Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Sean Hannity is already one of Fox News’ loudest voices, and has put his Trumpist stamp on the network’s broadcasts. Now, his influence has spread to the once-independent digital news operation, staffers say, and it’s largely thanks to a little-known former Hannity producer named Porter Berry.
Over the past several years, the conservative tenor of Fox News’ opinion coverage has seeped more and more into the company’s popular digital brands. Few at the network deserve more credit for this transformation than Berry, who moved from television to the digital side in 2018 after stints with Hannity, midday talk show The Five, and Bill O’Reilly, and who staff say has helped mold the websites more in the image of the network’s right-wing opinion programming.
According to multiple staffers, Berry’s editorial vision and management style has resulted in the departure of key digital news employees like Jason Ehrich, the former executive vice president of audience development and strategic partnerships, and Greg Wilson, the former managing editor of the Fox News website, among others.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Scouted/Zappos
I love everything about being in the outdoors, but few things can truly crush my will to stick it out outside like wet, aching feet.. There’s something so immediate about the discomfort and once my feet get wet, I’ve found there’s no escape. A combination of overheated, soaked, aching feet have ended more days spent hiking, fishing, gardening, and walking in the woods than I’d like to admit. I’ve tried waterproof hiking boots, but on rainy days, they just won’t cut it. Thankfully, I recently found a rain boot that protects my feet from the elements better than any other I’ve tried.
Muck boots are made with the durability and waterproofing required of actual farmers and outdoorsmen, which means they can handle pretty much any terrain. I first noticed a friend of mine wearing them, and while he looked a little silly, he swore by them. He was right—Muck boots come in several different styles and lengths (you can buy a snakebite proof pair if that’s a persistent problem you face in your life—God help you), but I think the best option is the ankle-height version. The neoprene bootie goes up to your ankle and the sole and shoe are composed of the most resilient rubber I’ve come across in a piece of footwear. The waterproofing is absolute, something relatively rare in actually affordable outdoor footwear, and better yet, it lasts over time. I’ve been wearing a pair I bought in 2016 and still haven’t noticed cracked rubber or a loose seam. They’re breathable in a way that you would think would retard the waterproofing, but, through the use of Neoprene in the upper of the boot, they have never failed to prevent all kinds of wet conditions from reaching my socks. The toe and heel of the boot are reinforced three and four times respectively, and somehow, someway, they are actually easy to take off, too. The heel was designed for you to kick off one boot after the other while wobbling on either leg right after you get home.
In my experience, other boots that advertise themselves as waterproof are always just hollow echoes of the real thing. When you wear these boots you feel exempt from the problems that field workers and forest wanderers have suffered from for ages. In fact, I’d go as far as saying thatpulling on these boots early in the morning before a long day outside feels much like what I imagine having a superpower feels like: I feel invulnerable.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Scouted/Vendors
New Kids on the Block helps you navigate all the new and exciting launches from our favorite brands, all in one place.
Indoor Party Puzzle: Brooklinen, the maker of our favorite sheets, teamed up with London Artist Tess Smith-Roberts for the perfect lazy day (AKA every day, these days) activity: a puzzle. It’s 500 pieces and worth having framed once you complete it.
Palm Reach Collection:Gantri makes some of our favorite lamps and they recently launched a new collection designed specifically for working from home. Choose between a table, floor, or wall lamp, each designed to create a more serene environment for getting stuff done.
The gods of comedy have heard your prayers—and just might make them come true. “Veep,” the greatest political comedy of all time, could return, somehow, some way, in some form, if only for a short while.
“We’ve certainly discussed it,” star Julia-Louis Dreyfus tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Everybody’s sort of gone off now and everybody’s doing other projects and so on. But I don’t rule it out entirely, doing some sort of ‘Veep’-related thing. I mean, there’s an area that we could jump back into. I think [showrunner] Dave [Mandel] and I have talked about it.”
Mandel adds, “We left just enough sort of like there’s some time jumps in there that you could definitely—”
The Republican National Committee paid more than $300,000 in October to a company owned by Donald Trump Jr. to purchase copies of his new, self-published book.
Autographed copies of the book, Liberal Privilege, were given out to donors who contributed between $50 and $100 to the RNC, according to a source familiar with the arrangement. The source said the promotion raised substantial sums for Republicans in the final stretch of the election.
The RNC’s payment—for $303,892.47 on October 28—went not to Trump Jr. directly but to a company called Pursuit Venture LLC. Corporate records in Delaware, where the company was formed in late 2018, list the president’s eldest son as its principal. The RNC’s payment was itemized as “donor mementos.”
Ludicrous conspiracy theories are swirling across Europe one week after staunch Hungarian anti-LGBTQ lawmaker Jozef Szajer was caught—quite literally—with his pants down at a lockdown-breaking sex party in Brussels.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s far-right Fidesz faces an uncertain future after the Brussels orgy organizer, David Manzheley, claimed that as many as nine party faithful have attended his sex parties over the years. Orban holds considerable control over the press’ ability to report the details of the sex party, where 25 men were in attendance before cops broke it up. But Hungarians are reading about it elsewhere and asking questions about how Fidesz members, who purport to be anti-LGBTQ and have severely hampered the rights of the LGBTQ community in Hungary, could be such hypocrites.
A spokesman for the Orban government told Hungarian news website Hirado that the Szajer affair was part of a larger conspiracy against the Hungarian government. Orban’s administration claims there is a secret-service operation to extract revenge against Hungary because of its threats to veto certain European Commission initiatives.
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
It’s that thing most people have experienced at least once or twice or 47 times in our lives, where you have a blissful night out that’s so euphoric you keep throwing back another drink, then “just one more,” and next thing you know it’s morning and you sit awake in a jolt, absolutely confused.
I love Eggnog. It is hands down my favorite holiday drink, and easily one of my top five favorite cocktails of all time.
Over the past decade and a half, I’ve become something of an Eggnog evangelist, treating every holiday season as an opportunity to remind the world to drink this delicious libation.
But unlike many self-professed cocktail snobs, I don’t just celebrate the good stuff that we serve at my Portland, Oregon, bars, Clyde Common and Pépé le Moko. No, I like it all; from cheap grocery store Eggnog to my yearly visit to Starbucks for their delicious Eggnog Latte—I’m a voracious Eggnog monster.
She has rarely put a foot wrong in the course of her 68-year reign, so it is entirely unsurprising that Queen Elizabeth did the right thing this week, and announced that she was cancelling the traditional Royal Christmas.
For the first time in 37 years, Elizabeth and Prince Philip will not be taking the train to their country home, Sandringham, will not be joined by close family, and will not throw a big party at Buckingham Palace for the extended clan of royals in the last days of Advent.
Instead, they will sit out Christmas at Windsor Castle, alone with their servants. All family interaction, as it has been for the past nine months, will be carried out on phone and internet lines instead.
With Republicans slowly starting to come to terms with President Trump’s defeat this year, there’s been talk about how “history will judge” his administration.
Sometimes that refrain is used to reassure that there will be an accounting for the awful things that have happened on his watch, while others are using it to argue that we should just let the past be the past and move forward; let’s forget about investigations, truth commissions, or prosecutions and leave the judgements to subsequent generations of historians. All of those invocations of history are implicitly celebrating a return to “normalcy” under a President Biden.
But historians know better. We know that history is not some abstract collection of truths, but is subject to the deliberate manipulations of people aided by the vagaries of time. If history is going to judge Donald Trump, we’re going to have to do a lot of work in the present, despite some recent claims to the contrary. History itself isn’t an actor; people determine how things are remembered, and historians can only render a reliable judgement if we judge him and his administration now.
0
