to an individual who just happened to be a former president as well as current president-elect.

Read the whole thing.

MEET THE NEW BOSS. SAME AS WORSE THAN THE OLD BOSS?

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Who is Robbie Williams and why is he a chimpanzee in Better Man?

In the U.K., Robbie Williams is a major megastar — and has been for decades. But not so much in the U.S. For whatever reason, Williams’ charming, edgy pop tunes and self-deprecating sense of humor never have quite clicked with Americans.

That might change with the new biopic about Williams, “Better Man,” which first opened in theaters on Dec. 25 but is about to go wide on Jan. 17.

Following the beats of a classic biopic, “Better Man” has a major twist: Williams — who voices and sings the character — is portrayed as a computer-generated chimpanzee.

Let’s find out why.

Or perhaps, let’s not. As Variety reports:

Expanding to 1,291 venues this weekend, the wacky Robbie Williams biopic “Better Man” isn’t exactly going bananas with a puny $580,000 opening day. Paramount, working with some co-financiers, acquired the feature for North America distribution (and Japan and France) for $25 million.

Helmed by “Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey, “Better Man” drew strong reviews playing fall festivals, with critics largely taken by the premise of having Williams represented by a CGI chimpanzee because, as he puts it in the trailer, he always felt “less evolved than other people.” But the film fizzled in its limited release in late December and, after hoping to plant a flag in awards season, has faded mightily among Oscar prognosticators. Williams is a U.K. icon, but has mostly remained obscure stateside, and a domestic marketing campaign that has emphasized the primate premise over the central pop star didn’t take.

Over the decades, many acts have become household name superstars in England, but fail to make much of a dent in the American market. (QED: Cliff Richard, Roxy Music, and Kate Bush until Stranger Things). As the Critical Drinker tweets, “A biopic about a singer who was notorious for failing to crack America and hasn’t even been relevant in over a decade. Who exactly thought this was a good idea?”

Having seen the trailer for Better Man several times this past fall and during the holiday season, and knowing nothing about Williams, it didn’t exactly inspire me to want to see what seemed like Planet of the Apes: The Boy Band Era.

TWO MEN ARRESTED AFTER BURGLARY CALL AT BRENTWOOD HOME OF VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS:

The Brentwood home of Vice President Kamala Harris, which lies within a Palisades fire evacuation zone, may have made it a target for would-be burglars Saturday.

The Los Angeles Police Department dispatched officers to Harris’ home about 4:30 a.m. Saturday when they received a burglary call of two men in black jumpsuits outside, KNX reported.

The officers detained two men, the radio station reported. It was unclear if they were then arrested.

According to local TV network KTLA, “LAPD said officers detained the two people who were breaking curfew, but have since released them as they found no evidence that they were committing a crime.”

Based on her actions in 2020, Kamala would have wanted it that way, presumably: Kamala Harris Lies, Claiming That She Never Promoted the Bail Fund That Bailed Out BLM Rioters As Well As Murderers and R4pists; But the Tweet In Which She Promoted that Bail Fund Is Still Up!

(And it’s still up to this day.)

Or is this a case akin to “Riots For Thee, But Not For Me?”