Before I get too into the swing of things, for culinary preparations have already started, let me wish you all a merry Christmas and a peaceful, restful holiday!

bari weiss doesn't view news as relaying facts about the world to an audience, she views it as generating debates about the facts

My final newsletter for 2025 is here. Take The Vienna Briefing's holiday quiz and see if you can get all 12 questions right. Both this edition and the quiz are free so share widely. open.substack.com/pub/viennabr...

I don't know if Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation, but for those who have made it their lives to support it, it certainly resembles a cult.

Related: "Once Upon A Christmas" is one of the great Christmas albums -- point blank, period, end of story.

I'm on deadline right now but I still have time to share the Christmas songs I've added to my rotation this year. First, "Because It's Christmas (For All the Children)" by Barry Manilow.

The Vienna Briefing will be coming at you one day early tomorrow ahead of the Christmas holidays, so sign up now to avoid missing out of my end-of-year newsletter.

🇷🇴👨‍💻🇵🇱 Romanian social media operatives quietly boosted Karol Nawrocki’s Polish presidential run on Facebook. 🕵️🇷🇺 The same network works for other Law and Justice figures and is linked to Romania's pro-Kremlin, far-right leader George Simion. 🔗FULL STORY: vsquare.org/how-romanian...

I find the framing of this article weird and kinda lazy. Can places that have been around for longer than I've lived in Vienna really be said to be 'shaking up' the culinary scene?

SCOOP-1: The @nytimes.com has confirmed the following previously unreported donations/pledges to the WH ballroom: ▶️Miriam Adelson’s foundation: $25m ▶️Lockheed Martin: $10m ▶️Palantir: $10m ▶️Ripple: $5m ▶️Parsons: $2.5m ▶️Roblox CEO: $2.5 Here's a gift link. There's more in the story 🧵…

SCOOP-2: Isabela Herrera donated $2.5m to MAGA Inc. on 12/31/2024. At the time, her father, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, was being prosecuted for bribing Puerto Rico's governor. In July, Trump's DOJ authorized a misdemeanor plea deal, overruling career prosecutors who had pushed a harsher sentence

SCOOP-3: In January, Oak View Group, then controlled by Tim Leiweke, donated $250k to Trump's inaugural. In July, Leiweke was charged in a bid-rigging case. He was expected to testify in the DOJ's case against LiveNation. But this month, before either case went to trial, he was pardoned by Trump

"The Year of the Gay Sex Zeitgeist" via @davidsess.bsky.social

Congratulations to Batya for winning the 2026 Donald Trump-Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

NEW from me: CBS News staffers are warning that Bari Weiss is sparking a "revolt" at 60 Minutes and the network after she spiked a story on CECOT. "Holy fucking dumpster fire," one staffer told me. Also, I have more details on today's 'angry" editorial call www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Bonehead move.

I completely missed the news of Norman Podhoretz's death.

There’s something about Christmas that means that, even though the shops are closed for, in the Austrian case, two and a half days, I prepare for it as if I were preparing for nuclear war.

The Vienna Briefing will be coming at you one day early tomorrow ahead of the Christmas holidays, so sign up now to avoid missing out of my end-of-year newsletter.

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"Forewarned, you might have thought was forearmed, but perhaps Rogers’ right foot is becoming like Arjen Robben’s left: just because you know he’s going to whip the ball into the top corner doesn’t mean you can stop him."

People saying Weiss and the new owners want CBS “destroyed” go too far: if you buy a news channel you want people to watch it. But getting some of the old guard to resign in protest – so you can replace them with your own people – may be a feature, not a bug.

Ein wichtiges Zeichen! Die Vereinigung der Parlamentsredakteurinnen und -redakteure bestätigt mir, was der "hetzerische & faktenwidrige" (@doew.at) Onlinesender AUF1 verbreitet: Ein Antrag auf Mitgliedschaft von Philipp Huemer & Stefan Magnet von AUF1 wurde mit Verweis auf die Vereinsstatuten...

abgelehnt, nämlich dem Zweck "unabhängigen & unbeeinflussten Journalismus aus dem & über das Parlament" zu fördern. AUF1 findet das natürlich skandalös. Ich finde das selbstverständlich Seit vergangenem Sommer schon evaluiert auch...

das Kuratorium für Presseausweise die Mitgliedschaft von AUF1-Huemer bsky.app/profile/mcgi...

Bari Weiss is doing the job she was appointed to do.

A group of Reform Party members have begun a "Reformers for Remigration" group. It is praised by the extreme Steve Laws, who got 0.4% in Dover Laws was - madly - on the Reform approved candidate list, until June 2023 when Richard Tice threw him out for advocating deporting Rishi Sunak + myself

[subs pls check]

I’m sorry, I was told Bari Weiss is a fearless truth-teller?

Is Bari Weiss holding a gun to her dog's head off camera?

Full-time: #AVFC 2-1 Manchester United One home defeat in 2025. Long-range strikes. Big saves. Regular rallies. Third in the league. Three points off the top. Some ghosts against United banished. Morgan Rogers.

Rogers is a phenomenon. #AVFC have basically done very little going forward before or during Rogers' goal. But here he is again, picking up the ball on the left and whipping, again, another effort towards the far corner. 2-1 Villa. Emery rips off his coat in celebration.

I think I need to come to terms with the fact that Vienna will never not be overcast ever again and that this damp greyness is my new lived reality.

"Has feminism failed women brought to you by bank of america" is my MKULTRA sleeper agent activation phrase

Bari Weiss is the first person to ask "What if Fox News, but boring?"

lol

I look forward to when @concordia.at posts this event every year (though if I could get an invite next year, that would be grand. 😇)

This is something I like to do every year. Let me begin with this interview with the Austrian documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, published in the French Jewish magazine K. La Revue at the beginning of the year. (1/5)

From a focus group of Gen Z Republicans. (www.city-journal.org/article/manh...) Tell me again about how Zohran Mamdani is the big threat to Jewish thriving in the US today.

From a focus group of Gen Z Republicans. (www.city-journal.org/article/manh...)

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I always enjoy getting press releases from the Greens complaining about budget cuts after they were the ones who signed on to a programme of spending increases and tax cuts that drove up the deficit and drained the state coffers.

Vienna's annual Pride Parade will take place on June 13, 2026. Due to citywide budget cuts, the City of Vienna has reduced public support for Pride next year, and as such, festivities such as the Community Fest and Pride Village will also be scaled back.

In this week's edition of The Vienna Briefing, I look ahead to and make a prediction about Austria's political 2026. open.substack.com/pub/viennabr...

Serbia's president Aleksandar Vučić has threatened revenge against the country's student-led civic protest movement after Jared Kushner pulled out of a deal to build a Trump Tower in Belgrade on the site of the General Staff Building. My news update @haaretzcom.bsky.social.

CNN has a show with a similar line. That the problem with this country is we just aren’t talking to each other. It’s the kind of diagnosis that a toddler would land on.

Auf dem Hauptplatz in Braunau hat ein 31-jähriger Urlauber aus der Schweiz für einen Polizeieinsatz gesorgt. Der Mann soll nationalsozialistische Parolen gerufen, den Hitlergruß gezeigt und auch antisemitische Aussagen gemacht haben. ooe.orf.at/stories/3334...

Matthew Goodwin objects to prosecuting this: ‘I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter. Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.’