Nolte: Disney’s Big Gay, Green ‘Strange World’ Crashes at Box Office

Nolte: Disney’s Big Gay, Green ‘Strange World’ Crashes at Box Office

Disney’s latest animated feature, the gay, green Strange World, just tanked at the box office.

Gee, what a shock. You mean no one wants to waste their Thanksgiving weekend having their children prematurely sexualized by groomers with a side order of enviro-guilt?

This should do wonders for Disney’s already cratered stock price.

Strange World cost anywhere from $150 million to $180 million to produce. Add at least another $50 to $100 million to promote, and what you have here is a straight-up catastrophe, a quarter of a billion — with a “B” — write-off.

Per the far-left Deadline, which is again making anti-science excuses for this flop, Strange World is on course for a three-day opening weekend of just $15.8 million. Over the five-day holiday weekend, it is estimated to reach only $20 to $23 million.

Strange World is a massive, feature-length Disney cartoon.

Strange World is a massive, feature-length Disney cartoon released over the holidays.

And it’s tanking.

The thought of this happening a few years ago was laughable. Everything Disney touched turned to gold.

Remember? Disney was the go-to brand. We trusted Disney to deliver not only quality entertainment but wholesome entertainment, entertainment for the whole family.

Well, those days are over.

The predators at Disney are coming for your kids, and everyone knows it.

The Disney brand is now the equivalent of a non-descript van and a guy behind the wheel offering your kids candy.

And now, to once again point out what lying hacks the entertainment media are and just how far these hacks are willing to bend over and sell out their integrity, I give you Deadline’s anti-science excuse for Strange World’s box office disaster:

One former Disney exec once told me, “They’re very good at making the best worst case decision” and in the scenario of Strange World, that’s sending it to Disney+ by the holidays.

Ohhhhhh…. So that’s why Strange World tanked. It’s not the enviro-propaganda or the teenage homosexuality… No, no, no… Strange World tanked because it will be on Disney+ in 30 days. After all, why go to the movies when you can watch it at home in 30 days, right?

Except.

Disney did the exact same thing with Encanto last year. And I do mean the exact same thing. In 2021, Encanto was released in theaters for the Thanksgiving weekend and dropped on Disney+ in time for the Christmas holidays. Nevertheless, it opened to $41 million.

So, under the exact same conditions, why would Encanto open to $41 million and Strange World do about half that?

And why would the liars at Deadline hide that rather pertinent fact from gullible readers?

What we got here is a real head-scratcher.

Deadline also tried to soften the blow with this sleight-of-hand:

That’s not the worst for a Disney animated pic, particularly over Thanksgiving, but it’s damn close: Their $140M original animation movie Treasure Planet was in freefall back in 2003 with a 3-day of $12M and [5-day of] $16.5M.

Except.

You forgot inflation.

In today’s dollars, $16.5 million equals $27 million, which, according to my public school math, adds up to more than Strange World’s $20 to $23 million.

Strange World’s environmental propaganda sounds obnoxious enough. But Disney also had to add a gay subplot involving two teenage boys…

Adult sexuality in a kids’ movie.

Why?

We.

All.

Know.

Why.

Just like this summer’s super-gay Lightyear, which also flopped, Disney is preying on your children and looking to destroy their innocence before you, as a parent, are ready for that to happen.

Teaching tolerance for people who are different is a noble thing. Disney has been doing that for nearly a century now, doing it without adding overt sexuality.

I’ll say it again, Disney has become a company no decent parent will dare leave their child alone with. Drag queens, normalizing and promoting the mental illness and self-mutilation of the trans hysteria, homosexual kids…

This is all headed in one direction: normalizing sex between adults and children. That sounds crazy, but look at what Disney’s doing today that sounded crazy five years ago.

The endgame is making you feel like a bigot for not allowing a hairy drag queen to take your six-year-old son to bed.

What else could the endgame be?

And that’s probably not the endgame because there is never an endgame with the left. Just a slippery slope of unimagined depravities.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/11/25/nolte-disneys-big-gay-green-strange-world-crashes-at-box-office/

Attorney General Merrick Garland delivers remarks at the U.S. Justice Department Building in Washington on Nov. 18, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

VIEWPOINTS

Appointment of Special Counsel Amounts to Election Interference and Sets Dangerous Precedent

Benjamin Weingarten

 

0:006:14

Commentary

While Republicans kicked off the 2024 presidential race with the announcement that Donald Trump was running for president, in perhaps the ultimate sign of our ignominious times, Democrats, in effect, kicked off their half of the contest three days later by appointing a special counsel to escalate their political prosecution of him.

This is where “our democracy” stands today: with its purported defenders engaging in the singularly anti-democratic act of siccing a hyper-politicized law enforcement apparatus on a candidate for the highest elected office, on dubious grounds, thereby subverting the political process by which we decide who represents us.

At a minimum, no doubt to an approving President Joe Biden, his law enforcement arm is now engaged in what amounts to election interference against arguably the president’s top challenger—ironically probing in part then-President Trump’s alleged interference with the transfer of power in 2020, when Trump could make the case the Deep State did the same to him from the inception of Russiagate in 2016 onward.

Worse, with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel, the prospect of the former president being charged and convicted of something, anything, is more real than at any time during the perpetual campaign to purge Trump from the body politic.

Our Ruling Class really does wish to “lock him up,” or at least hold that threat over the former president’s head for maximum political gain.

There are many layers to the surreal lawfare assault on Trump worth peeling back—all of which point to the fact that our core institutions are willing to burn themselves down in service of their own power and privilege.

For starters, we have the inherent Third World nature of the current president, by way of his attorney general, pursuing criminal charges against his predecessor and present challenger. This is an extension of the Third World, Soviet show-trial-style Jan. 6 committee preceding it. The law enforcement apparatus carrying out the investigations has time and again acted, Third World-like, as the Ruling Class’s sword and shield. Such Third Worldism in our politics—weaponizing the national security and law enforcement apparatus against Ruling Class foes—has now been normalized, and institutionalized.

Next, there are the beyond dubious grounds on which the DOJ’s legal pursuit is putatively based. No Justice Department has ever pursued such probes, on such grounds, concerning such debatable charges, under such circumstances as this one. The 2024 presidential election may hinge in large part on what case(s) the DOJ can make over a document dispute—as even federal law enforcement has acknowledged is at issue with the Mar-a-Lago materials—and the manner in which a president contested an election.

Setting aside for a minute the contempt with which the DOJ/FBI has treated Trump time and again, looked at on the merits, the agencies have punted far more clear-cut cases concerning the handling of documents by officials with far less authority than the commander-in-chief. To my knowledge, there is little if any guidance on what constitutes “unlawful interference” with the transfer of power, or election certification—meaning, at very best, the Justice Department is dealing in hypotheticals and unique matters of interpretation. In other words, the grounds for legal pursuit of Trump by his successor’s administration are shaky, and the cases to be made are novel, to put it mildly.

If federal prosecutors—starting with the attorney general—acted with even a modicum of discretion, they would have immediately dismissed even the thought of pursuing anything but open-and-shut cases, overwhelmingly supported by law and precedent, when it comes to prosecuting a former president and current candidate. Instead, by characteristically holding Trump to a different standard than any president to come before him, our preeminent law enforcement agencies are undermining the rule of law.

Another aspect of the story is Garland’s artful attempt to insulate himself from an inherently hyper-political prosecution that his DOJ initiated in the first place, and that he ultimately calls the final shots on anyway—and all while the president’s son, not to mention other family members, who monetized patriarch Joe’s office through dealings with our worst adversaries, face no special counsel. Talk about a double standard.

Then there’s Special Counsel Smith’s checkered record in spearheading past baseless pursuits of Republicans during his time as the head of the Obama Justice Department’s public integrity section. His office’s reckless prosecution of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell on bribery charges led to an embarrassing rebuke at the Supreme Court, which overturned the Republican’s conviction by a nine-to-nothing vote. The special counsel has also been implicated in the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofits during the Obama years.

And then, of course, there’s the myriad ways the prosecution can and will be exploited to hobble candidate Trump, cast a cloud over the GOP primary process, stymie Congressional Republicans likely to probe aspects of Jan. 6 and perhaps the DOJ and FBI themselves, and sideline those members involved in contesting the 2020 presidential election—all while distracting from the Biden administration’s misdeeds.

Lastly, there’s the precedent this all sets.

The legal persecution of Trump—an insurance policy of sorts should the political persecution of him and his supporters fail—is beyond chilling.

Those who loathe Trump, his policy, and his people, have proven they are willing to eviscerate the American system in the name of defending it from traitors, authoritarians, and insurrectionists.

Their projection is reaching its apex.

Should it persist, we will be an unrecognizable country.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/appointment-of-special-counsel-amounts-to-election-interference-and-sets-dangerous-precedent_4884195.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-11-26&src_cmp=mb-2022-11-26&utm_medium=email&est=9%2BL40Hw76eeOvhuM%2FYNWUIDJpEzx0eBIN7L%2FGoen3m%2FzXUgqBxLYM5ssly6Z

 

President Joe Biden looks toward reporters as they shout questions during an event in Washington on Nov. 18, 2022. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

Biden Attacks ‘Semi-Automatic’ Gun Ownership, Vows to Push Firearm Curbs During Lame Duck Congress

By Tom Ozimek

 

0:005:12

President Joe Biden on Nov. 24 called for “much stricter gun laws,” saying that he plans to push for a ban on “assault weapons” during the lame duck Congress while labeling the idea of allowing “semiautomatic weapons” to be purchased as “sick.”

Biden made the remarks after a meeting with local firefighters in Nantucket, Massachusetts, when he was asked to comment on a recent shooting at a Virginia Walmart, in which the perpetrator shot and killed six people before turning the gun on himself.

“I’m sick and tired of these shootings. We should have much stricter gun laws,” Biden said.

Biden first called for tougher enforcement of existing red-flag laws, which allow authorities to take guns away from people deemed dangerous.

“It saves lives. So that’s number one,” Biden said of red-flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders (ERPO).

While some studies, like one from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (pdf) and another from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, claim that ERPOs can help reduce suicides and mass shootings, research from the RAND Corporation found the evidence inconclusive.

At the meeting in Nantucket, the president also took aim at semi-automatic guns.

Biden, who has previously called for banning semi-automatic firearms, including handguns, said that “the idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick.”

“It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers,” Biden continued, adding that he would push for a ban on assault weapons during the lame duck Congress.

“I’m going to do it whenever … I got to make that assessment as I get in and start counting the votes,” Biden added.

Red-Flag Laws

While there are no federal ERPO regulations, a number of states have adopted red-flag laws.

A recent Associated Press analysis found that existing red-flag laws in 19 states and the District of Columbia were used to remove firearms from people 15,049 times since 2020, or fewer than 10 per 100,000 adult residents.

Some experts have suggested the reason red-flag laws haven’t been shown to be effective in reducing violent crime is that authorities either aren’t aware of the laws or are reluctant to enforce them.

“It’s too small a pebble to make a ripple,” Duke University sociologist Jeffrey Swanson, who has studied red-flag laws, said of the AP tally, in remarks to PBS. “It’s as if the law doesn’t exist.”

While gun control advocates have touted red-flag laws as a powerful tool to reduce violent crime, gun rights advocates have argued that such laws won’t be effective at reducing crime but will only make law-abiding citizens more vulnerable by reducing their access to tools they can use to defend themselves and their families.

“You’re taking away someone’s property and means of self-defense,” Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who heads the pro-gun Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, told PBS.

Others have argued that the problem isn’t guns but the lack of institutionalization of the mentally ill.

“The reality is that absent institutionalization of disturbed individuals, such persons presenting actual threats to society will remain a threat even after seizing their firearms, as they will still have the ability to use a knife, motor vehicle, or countless other potentially lethal items to commit mass murder,” some two dozen conservative South Dakota lawmakers wrote in a 2019 letter advocating against red-flag laws.

Christopher C. Hull, a public affairs executive and Epoch Times contributor, echoed this sentiment in a recent op-ed.

“From 1960 to 1964, there was not a single notable mass shooting in the United States,” Hull wrote. “Then do-gooders decided on ‘deinstitutionalization’—that is, to simply release virtually all of the mentally ill into American society.”

“As we emptied out America’s insane asylums, mentally ill people began killing Americans en masse,” Hull wrote, noting that several studies have shown a link between mental illness and mass shootings.

The Democrat-controlled House introduced a bill in June, known as the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order (pdf), which would have created a federal red-flag gun law. While the measure cleared the House largely along a party-line vote, it failed to pass the Senate.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm for stricter gun laws among Americans has fallen. According to Gallup, 57 percent of U.S. adults now think laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, down from 66 percent in June, according to Gallup.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-attacks-semi-automatic-gun-ownership-vows-to-push-firearm-curbs-during-lame-duck-congress_4885224.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-11-26&src_cmp=mb-2022-11-26&utm_medium=email&est=AXEn0dYdjlVlq0G1r7OVT%2BQBxuKA2%2B6vN5lOvItavN%2FVHmhKxAm5rTDEOzWU

ADVICE FOR ELON [UPDATED]

ADVICE FOR ELON [UPDATED]

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ELON MUSK, TWITTER

Elon Musk’s effort to turn Twitter into a free speech platform has encountered angry resistance from the Left. The EU has demanded that he expand censorship, liberals have insisted that “hate speech” has proliferated since his takeover, and so on. As Scott noted earlier, members of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council,” who may or may not be out of a job, have denounced Twitter’s incipient libertarianism.

At the same time, liberals have sneered when Musk has acknowledged some need for content moderation, as though that somehow negated his commitment to free speech. There is a lot of fuzzy thinking going on here. Liberals talk about the “safety” of the platform, which makes little sense unless they are claiming that it may cause your cell phone to explode, causing personal injury. Musk, on the other hand, has at times described himself as a free speech absolutist. I am an absolutist, too, if you start with an understanding of what “speech” means.

I don’t think the issue of content moderation on a social media platform is particularly hard to resolve. First of all, on reflection anyone–including more-or-less absolutists like Musk and me–will agree that some content moderation is necessary. Bots should be banned, child pornography should not be permitted, users should not be allowed to conspire to commit terrorist acts.

Such content moderation can easily be reconciled with Musk’s commitment to free speech. I drafted a statute that was introduced, but not passed, in the last session of Minnesota’s legislature. It applied to a defined range of social media platforms, and banned discrimination in content moderation. Platforms could moderate content to their hearts’ content, but in doing so, they were prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, religion or political orientation.

The tech giants purported to be outraged by my proposal. They (Twitter, Facebook et al.) hired three industry groups to appear at a committee hearing to testify against it. They claimed that my bill would make it impossible to block child pornography or terrorist plots. Really? I asked. Please explain why you need to engage in race discrimination to prevent child pornography on your platform. They were unable to do so, of course. Their position was absurd.

One good thing about the anti-discrimination approach is that it is consistent with various degrees of content moderation. For example, a platform might want to enforce a minimum level of good taste. Thus, it might delete content featuring the severed head of Barack Obama, or use of the hashtag #RapeMichelle. Fine. But then, it would also have to ban content featuring the severed head of Donald Trump and the hashtag #RapeMelania, both of which were A-OK with Liberal Twitter.

If I were Elon Musk, I would announce whatever content moderation standards he wants to apply to Twitter. I would then add that those standards would be applied in a way that does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion or political orientation, and I would hire employees who would effectuate that commitment. Liberals would weep and gnash their teeth, but they would be unable to articulate a plausible objection to such a policy. As I know from experience.

The advice if free, Elon. If you take it, it will be the best bargain anyone offers you today.

UPDATE: A couple of additional thoughts. One might wonder whether banning “political orientation” discrimination is broad enough language, given that many of our most divisive controversies–e.g., the appropriateness of carving up children–may be seen as social, rather than political. Actually, “political orientation” was my shorthand, but the bill as drafted says “viewpoint,” which covers any sort of controversy or subject.

Second, neither my post nor my bill refers to “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Twitter, like the rest of the internet, is full of misinformation. The most notorious disinformation campaign of recent times was the Russia collusion hoax, which was all over Twitter, and perhaps still is. But sorting out the true from the false on a platform like Twitter is a hopeless endeavor, and identifying misinformation and disinformation can only be left to debate among users. I take it that this is largely what Musk means when he says he is in favor of free speech. It certainly is what the Founders had in mind.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/11/advice-for-elon.php

Four Mass Shooting Truths to Shut Down Your Liberal Family Members at Thanksgiving Dinner

Four Mass Shooting Truths to Shut Down Your Liberal Family Members at Thanksgiving Dinner

BY KEVIN DOWNEY JR.  

(AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane)

The media is shifty when it comes to mass shootings. They decide which shootings we do and do not get to hear about. If a shooting doesn’t jive with the liberal narrative, you’re not likely to hear the gory details.

FACT-O-RAMA! In order to talk about mass shootings, we have to agree on the definition of what a mass shooting is. Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot, not including the shooter/shooters.

The recent mass shooting in Colorado Springs is the 601st mass shooting in 2022. There have been four mass shootings since then, but you likely haven’t about them. You probably didn’t hear about most of the previous 600 shootings, either. Why is that? Because the left is keeping secrets. Let’s talk about what they don’t want you to know about mass shootings and why, so you can dominate your commie relatives at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Mass Shooting Secret #1: The AR-15 Is Not a Mass Shooter’s Weapon of Choice

The left likes to screech about the evils of AR-15s and their use in mass shootings. Some dolts whine that the AR-15 is the “preferred weapon” of mass shooting whackjobs. I rate this myth: five big, stinkin’ Pinocchios.

When you’re arguing at the Thanksgiving table with your liberal sister-in-law and her green-haired, trans-pan muxe-puke femme-boi?friend, she’ll go full-harpy on how AR-15s are the preferred weapons of mass shooters. This is odd, because even the Pravda-like lefty media outlet ABC News had to admit that’s false. As did Newsweek and The New York Times. Yet the left somehow still manages to convince their quislings that assault semi-automatic rifles are the problem. Why is that? We’ll discuss that in a bit.

Mass Shooting Secret #2: Most Mass Shooters Aren’t Angry White MAGA Dudes

No mass shooting argument is complete without a bolshie screeching that “angry, white men” are responsible for the lion’s share of mass shootings. Again, this lie warrants five whopper Pinocchios. Also, it’s where your lib-in-law will lose its gender-free mind when you show him/her/zhim this article.

As I’ve written before, most mass shootings are committed by black men. The media goes radio-silent when black dudes blaze up a rap concert, as we saw when three black men perforated more than 22 people in Miami in May of 2021. That story disappeared pretty quickly. As did a recent Halloween drive-by in Chicago that left 13 people injured, including three kids, and one man dead. No MAGA hats or white suspects were found.

Mass Shooting Secret # 3: Fudging the Numbers

The liberal guntards are happy to screech that mass shootings are on the rise. In fact, this is true. The nation saw 611 mass shootings in 2020, and we will easily beat that by the end of Thanksgiving weekend this year. There were 690 multiple-victim shootings in 2021.

The left likes to pull some gun-grabbing chicanery at this point. They are happy to point out the 600-plus mass shootings but conveniently leave out that most are drive-by, drug-related, gang-related, or just pointless party shootings. Again, this omission is likely due to the race of those spreading mad brass around our major cities. The commies will scream about the number of mass shootings (because it fits the narrative) while conveniently forgetting to mention who is pulling the triggers, as this wouldn’t work with the liberal brainwashing scheme.

New York’s gun-loathing governor, Kathy Hochul, can’t stop talking about the brutal May 14 mass shooting in her hometown of Buffalo, which left mostly black people killed and wounded, but hasn’t said a word about the Nov. 5 mass shooting in the same city that left four people injured. Nor has she mentioned the 45 mass shootings in Chicago this year. Is it because some lives matter more than others? Or because these shootings don’t help the commie cause?

Related: Media Ignores Yearly Fourth of July Carnage in Chicago to Focus on Suburban Shooting: Wonder Why?

Mass Shooting Secret # 4: Mass Shootings Are a Tiny Proportion of Gun Murders

As of today, Gun Violence Archive states that roughly 15,608 people have been murdered with guns in 2022. (This doesn’t count defensive shootings and unintentional shootings.) Of those, around 545 people were killed in mass shootings. This means mass shootings make up 3.49% of all gun-related murders. Yet, the apparatchiks in the mainstream media would have us believe mass shootings are a major cause of death in the United States.

SHOCK-O-RAMA! More than 500 Americans are hit by lightning every year, making the chance of getting killed in a mass shooting and getting hit by lightning about the same.

What Have We Learned?

We have learned that the media is very picky about which mass shootings make — and stay in — the headlines. If the shooting doesn’t fit the narrative, it’s almost like it never happened.

We know that those big, scary AR-15s — and those pesky high-capacity magazines — aren’t the weapon of choice for mass shooters, though the bum lickers in the liberal news media would have us think otherwise.

We also figured out that mass shootings make up a tiny fraction of murders in the nation, yet they get most of the media ink. And we learned most shooters aren’t drooling white men in MAGA hats.

So what gives?

There are two bogus narratives oozing out of the liberal press: White guys are the biggest domestic problem facing the nation; and AR-15s pose a threat to the population. Neither is true.

My humble opinion is that the Democrats have been hijacked by globalists who want us unarmed. You know — the way Hitler, Stalin, and Mao wanted their people defenseless. If a government wants its population unarmed, they are probably up to no good.

The leftists are using mass shootings to take away the AR-15. They happily stand on the bodies of dead kids, gay people, and anyone else viciously murdered in a mass shooting to propagate their lies. I almost think they look forward to these violent incidents.

Now that you know how to trounce your commie-in-laws in a verbal joust, let’s start out the Thanksgiving weekend with some laughs. Here’s another great video by my friends at Jokes and a Point. Remember, liberals are miserable, self-hating merry andrews. Conservatives know how to have fun.

Happy Thanksgiving!

https://pjmedia.com/columns/kevindowneyjr/2022/11/22/four-mass-shooting-truths-to-shut-down-your-liberal-family-members-at-thanksgiving-dinner-n1647976