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The Ludicrous Reason Hollywood Barred ‘Reagan’ From a Best Picture Nomination.

We cant allow just anyone to come in here and win an award if we don't like them.

We're not going to put them on the ballot, just like democrats kept Trump off some elections ballots.

Difference was Trump filed a lawsuit to be a candidate, and Pres Reagan is dead.

Ed Feulner | January 26, 2025
| A poster advertising a movie about former President Ronald Regan sits on the sidewalk near the Fiserv Forum as the city prepares for the Republican National Convention on July 12, 2024, in Milwaukee. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Ed Feulner @EdFeulner

Edwin J. Feulner’s 36 years of leadership as president of The Heritage Foundation transformed the think tank from a small policy shop into America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas. Read his research.
No conservative could honestly have expected the 2024 biopic “Reagan” to be a viable contender for Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars. Ultraliberal Hollywood could never honor a film that dares to depict our 40th president as a hero.

But the fact that it’s officially ineligible for nomination because it doesn’t meet new diversity requirements? What an indictment of the industry that, ironically, catapulted Ronald Reagan onto the public stage years before he ran for office. This is political correctness on steroids.

To be eligible now for a Best Picture nomination, a film must meet at least two of four “inclusion standards.”

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One ensures that “at least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors … is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.” The list ranges from “African American” and “Hispanic or Latina/e/o/x” to “Pacific Islander” and “Southeast Asian.”

Race isn’t the only accepted category. You can also appease the Academy by ensuring that your cast, crew, or those who distribute or market the film are women, LGBTQ, or “people with cognitive or physical disabilities.”
The list goes on, but the intent is obvious: to check every box possible on the far-left’s approved checklist.

Imagine the chilling effect this will have on Hollywood. Some fine films will surely be rejected in the proposal phase because they won’t easily conform to these “standards.”

Consider some past Best Picture winners that would be disqualified today. 1970’s “Patton,” for one. Sure, it would be historically inaccurate to make the players in this World War II film a multigender, rainbow-colored group, but good luck capturing the top prize at the Oscars otherwise.

Or how about 1972’s “The Godfather”? Just look at the cast. So male, so white, so straight. Mind you, that’s the logical way to go if you’re making a film about the Italian mafia in the middle of the 20th century, but it also means your chances for a Best Picture statuette will be sleeping with the fishes.

Or take 1984’s “Amadeus.” It took some great writing, acting, and directing to mount this dramatic tale of the rivalry between Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri. It also took a very homogeneous cast for a story set in 18th-century Europe. But that alone would eliminate it as a possible Best Picture today.

Other past winners in this category: “Annie Hall.” “Rocky.” “Kramer vs. Kramer.” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The list, like the Oscar broadcast itself, goes on and on.
It’s true that “Reagan” isn’t alone in being excluded this year. The “standards” knocked more than 100 films out of contention.

But no one expected “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” “Madame Web,” and “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” to snag a Best Picture nod. “Reagan,” however unpopular it may be politically, at least deserved to be nominated. The fact that Hollywood is excluding from Best Picture films that don’t genuflect at the altar of diversity is a sad commentary.

“There’s a loss of freedom of expression,” Dennis Quaid, the actor who portrays Reagan, said of the new rules. “Back in the ’70s, [Hollywood] may have been skewed to the left, but everybody was trying to be politically incorrect back then. It was an exciting time. We had a real dialogue with people instead of trying to fit into a mold.”

Making a high-quality film isn’t the primary goal anymore. Feeling good about it is. You may lose money hand over fist at the box office, but at least you can hold your head high at the fashionable parties and assure your snobby friends that you employed the right number of people from all the approved categories.

There’s nothing wrong with having a diverse cast or crew. Film producers should be free to hire the most qualified person for each role or job. Nothing could be more American than following a merit-based system that doesn’t exclude anyone with the proper qualifications from consideration.

But those qualifications should be confined to one’s talent or ability to do a particular job—not membership in a special protected class. To mandate otherwise means instituting a decidedly un-American practice: quotas. Yet it’s just as wrong to include people based on their gender, race, or other factors as it is to exclude them.

In 1983, Reagan signed the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. into law. In 2025, Hollywood is discriminating against a Reagan biopic because it is insufficiently diverse.

It’s the kind of farce that would make a good movie. Too bad it couldn’t win Best Picture.

Originally published by The Washington Times

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2. How Trump’s Youthful Cabinet Is Shaping the Future of America’s Politics
3. Heritage Foundation Chief Takes Long View in Combating America’s ‘Social and Cultural Deterioration’

 

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Unhinged Washington Protesters Show Why Democrats Are Losing Ground

Elise McCue | Virginia Allen | August 23, 2025
| Elise McCue @EliseMcCue

Elise McCue is a digital associate for The Daily Signal.
Virginia Allen @Virginia_Allen5

Virginia Allen is a senior news producer for The Daily Signal and host of "The Daily Signal Podcast" and "Problematic Women." virginia.allen@dailysignal.com.
While Washington, D.C., residents are enjoying feeling safe on the streets of their community once again, angry middle-class suburban protesters want the National Guard to leave the crime-ridden city. When Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the National Guard troops at Union Station this week, protesters used their First Amendment rights to express their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.

There were over 180 homicides in Washington in 2024. If it were a state, it would have the highest homicide rate in the nation. But Washington’s anti-law enforcement protesters appear more consumed by a political agenda than the safety of those who live and work in the city.
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On this week’s edition of “Problematic Women,” we discuss the radical Left’s bizarre campaign against the Trump administration’s efforts to improve safety in the city.

Also on today’s show, President Donald Trump is working to secure a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, which might explain why Trump made fewer public appearances this week following his meeting with European leaders on Monday.
And Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese joins the show to give us an inside look into Air Force One and the press briefing room of the White House.

Plus, California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom is flooding social media with memes. His office claims it’s part of a campaign to show the Trump administration how silly its own meme game is, but no one is buying it. Newsom is playing the meme game because it works.

And the Travis Kelce photoshoot is … well, we’ll let you decide.

All this and more on this week’s show!

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Dishonorable Conduct Award Winner—Judge John McConnell

Thomas Jipping | Hans von Spakovsky | November 17, 2025
|
(Cemile Bingol via Getty Images)
Thomas Jipping @TomJipping

Thomas Jipping is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Hans von Spakovsky @HvonSpakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He is the host of Heritage’s "Case in Point" podcast.
We awarded our October Dishonorable Conduct Award to California Judge Edward Chen in the first of our new series on judges who ignore or twist the law and the Constitution to get the policy outcome they desire. Our November award, unfortunately, goes to Rhode Island Judge John McConnell for his decision on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which was a blatant and obvious violation of the Constitution.

More than 150 years ago, the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “there is hardly a political question in the United States which does not, sooner or later, turn into a judicial one.” He had no idea just how right he was. Rogue judges like Chen and McConnell continue trying to run the executive branch by interfering in President Donald Trump’s policy decisions and constitutional and statutory authority.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and shares its administration with state agencies. Last year, the program spent $100 billion to help nearly 42 million Americans. Congress provides funding in the annual appropriations bill that covers the Department of Agriculture.
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This year, two weeks before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, House Republicans introduced HR 5371, which would continue the same level of department funding through Jan. 30, 2026, while the annual appropriations bills were being finalized.

The October Dishonorable Conduct Award: Judges Who Threw Out the Statute With the Bathwater

The House passed HR 5371 on Sept. 19. In the Senate, however, a simple majority can pass a bill, but only if a 60-vote supermajority allows a final vote. A group of 44 Democrats and one Republican blocked a final vote on the continuing resolution, allowing funding for the Agriculture Department and the food assistance program to run out. The same 45 senators would keep the government closed by blocking a vote on the funding bill 13 more times.

The statute authorizing SNAP addresses possible appropriation shortfalls in two ways. First, it provides for a contingency fund “for use only in such amounts and at such times as may become necessary to carry out program operations.” This fund is typically used in cases of natural disasters and, when the fiscal year ended, contained enough to cover about two weeks of SNAP benefits.
Second, the statute limits benefits to the amount appropriated each year and requires that state agencies reduce SNAP benefits “to the extent necessary to comply with” that limitation.

On Oct. 30, a coalition of municipalities and nonprofit organizations filed a federal lawsuit in Rhode Island, asking McConnell to order the Trump administration to pay full SNAP benefits during November despite the lack of an appropriation from Congress.

While the department authorized use of SNAP contingency funds to pay at least partial benefits for November, McConnell went even further. He not only ordered the administration to pay full SNAP benefits but required covering the shortfall by transferring billions of dollars from a permanent appropriation already designated by Congress for other funding, such as the National School Lunch Program.

The Supreme Court has recognized many times that executive branch agencies have the authority and discretion to allot funds appropriated by Congress among competing priorities. McConnell’s decision in this case, however, went beyond hijacking the Department of Agriculture’s discretion.
Federal law provides that SNAP benefits may not exceed the amount appropriated for a particular fiscal year and that shortfalls must be handled by reducing benefits. McConnell apparently did not like those statutory directives, and so he came up with his own. He thought Congress should have created the option of raiding other federal programs and redirecting funds. Congress did not do that, so McConnell attempted to do it for them.

In other words, he used a single order to invade the authority of not one, but two other branches of government. He turned himself into both the president and a one-man Congress. It is only Congress—not federal judges like McConnell—that has the authority under the Spending Clause, Section 8 of Article I, to appropriate revenue and to decide how that revenue will be spent in government programs that Congress, not judges, creates, like the SNAP program.

The Department of Justice asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit to stay this lawless order and, because McConnell had given the administration mere hours to comply, also asked the Supreme Court to step in. As everyone knows by now, the Senate passed HR 5371 on Nov. 10, and House members were returning to Washington to do the same. This would obviously restore SNAP funding and make any debate about stopgap or contingency spending moot. That’s at least how it should have been handled.
The 1st Circuit, however, not only waited until after the Senate vote to rule on McConnell’s order but, inexplicably, refused to set it aside, even though the court conceded that there was a “serious argument” that McConnell did not have the authority to second-guess the department’s decision on allocating funds.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court stepped in so that this political conflict could be resolved politically. On Nov. 11, the court stayed McConnell’s order until midnight on Nov. 13. That gave the House time to pass HR 5371 and for Trump to sign it into law.

Far too many political questions become judicial ones. The public understands too little about how the judicial branch is supposed to operate, and judges who step outside their constitutional lane and interfere with decisions the Constitution has assigned to the political branches only make it worse.

McConnell should have dismissed this case the moment it was filed, especially when refusing to do so meant he was displacing both the executive and legislative branches in this conflict.

For his obvious violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law, Judge McConnell has earned our November Dishonorable Conduct Award.
Judge John McConnell (U.S. District Court of Rhode Island)

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