Comey Trashes President Trump in 5-Minute Rant, Says Taylor Swift Helps Him Cope with Trump

Former FBI Director James Comey once again trashed President Trump in a 5-minute rant posted to his Substack.

Comey said pop singer Taylor Swift, who appeals to tweens and juvenile women in their 30s, helps him deal with President Trump.

This is the same guy who once ran the most premiere law enforcement agency in the US.

Full Comey transcript:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to my Substack. Last week’s cold turns out to have been COVID—quite a flashback. Donald Trump is still President and still humiliating America on a national stage, standing next to Vladimir Putin. It’s like a dream—a bad dream you can’t wake up from. But I don’t want to talk about that bad dream this week. I want to talk about a truly inspirational public figure named Taylor Swift.

Of course, I watched her podcast interview with the Kelsey Brothers. Of course, I watched the whole thing, although on YouTube, Patrice and I got kicked off for the last 15 minutes and finished it on her phone. But I watched it. You see, Taylor Swift and I go way back. I went to my first concert of hers 15 years ago. I’ve been to a second, and I have helped financially support the attendance of a lot of family members at others. I’m in a family Swiftie group chat. I know all her music, and I listen to it on my headphones when I cut the grass. So yes, I have a favorite of hers—although honestly, for me, it’s a tie between All Too Well, 10 Minute Version and Exile featuring Bon Iver.

Taylor Swift has grown up with my family and provided us a soundtrack, really, as we’ve grown ourselves and learned and adapted and dealt with adversity and celebration. She had songs for all of it. I suspect that’s something that millions of Americans have also experienced in their families. I think that’s because Taylor Swift produces great art, but also because she models something.

At every stage of her career, she’s shown a certain way of being that resonated with my kids and also felt right to me as a parent. She’s still doing that as a grown-up. Like a lot of you, I struggle with how to stand up to bullies without letting their meanness infect me and change me. You may have seen that the governor of California has been generating a lot of attention lately by posting on social media in a satirical way where he mocks Donald Trump and his all-caps megalomania and his absurdity. I find it very funny—hilarious even sometimes. But I’ve got to be honest, it also leaves me with a strange feeling at times, because I don’t want us to become like Trump and his followers. There are far more decent, honest, kind people in America than there are mean jerks.

Now, don’t get me wrong—we have our jerks, millions of them, you may have noticed. In particular, there’s a stunning coarseness and ugliness in the Republican Party today. It’s upsetting, but it’s also a minority of America. On the whole, we aren’t like that, and we don’t like that. I think that’s a big part of the reason so few Americans support Donald Trump when they have to see him up close, and why Republicans are so worried about what’s coming for them next year.

And to be clear, I am not an advocate for weakness. Of course, we need to stand up to jerks and defend what matters. But I think we have to try to do that without becoming like them, which is what makes me think about Taylor Swift. She’s made clear that she sees Donald Trump for what he is. And last year, she urged Americans not to make the serious mistake of electing him. Of course, we’re now living with the consequences of that mistake.

But while our elderly, makeup-covered President is posting about whether Taylor Swift is still hot and declaring that he can’t stand her, what’s she doing? Living her best life, producing great music, and—as she urged all of us to do during the podcast—not giving the jerks power over her mind.

She said something about dealing with internet trolls that stuck with me: Think of your energy as if it’s expensive. Think of it as a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it. I really enjoy reading Arthur Brooks, who writes columns about happiness in The Atlantic. I don’t know if he’s a Swiftie, but last week he wrote about research on the way that being rude or snarky actually hurts the rude person.

As he wrote: When you become less polite, the alteration in your conduct can make you less happy, more depressed, and angrier about life. I know you get that even without the research. Just watch Fox News or hang around on X, and you’ll see what he means. We can’t stop people from being jerks. What we can do is stop it from hurting us, from changing us.

At my second Taylor Swift concert in Hartford, Connecticut, 14 years ago this summer, she sang a song about this topic, asking: Why you gotta be so mean? And she spoke directly to the nasty people: I bet you got pushed around. Somebody made you cold. But the cycle ends right now, because you can’t lead me down that road.

You’ll be glad I didn’t sing that. That’s right—because down that road is unhappiness. Nobody should have that power over us.

Thank you, Taylor Swift. Keep the faith.

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LA’s secret celebrity tunnel was just a rumor. Until workers found it.

In its near-century of existence, Chateau Marmont — a faux French castle perched on a hill near the entrance of West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip — has kept countless secrets for the artists, actors and other icons that have stalked its halls. It has also held a few mysteries of its own, including a long-rumored secret tunnel. 

Famously, the bohemian playground-slash-hotel doesn’t allow photos in its public spaces so that guests can unwind away from the outside world’s prying eyes. (Not that it’s ever stopped paparazzi from lurking on the sidewalk right outside.) As such, Chateau Marmont’s reputation as a comforting haven has made it a Hollywood favorite, with film director Billy Wilder once describing its appeal this way: “I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.”

Every once in a while, though, fizzy tales do manage to trickle outside Chateau’s secretive walls, such as when Lindsay Lohan reportedly racked up a staggering $46,000 tab from her extensive stay there, or when Doors rocker Jim Morrison scaled the rooftops of the hotel’s bungalows late at night throughout the 1960s. 

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Jimmy Kimmel Blames ‘Repulsive’ Liberal Activists For Trump’s Return to Power 

Late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel has blamed “repulsive” liberal activists for enabling President Donald Trump’s return to power.

During an appearance on the Sarah Silverman Podcast on Thursday, Kimmel said without a shred of irony that “loud voices” had scared people away from the Democratic Party.

“I’s not the party. It’s not the majority,” Kimmel insisted. “ It’s the loud voices that scare people from saying what they believe and make you think twice about a joke or whatever.”

“You know, a lot of their points are valid, but a lot of them are also just repulsive, in that they repel people,” he continued.

“They go like, ‘Oh, you’re no fun. I don’t want to be around you.’ And I think that if you had to boil it down to one thing, that’s kind of what it is.”

Jimmy Kimmel without a shred of irony, claims it’s the loud repulsive voices on the left that are driving people away from the Democratic Party pic.twitter.com/e3BMYQVdC7

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) August 9, 2025

It is not the first time that Kimmel, who is himself a committed left-wing activist, has accused humorless liberals of costing the Democrats the 2024 election.

“I think a lot of the outrage is completely manufactured, and it’s like, a lot of these people who are angry aren’t really angry,” Kimmel said back in April.

”I think these liberals who’ve done such a good job of viciously attacking comedians are a big part of the reason why Trump is the president right now.”

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The Sad, Pathetic End of Howard Stern

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

A big, explosive controversy that’s impossible to ignore! A jaw-dropping confession that outraged his corporate bosses! Or maybe he’d finally suffer the consequences of speaking “truth to power” — and pay the ultimate price for refusing to back down!

That’s how “The Howard Stern Show” was supposed to end.

This November marks the 100th anniversary of TS Eliot’s haunting poem, “The Hollow Men.” It’s a telling coincidence, for it foretold not just the fate of the world, but of a certain shock-jock: “This is the way the [Howard Stern Show] ends; Now with a bang but a whimper.”

But calling it a whimper would be an overstatement. It was more of a “tree falling in a forest when no one’s around” situation, because Howard Stern’s audience abandoned him years ago: “Stern’s program has fluctuated from 20 million daily to just 125,000 of late.”

That’s an astonishing fall from grace. There are, quite literally, thousands of nameless, faceless YouTubers, TikTokers, X posters, and “influencers” with far larger audiences than the one-time “King of All Media.” During his heyday, 20 million Americans famously listened to Howard Stern to “see what he says next”.

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Grok generates fake Taylor Swift nudes without being asked

Backlash over offensive Grok outputs continues, just a couple weeks after the social platform X scrambled to stop its AI tool from dubbing itself “MechaHitler” during an antisemitic meltdown.

Now, The Verge has found that the newest video feature of Elon Musk’s AI model will generate nude images of Taylor Swift without being prompted.

Shortly after the “Grok Imagine” was released Tuesday, The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed was shocked to discover the video generator spat out topless images of Swift “the very first time” she used it.

According to Weatherbed, Grok produced more than 30 images of Swift in revealing clothing when asked to depict “Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys.” Using the Grok Imagine feature, users can choose from four presets—”custom,” “normal,” “fun,” and “spicy”—to convert such images into video clips in 15 seconds.

At that point, all Weatherbed did was select “spicy” and confirm her birth date for Grok to generate a clip of Swift tearing “off her clothes” and “dancing in a thong” in front of “a largely indifferent AI-generated crowd.”

The outputs that Weatherbed managed to generate without jailbreaking or any intentional prompting is particularly concerning, given the major controversy after sexualized deepfakes of Swift flooded X last year. Back then, X reminded users that “posting Non-Consensual Nudity (NCN) images is strictly prohibited on X and we have a zero-tolerance policy towards such content.”

“Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” the X Safety account posted. “We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed. We’re committed to maintaining a safe and respectful environment for all users.”

But X Safety may need to ramp up monitoring to clean up Grok outputs following the Verge’s reporting. Grok cited The Verge’s reporting while confirming that its own seemingly flawed design can trigger partially nude outputs of celebrities.

xAI can likely fix the issue through more fine-tuning. Weatherbed noted that asking Grok directly to generate non-consensual nude Swift images did not generate offensive outputs, but instead blank boxes. Grok also seemingly won’t accept prompts to alter Swift’s appearance in other ways, like making her appear to be overweight. And when Weatherbed tested using “spicy” mode on images of children, for example, Grok refused to depict kids inappropriately.

However, it may not be easy to get Grok to distinguish between adult user requests for “spicy” content versus illegal content. The “spicy” mode didn’t always generate Swift deepfakes, Weatherbed confirmed, but in “several” instances it “defaulted” to “ripping off” Swift’s clothes.

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Senators Blackburn, Warnock team up on bill to give entertainment industry some tax relief

U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Raphael Warnock are usually on opposite sides of the aisle, but they are teaming up on a bill that would give the entertainment industry some tax relief.

The Creative Relief and Expensing for Audio and Television Enterprises Act, dubbed CREATE, would extend a $150,000 tax credit for production expenses incurred by entertainers, singers and songwriters through 2030. The credit is set to expire at the end of the year with an extension from Congress.

“Thousands of singers and songwriters call Tennessee home, and they should be able to write off recording production expenses that are critical to their work,” said Blackburn a Tennessee Republican. “The CREATE Act would support creators and keep America’s music industry strong by ensuring they can still count on this tax relief.”

Georgia has become a hub for filming television series and movies. More than 550 productions were made in Georgia in the past three years, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development. During fiscal year 2025, which ended June 30, film and television productions spent $2.3 billion.

“From productions like The Color Purple, to The Hunger Games, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Georgia has become a national leader in the arts and entertainment industry,” said Warnock, a Georgia Democrat. “Our continued investments in incentivizing domestic production for film, television, and music benefit our culture and our economy.”

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The Left’s Overreaction Addiction

Sunny Hostin claims Stephen Colbert’s show cancellation is an instance of the “dismantling of our democracy.” An X commentator wrote, “Democracy is when Colbert is on television.” Sunny must have fallen off Venus and is unused to Earth gravity—or she’s just a host on The View. She epitomizes the overreaction that has overtaken rational thought and replaced political discourse in America.

As background for those who have not fallen with Sunny, Stephen Colbert is a political shouter who has been a fixture on late night TV for decades, starting out on The Daily Show, then his own satire show The Colbert Report, and now The Late Show. Democracy in America predates Colbert by some 200 years. Things came to an unfunny conclusion of sorts in July when parent company CBS announced Colbert would go off the air next year for financial reasons. That last thing is what set off the Venusians.

Colbert was a Trump critic. That is to say whatever Trump did or said on any particular day, later that night Colbert would mock, ridicule, and otherwise shout hatred toward, in front of a woke audience pre-triggered to bray for more blood. It wasn’t funny and didn’t even try to be funny; it was just the Two Minutes of Hate each night. As Orwell wrote, this forced expression of negativity was a key mechanism for maintaining social control, reinforcing the Party’s ideology and preventing independent thought. It is a baseline for processing information. So it was with Colbert—plus a musical guest.

Nobody among his audience, or for that matter apparently anybody who voted Democrat, thought the reason for Colbert’s demise was “financial reasons.” Every X post, every statement issued by a hip Democratic senator said the same thing: Colbert was canceled because he criticized Trump, often characterized as “the regime” or something Hitler-esque. We have gotten to the point, said one Facebook meme, “where those who make fun of the Dear Leader are disappeared.” They all seemed to believe it, and “I Stand with Colbert” signs appeared at the usual protests. On air Colbert told CBS to “F**k off,” while his mentor Jon Stewart composed an entire musical number consisting of the words “F**k off” to CBS. Biting satire.

It was several late nights of this until little bits of “truthiness” (a Colbert term) came out. The Late Show’s ad revenue had plummeted after the pandemic. Gutfeld! beat The Late Show in the ratings for 21 straight months. Rational sources explained the Colbert show loses $40 million for CBS every year. Of the network late night shows, Colbert’s had the smallest footprint on social media. The format of late-night television, wrote the Guardian, “was a living relic of a different time, when a youth-skewing audience would reliably pop on linear television at 11:30 pm. The field has been contracting for years, with programs hosted by Samantha Bee, James Corden, and Taylor Tomlinson ending without replacement.” Ad revenue for the genre as a whole was down 50 percent from Trump 1.0 and the Covid years. 

“It’s long been assumed,” continued the Guardian, “the hosts currently in these once-coveted chairs would be the last, their programs expiring when they decided to step down.” And if Paramount axed Colbert because the White House didn’t like it, why did they give $1.5 billion to South Park, which literally the next day attacked the president harder than Colbert ever has (it portrayed Trump begging for sex from Satan)? That night Colbert riffed off South Park to make a micropenis “joke” about Trump.

Colbert actually was canceled for financial reasons. None of that mattered, because the Orange Man had scuttled another piece of democracy and we were one step closer to fascism. Everybody said so. If Trump supported it, the left must oppose it. If the left opposed it, it must be part of America’s creep toward fascism. Nothing is just a problem, a disagreement, a fact anymore. Everything is life or death, at least until the next meme spikes the bloodstream of the mainstream media and social media to call the left again to arms. It should be seen as the kind of biting satire The Daily Show used to be capable of before it started to view itself as the last gasping voice of freedom (plus commercials.)

As with Colbert, the overreaction compulsion finds leftists getting tangled up supporting the most bizarre things.

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Woke Gestapo Target ‘Registered Republican’ Sydney Sweeney for Thoughtcrime

The Woke Gestapo in the far-left entertainment media are targeting Sydney Sweeney for a career blacklisting.

So far, Sweeney’s committed two cardinal sins. The first is daring to be sexy and appealing in an American Eagle blue jeans ad. You see, Sweeney had the temerity to be normal-beautiful, not fat/trans/tattooed “beautiful.”

After five years of Normal People being grossed out by an “inclusive standard of beauty” and “body positivity” — which is nothing more than an affirmative action program that allows ugly people to appear in Swimsuit Editions and underwear ads — Sweeney dared to be her sensual, appealing, all-American self in a campaign that even included her own Ford Mustang.

The campaign was a massive success (duh), the blue jeans sold out (duh), and then the left did what it always does in the face of Normal succeeding: they freaked out and screamed “Nazi”. And no, it wasn’t just nobodies on TikTok melting down. Disney staffers at ESPN declared the ad “fascist.” MSNBC said it was “fair” to attack the ad as “Nazi propaganda.”

American Eagle, to its great credit, appears to understand that social media is not real life. Obviously, the ad is a rousing success. Obviously, Normal People appreciate this return to Normalcy. Obviously, though this ad, American Eagle has earned the goodwill of a vast majority of the people who long ago tired of staring at fat women in bikinis… So American Eagle has already told the Woke Gestapo to suck it.

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Skydance Says It Had No Role in Cancelling Stephen Colbert, Blowing Hole in Democrat Conspiracy Theory

Skydance Media is now saying it played no role whatever in the cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Th let has made a conspiracy theory out of the cancellation of extreme left-wing comedian Stephen Colbert by CBS, with the wild claim that the network cancelled the show so that President Donald Trump’s administration would approve the merger between CBS owner Paramount and Skydance Media. But Skydance is now saying that it had no hand in cancelling Colbert’s show and his cancellation has nothing to do with the merger plans.

Skydance General Counsel Stephanie Kyoko McKinnon responded to a letter by leftist Democrat U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Wyden to say that, while her company knew of the cancellation, they were only told after CBS had made its decision. And Skydance was not part of the deliberation process.

The Democrat Senators had sent a letter to Skydance asking if the company was involved in cancelling Colbert.

“Were you or other Skydance executives involved in discussions about canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert? If so, please provide information regarding the timing, nature of, and participants in these discussions, including whether the pending transaction with Paramount was discussed,” the letter asked.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), among other elected Democrats fire off social media screeds and even appeared on cable news channels and asserted that the lawsuit settlement between President Donald Trump and CBS parent company Paramount “sounds a lot like bribery.”

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Leftists Believe Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Jeans Ad Is A “Nazi Dogwhistle”

TDS riddled leftist lunatics are angry about an advert for jeans featuring actress Sydney Sweeney, charging that it contains “Nazi dog whistles.”

As we highlighted last week, the ad for American Eagle jeans features Sweeney modelling the denim products while looking sexy (yes, she is sexy and you’re allowed to say that).

More importantly, this ad and other recent ads, including one for Nike are indicative of the major cultural shift that has occurred.

These companies finally realised that putting obese “diverse” individuals into specially made versions of their products isn’t the best way to get people to buy them.

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