2:40: “You can’t win against fanatics, at least in the short term. And what we’re realizing about the woke bandwagon…these people are radicals, extremists, fanatics. They have an extraordinary set of claims, and have managed to push them, bulldoze them right into the center of our lives. And there have been no effective barricades, and six or seven years ago I don’t think people realized the scope of what was coming.

“[An oft-repeated quote is that] one day the barbarians will be at the gate, and we’ll be debating which gender pronouns to call them. It is deranging.

“People are being demanded to say things they know are not true. If you assault the things that we know to be true — like the fact that there are boys and girls, that you’re not assigned a gender at birth but you’re subjected to a sort of lottery system…there are boys and girls, of course, but if you persuade people that this is not true, that there are in fact dozens of gender permutations…you can do an awful lot afterwards. Because you’ve made people doubt things they knew to be true.

“The next stage of this is a war on the fundamentals of everything in our society. A war on our history on your past, on our past, on our foundations…and a war on white people.

“The last phrase is something people jump at, but there’s no other way to describe it now. Lots of different bigotries exist in the world but the only one that is completely tolerated, indeed encouraged in our 21st Century market, is hatred of and diminishment of people for being white.

“We wouldn’t tolerate this with any other skin color. Only with white people is this now permissible. Because white people are inheritors of the west, and must therefore pay for the sins of the west.” — Douglas Murray, author of “The War on the West.”

‘This is the first time the president attended this dinner in 6 years … We had a horrible plague, followed by 2 years of COVID’ — Pres. Biden begins his speech by firing shots at Donald Trump 👀 #WHCD pic.twitter.com/Sr8CpSghoY

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) May 1, 2022

We all clean house every so often, but (and I know this is familiar to every older person in this racket) it’s very emotionally difficult to toss or put aside articles from 25 and 30 years ago. You think back to the blood, sweat and tears that went into each one, and the feeling swells. A little eye moisture. We all have to refresh and let the past go, but it hurts so much.

So the Being Mortal production shutdown happened a week and a half ago and Bill Murray (moody rambunctious boomer offender) and Keke Palmer (“Millennial Diva”) are still trying to work things out? They can’t come to a rapprochement after ten effing days? Obviously one of them has an attitude and an arched back. Thoughts?

HE to Robespierre Woke Comintern: Please consider HE’s solemn, bended-knee plea that the international woke terror brigade not cancel or otherwise severely punish Mickey Rourke for having earlier this month praised director Roman Polanski from the set of The Palace, which may (rushed as it sounds) debut at the ‘22 Venice Film Festival.

Last night I watched two and a half episodes of The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather. The early reviews had been mostly negative, so I was semi-intrigued by the fact that it seemed fairly competent. Michael Tolkin‘s script struck me as above average. Alas, I began to lose interest during episode #2, and then I started to impatiently fast forward. I was hoping that the Marlon Brando videotape audition sequence would turn up in episode #3, but nope.

And yet — AND YET! — I quickly fell for Matthew Goode‘s portrayal of Robert “The Kid Stays in the Picture” Evans. Having been a moderately close journalist “friend” of Evans in ’95 and ’96 and having spent a lot of time at his French Chateau home on Woodland, I knew the guy pretty well and right away I was nodding appreciatively at Goode’s performance. He nails the murmuring voice, the improvisational smoothitude, the wit, the street cunning.

The last time I was genuinely turned on by a famous-person-impersonation performance was Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris (’11).

Why did I lose interest early on? Simple — seething guineas aren’t very interesting.

The New York Italian-American community was pissed and paranoid about Mario Puzo‘s best-selling 1969 novel being made into what they presumed would be a run-of-the-mill gangster film, and for whatever reason nobody (not Evans, not Francis Coppola, not producer Albert Ruddy) was able to sell them on the possibility that The Godfather might become the greatest Italian-American epic ever made, and that it would romanticize Italian-American culture more than anything — a movie that would be much more about family and culture than crime.

The history is the history, but listening over and over to Giovanni Ribisi‘s Joe Colombo, Frank John Hughes‘ Frank Sinatra, Danny Nucci‘s Mario Biaggi and Anthony Skordi‘s Carlo Gambino bitch and moan about “what a disastuh this fuckin’ film will be”….Jesus, guys, give it a rest.

Having hated Dan Fogler for years, I was a wee bit surprised that I liked his performance as Francis Coppola. I was also more or less okay with Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller‘s performance as Ruddy.

Thousands of copies of Roget’s Thesaurus fell off a truck yesterday on a New York-area boulevard. Random witnesses were taken aback, stunned, startled, aghast, stupefied, gobsmacked, thrown for a loop, bewildered, shocked, rattled, dazed, surprised, dumbfounded, blown away, flabbergasted, confounded, astonished, etc.