Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
After Trump’s FCC apparently badgered ABC into suspending Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show produce a Trump-compliant episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXNJ3V9lzg
“Monday night on his ABC talk show, Jimmy Kimmel said something dumb about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah last week. Two days later, ABC, which is owned by Disney, announced that it was “indefinitely” suspending the comedian’s show.
Maybe the Disney executives who made that decision—CEO Robert A. Iger and Dana Walden, who oversees the company’s television division—were simply reacting to public outrage at Kimmel’s remarks. But the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was announced several hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested that TV stations might be fined or lose their licenses for broadcasting the show. That constitutionally dubious threat shows how the FCC can abuse its regulatory powers to suppress speech that offends President Donald Trump and his allies…
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that federal bureaucrats may not punish private companies for giving a forum to politically disfavored speakers.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/18/brendan-carr-flagrantly-abused-his-powers-to-cancel-jimmy-kimmel/
“We collected a dataset with
over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between
September 16 and October 21, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct
users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified
Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all
users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables
us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative
with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Rus-
sian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced
36 times more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content
originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. Using
state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about
4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were
bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they
had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ide-
ologically broad swath of Twitter users were exposed to Russian
Trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election,
it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291
Inside the Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission to North Korea and What Went Wrong | Amanpour and Company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79djGjRKsg4
““The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.””
If this is all he said, then this is a political cancellation that goes against everything many on the right used to say they stand for. Kimmel’s statement is not totally accurate, but is hardly beyond the pale.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/media/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-trump-fcc-brendan-carr
The U.S. deadly strike on the potential drug boat appears to have been illegal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKF1e58j5XQ
“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/doj-quietly-deletes-study-charlie-005626328.html
Trump is purging the CIA of people who contributed to reports with evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump is punishing people for doing an appropriate job while also weakening U.S. intelligence on Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNveMlSeA7o
“When you look at the sectors of the economy that were supposed to benefit from Trump’s economic policies, however, the news gets significantly worse. The manufacturing sector lost 12,000 jobs during the month of August and 78,000 over the past year, according to the data released Thursday by the Department of Labor.
Over the past three months, during which Trump’s tariffs have been in full swing, the manufacturing sector is down 31,000 jobs. Other blue-collar sectors like construction and mining are down over that same period.
All three sectors figure to have been negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs, which (contrary to the administration’s claims) have hit American businesses with huge new taxes on parts, raw materials, equipment, and more. Like with any big tax increase, one way businesses can offset those costs is by hiring fewer people or postponing new investments and expansion. That’s exactly what manufacturing firms say they have been doing.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/05/maga-economics-is-losing/
“By the sources’ telling, SEAL Team Six had sailed to the North Korean coast in two mini-submarines under a communications blackout, which meant that they lacked the livestreamed intelligence they were used to having. Based on aerial surveillance beforehand, the military planners had concluded that this part of North Korea was supposed to be free of boat traffic at that hour of the night in the winter.
Some of the SEALs swam to shore while others stayed in the submarines. When a leader of the shore team saw flashlights coming from a boat and a man jumping into the water, he opened fire without any discussion. Then the shore team swam to dispose of the bodies—trying to sink them so that they couldn’t be found—and then they sent a distress signal to evacuate. There were no weapons or uniforms on the boat.
…
The mission was carried out during the first Trump administration. The U.S. government wanted insight into North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his high-stakes nuclear negotiations with President Donald Trump.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-north-korean-fishermen-and-mutilated-their-bodies-to-hide-a-failed-mission/