RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/drop-dead-city-documentary-new-york-city-fiscal-crisis

This year marks a half-century since the acute phase of New York City’s fiscal crisis. It began in February 1975, when a default by a state-backed housing authority alarmed the bankers who regularly lent to the city, prompting closer scrutiny of New York’s own finances. In April, the banks stopped extending credit to cover the city’s chronic deficits. That led to a state takeover of city finances in June and, finally, a federal guarantee of the state rescue plan in December.

The crisis still sparks both ideological and practical debate: Was it the banks’ fault—for lending too much, or for cutting off credit? Or was it the city’s fault, for borrowing beyond its means? Did the reforms that followed usher in an era of harmful austerity or broad-based prosperity? Was the outcome a bailout, a punishment, or both?

This year marks a half-century since the acute phase of New York City’s fiscal crisis. It began in February 1975, when a default by a state-backed housing authority alarmed the bankers who regularly lent to the city, prompting closer scrutiny of New York’s own finances. In April, the banks stopped extending credit to cover the city’s chronic deficits. That led to a state takeover of city finances in June and, finally, a federal guarantee of the state rescue plan in December.

The crisis still sparks both ideological and practical debate: Was it the banks’ fault—for lending too much, or for cutting off credit? Or was it the city’s fault, for borrowing beyond its means? Did the reforms that followed usher in an era of harmful austerity or broad-based prosperity? Was the outcome a bailout, a punishment, or both

We’ve both recently attended a screening of a new documentary on the crisis, Drop Dead City. The title comes from the famous Daily News headline paraphrasing President Gerald Ford’s initial refusal to rescue New York in October 1975: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” As with many famous quotes, Ford never used those exact words—though what he did say was close enough. Directed by Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost, Drop Dead City blends newly unearthed archival footage with clips and fresh interviews featuring key figures from 1975, including union leaders and financiers.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/rosie_o_donnell_as_a_sexually_active_lesbian_nun_hollywood_keeps_hitting_new_lows.html

Next time you’re wondering how low Hollywood can go, whatever you come up with, go lower than that. While Hollywood once sought to catch the largest audience possible, nowadays it seeks to find niche audiences—and, once it finds them, it must constantly figure out how to hold that niche attention.

The creative minds behind HBO Max’s “And Just Like That,” the spin-off to the 1990s hit “Sex and the City,” may have come up with the niche-est idea yet: They decide to have leftist lesbian, and one-time actress and show host, Rosie O’Donnell, play a virginal nun who has an affair with Miranda, the character played by the lesbian socialist Cynthia Nixon, who lives in a world filled with “trans” children.

For those not au courant on pop culture, some background might help. Sex and the City debuted in 1998 and ran for six seasons. Based on Candace Bushnell’s eponymous book, it purported to tell the story of four female friends in New York City navigating their way through the dating scene. Week after week, the characters hopped in and out of bed with frenzied ferocity, something that made sense once you learned that the show’s creator and chief writers were gay men (Darren Star and Michael Patrick King). The characters were female; the approach to sex was not.

After the show ended, Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda, announced that she was a lesbian. Despite her estimated $20 million net worth, she’s also a socialist, carrying on the grand tradition of the nomenklatura getting very, very rich while the people upon whom they visit their ideology suffer. Nixon recently made headlines by boasting that just about every young person in her world is a member of the so-called “transgender” cohort. The odds of that being nature, not nurture, are zero:

And then there’s Rosie O’Donnell. She started life as a stand-up comedian, acted in some movies, and then had a talk show. Along the way, to no one’s surprise, she came out of the closet as a lesbian and, naturally, as a Democrat party activist. Over the years, she has adopted multiple children with various partners. Most recently, she made headlines when she fled to Ireland to escape the horrors of Donald Trump’s second term.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/snow-white-is-dead/

There’s bad news in fairyland. Snow White isn’t white. The Queen is the fairest of all. And after eating from the woke apple, Snow White is so dead that all the mocap CG dwarves in the Mouse House can’t begin to raise her. Neither can Prince Charming who now identifies as a woman.

After last weekend’s poor opening, there was a scramble in Hollywood to deny that wokeness was the cause, followed by prognostications that this weekend would fix all. The Friday numbers are in and while the weekend numbers aren’t set yet and certainly not final, they’re catastrophically bad

A Working Man, the latest Jason Statham male-skewed action movie, walloped Snow White Badly. To make matters worse, Friday numbers actually have Snow White behind ‘The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1’.

While Snow White may not actually end up in third place, it was struggling to keep pace even with The Woman in the Yard horror movie.

Making matters even more depressing, Captain Un-America, Brave New World, fell 91% to a miserable 7th place.

Again those numbers may not end up holding, but at the moment Disney’s spring is off to a really bad start.

It’s not just about the numbers, which are bad enough, but the per theater average which registers enthusiasm.

Disney’s Snow White had the highest number of theaters, monopolizing 4,200 theaters, but its per-theater average was below $1,000, putting in 5th place for public enthusiasm. And Captain Un-America in 9th place with a $306 per theater average and still short of $200 million.

Disney’s IP spam is no longer looking like a solid bet for theater owners and that’s really bad news for the mouse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/house-of-david-replaces-jews-with-muslims/

The story of the rise of David, a shepherd boy, into a hero, a king and one of the great religious lyricists, is a phenomenal drama that Hollywood has fumbled again and again. For different reasons.

1951’s ‘David and Bathsheba’ was the typical clunky overdramatized spectacle of the era and the less said about Richard Gere as David the better. NBC’s Kings was an interesting, but baffling TV series, setting the struggle between Saul and David in a modern-day New York City ruled by kings.

Amazon Prime ‘House of David’ is more repugnant, but that has more to do with our own age than anything else. Our age is woke, Amazon Prime’s originals are particularly woke and ‘House of David’ starts out by jettisoning the Jewishness of the story in the most woke way possible by replacing both Saul and David with Arab Muslim actors.

David, traditionally seen as a redhead, becomes the latest ‘ginger’ to bite the dust and be replaced by what woke Hollywood decided is a more diverse appearance.

I recently wrote about a William Tell adaptation bringing in Muslim characters to show how diverse 14th-century Switzerland was. Biblical Israel was also apparently a very diverse place. But in typical woke DEI fashion, that diversity only goes one way, sidelining people who ‘look’ the wrong way and replacing them with more ‘diverse’ Arab Muslims who look the right way.

https://www.thefp.com/p/house-of-david-christians-jews

House of David is a biblical drama from brothers Andy and Jon Erwin, a duo of Christian filmmakers from Alabama. It tells the biblical story of King David, author of the book of Psalms, who was a shepherd, musician, and poet before he came to the throne. And it’s freaking phenomenal.

There’s much for Jewish audiences to love. Set in Israel in 1000 BC, the series brings the biblical story to life with compelling characters of the sort the Bible excels at; the show is respectful of the source material while also taking some subtle liberties (Agag, king of the Amalekites—the prototype in Jewish tradition for hatred of the Jewish people—is portrayed as a cannibal, for example). It has a healthy number of Israeli actors thrown into the mix, and the on-screen text identifying settings in the show appears first in Hebrew before in English. And when David sings, he sings in Hebrew, in verses culled from Song of Songs or the Psalms.

For those of us steeped in biblical texts, it’s a joy to see our scriptural world brought to life so artfully.

But the show’s most important contribution is in exposing liberal American Jews to the way so many of our Christian neighbors see us—not as an oppressed victim caste who killed Christ and should be loathed for it, but rather as an ancient, noble tribe of warrior poets and kings favored by the blessing of the God they serve.

American Jews often accept a widespread misconception that the attachment so many evangelical Christians have to Israel, and to their American Jewish neighbors, is the result of a longing for the Second Coming. In this reading, the Jews are mere instruments whose return to the land of Israel will result in their mass conversion (or mass expiration), and bring about the messianic redemption of the world. Many Jews feel offended by this apocalyptic narrative, but it’s far removed from how Jews are understood by American Christians, one of the first populations in history to organize their religion around the protection of Jews, rather than around our persecution. Though the Ku Klux Klan demonized both Catholics and Jews, there have been times in American history when it was harder to be a Catholic, a Mormon, or a Quaker than it was to be a Jew.