Tony Wong

I watch TV for free: Contributing Columnist and Former TV Watcher for The Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper

[Toronto Life @torontolife]

Former CityNews reporter Tina Yazdani has launched a $650,000 lawsuit against Rogers
https://t.co/CeFup6kzSb

[SuperDaffyd @SuperDaffyd]

@TVNewsNow @brithume Hume talking out of his ass again.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

60 Minutes made $206 million in advertising in 2024. It was not a struggling relic. It was the most profitable serious journalism operation in American broadcasting.

Then David Ellison bought Bari Weiss's website for $150 million and handed her CBS News. She spiked a story on El Salvador's CECOT prison. She let Benjamin Netanyahu pick his own interviewer instead of sitting across from Leslie Stahl. She fired the executive producer, two on-air correspondents, and the behind-the-camera producers who actually ran the place.

The replacement EP has never worked a day in broadcast news. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire endorsed the hire.

This is not mismanagement. Ratings are down across CBS News. The journalism is getting worse. The audience is leaving. But Ellison's other corporate deals - the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition - got a presidential thumbs-up while Netflix got frozen out. Trump said out loud he would remember which companies played ball.

That's the transaction. CBS News bleeds so that Paramount profits. Sharyn Alfonsi doesn't have a job so that David Ellison gets his merger.

The people who watched 60 Minutes for fifty years to find out what was actually happening in the world... they just lost something that cannot be rebuilt under corporate ownership. Not in this environment. Not while the president is keeping score.

[Richard Southern @RichardCityNews]

WATCH - WATCH - “I’m the only Premier in history that refuses to use the Premiers plane” said Premier Ford in the legislature on February 27, 2019. “I prefer to drive around and talk to the people about things that matter”

[The Day Warrior @thedaywar90]

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 Former U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton:

"It is shocking that Trump said no one informed him that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. I find it unbelievable that one of the fundamental pillars of geopolitical strategy in the Middle East was ignored. That was the first thing we assumed Iran would do. It is their main tool of global leverage. We are now seeing the consequences of a foreign policy driven by impulse rather than strategy.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

It’s still so strange to me that both russia and the USA are openly campaigning for Orbán 🤯

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

2026: F15 shot down in Iran with pilot missing. Trump says absolutely nothing.

1995: When Capt. Scott O’Grady’s F-16 was shot down over Bosnian Serb territory, President Clinton IMMEDIATELY held Rose Garden press event:

[Data Of Statistics @DataOfStats]

Top 25 Most Liked Countries (2026) 🌎

1. 🇨🇦 Canada: 74% (positive global view)
2. 🇯🇵 Japan: 72%
3. 🇩🇪 Germany: 70%
4. 🇦🇺 Australia: 69%
5. 🇨🇭 Switzerland: 68%
6. 🇳🇿 New Zealand: 67%
7. 🇸🇪 Sweden: 66%
8. 🇳🇴 Norway: 66%
9. 🇳🇱 Netherlands: 65%
10. 🇫🇷 France: 64%
11. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 63%
12. 🇮🇹 Italy: 62%
13. 🇪🇸 Spain: 61%
14. 🇸🇬 Singapore: 60%
15. 🇰🇷 South Korea: 59%
16. 🇧🇷 Brazil: 58%
17. 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates: 57%
18. 🇫🇮 Finland: 56% (Estimated based on placement)
19. 🇩🇰 Denmark: 55% (Estimated based on placement)
20. 🇮🇪 Ireland: 54% (Estimated based on placement)
21. 🇦🇹 Austria: 53% (Estimated based on placement)
22. 🇵🇹 Portugal: 52% (Estimated based on placement)
23. 🇧🇪 Belgium: 51% (Estimated based on placement)
24. 🇮🇸 Iceland: 50% (Estimated based on placement)
25. 🇱🇺 Luxembourg: 49% (Estimated based on placement)

📊 Source: NT — The World's Favorite Nations: Positive Perceptions Ranked.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Breaking: Russia is secretly providing satellite imagery and sharing drone technology to help Iran target U.S. forces in the region https://t.co/49KKQexC4c

[Pew Research Center @pewresearch]

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country.

The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: https://t.co/qBtj1ycDkP

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

DURBIN: How does taking a father from a child dying of cancer qualify as a violent crime?

NOEM: I don't know what you're speaking of

DURBIN: You know exactly what I'm speaking of. Ruben Torres two weeks ago buried his daughter Ofelia. When he was arrested at Home Depot, he said to your agents, 'Please let me go home. My daughter is dying of cancer.' They said 'No.' They arrested him and deported him for two weeks. Finally he returned for a court hearing. His daughter lived to see that hearing where the court said he was treated unfairly by your agency, and she died 3 days later. I was at her memorial service. Was he a violent criminal?

NOEM: Sir, we enforce the law

DURBIN: What law?

[Molly Thomas @MollyThomasTV]

So true 🤣

[David Stockman @DA_Stockman]

Gotcha.

[Dan Pfeiffer @danpfeiffer]

Barack Obama reached a deal that prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Trump ripped up that deal.

Now we are at war with Iran to prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon.

[Andrew—#IAmTheResistance @AmoneyResists]

This is the greatest thing I’ve seen the internet produce in so long. Absolutely brilliant and hilarious.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 MAJOR BOMBSHELL: Ted Lieu says the full, unreleased Epstein files show Donald Trump R*PING children.

That’s what’s being hidden.
That’s why the files stay sealed.
That’s why there are no arrests.

Release everything. Let the truth come out. Or RESIGN!

[Ann @AEMorton07]

@ReallyAmerican1