They’re coming home to Israel and headed to who knows where
The remaining Hamas hostages in Gaza are free (Associated Press):
Hamas released all 20 remaining living hostages held in Gaza on Monday, while Israel began releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of a ceasefire pausing two years of war that pummeled the territory, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, and had left scores of captives in militant hands.
Cheering crowds greeted buses of prisoners in the West Bank, while families and friends of the hostages gathered in a square in Tel Aviv, Israel, cried out with joy and relief as news arrived that the captives were free.
The hostages, all men, have arrived back in Israel, where they will reunite with family and undergo medical checks. The bodies of the remaining 28 dead hostages are also expected to be handed over as part of the deal, although the exact timing remained unclear.
For the first time in over two years, there are no living hostages in the hands of Hamas. pic.twitter.com/4YSFYyNkRY
Emotional footage was shared by Israeli broadcasters to an estimated 65,000 people gathered in front of large screens on “hostages square” in Tel Aviv and to millions more watching the coverage at home.
[…]
The family of Matan Angrest, 22, an Israel Defense Force soldier captured when his tank was attacked by Hamas near the Gaza perimeter fence, who have been critical of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the continuation of the war, praised Donald Trump.
They said: “We can breathe again. Our Matan is home. Our beloved boy has been returned to us after two complex years, and we are so proud of him … A huge, historic, eternal thank you to the president of the United States and his team who worked with dedication and persistence for the rescue and return of our loved ones.
“The joy in our family is mixed with sadness for those murdered and for those who were not returned alive.”
Donald Trump as I type this is speaking to Israel’s Parliament. But the less said about that the better. We’ll never hear the end of it. He’s saying plenty, and is running behind schedule.
Knesset lawmakers Ofer Cassif and Ayman Odeh were removed from the chamber after holding up protest signs a few minutes into President Donald Trump’s address. “That was very efficient,” Trump said, as the two men were escorted out. Ahead of Trump’s speech, Cassif said in a statement that it would be “undoubtedly filled with self-aggrandizement and lies” and that the U.S. president “has not an ounce of care for either the Israeli or Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile, Sky News reports that an Israeli military drone has dropped leaflets in Ramallah in the West Bank warning Palestinians that they are under surveillance. Anyone celebrating the Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners will be arrested and face harsh punishment.
An Israeli military drone has dropped leaflets outside the military detention facility Ofer Prison in the West Bank, warning Palestinians ahead of the release of almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners. Sky’s Adam Parson reports. #Israel #Palestine #SkyNews
Sky News also reports that the Israeli government has also banned the families of those prisoners from being interviewed.
Israel has banned Palestinians from celebrating the release of Palestinian prisoners [hostages] & banned their families from giving interviews
Contrast that with the celebrations around the release of Israeli hostages & the many interviews being broadcast around the world. pic.twitter.com/oUPNeJoDXK
Aljazeera reports that some released Palestinians will be forced into exile:
Families of many of the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel under an exchange deal say their long-awaited freedom is bittersweet after they learned their loved ones would be deported to third countries.
At least 154 Palestinian prisoners being freed on Monday as part of the swap for Israeli captives held in Gaza will be forced into exile by Israel, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Media Office said.
It’s not clear what any of it means for Gazans. The ceasefire means there is a power vacuum in Gaza already being filled by violence (CNN):
Social media channels affiliated with Hamas reported clashes in the Sabra area of Gaza City between a prominent family and security forces during which Muhammad Imad Aql, the son of a senior Hamas military commander, was killed.
Hamas forces surrounded the Dughmush family’s neighborhood on Friday night. Sources told CNN that several members of the family had been killed, and a large number of masked, armed men had been deployed around the Jordanian hospital in Gaza City.
CNN was told Sunday that clashes continued in the area.
In southern Gaza, a group opposed to Hamas known as the Popular Forces has refused to lay down its arms.
I’m just going to leave this gift link for you if you have the stomach. An excerpt.
The Christian mayor:
“Do not miss the weight of this moment,” he wrote to his 1,700 followers, in the first days after Kirk’s death. “We need men and women of faith, courage, and action who will take the fight to the enemy — lawfully, openly, fearlessly.
“We can’t bring out the stocks. We can’t tar and feather them. But we can do the next best thing. Expose them. Call their bosses. Make them famous. Get them fired. And make sure to take screenshots.
“This is war. And this is how we fight back.”
[…]
“There must be economic consequences for this cancerous vitriol,” Arnold wrote to his followers on Facebook, a few days after Kirk’s death. “Share, share, share.”
“All of the sudden I am really enjoying cancel culture.”
“Shame is not revenge. Shunning is not cruelty. These are the thorns God places on the path to drive men back to the way of truth.”
The bisexual firefighter:
“I will not be guilted into feeling sorry,” Meyers wrote back, but by then her post was beginning to generate a steady number of replies, and even if she didn’t regret her message, she didn’t want to deal with any more blowback or harassment. Forty-seven minutes after posting, she went back onto Facebook and cleared it off her page.
“Fine. I deleted it,” she told a friend. “It’s done.”
[…]
But by the time Meyers got back to the firehouse, friends were sending her screenshots of her post as it spread all over the internet. It had been shared by a local hunting guide, reposted by an old Tea Party group and amplified by a right-wing comedian with hundreds of thousands of followers. When Meyers sat down for her lunch break, she searched for her name online and saw thousands of posts totaling millions of views.
“I know where she works,” one poster wrote, sharing a photo of Meyers and a link to the Canyon Lake Fire Department.
“Revoke her license,” another person responded. “She cannot be trusted to have life in her hands.”
“Getting ‘fired’ won’t even be enough punishment.”
“Hopefully God takes away someone she adores. Hopefully he makes her choke.”
“Find out what she drives and her home address.”
[…]
She left the firehouse to drive home, but one of her colleagues said she could stay at his house. He was a conservative who thought Meyers’s post was horrific, but he hid her car behind his house and offered her a bedroom for the next few days. He insisted on following her everywhere for protection, including back to the chief’s office for another disciplinary meeting, where she was fired for “unacceptable conduct.”
She packed her belongings at the firehouse and noticed a message on her phone. It was from a number in New York, and a voice she didn’t recognize. “What a shitty little green house and a red Jeep,” the caller said, and she wondered if he was watching her.
She packed a suitcase of clothes, loaded her dog into the car and stopped at her mother’s house. Her mother mistook her distress for regret, but Meyers said she wasn’t sorry for what she’d written. If anything, she was angrier, but she also needed to find someplace that felt safe in a country increasingly on edge. She didn’t know where she was going yet — just that she needed to leave.
“Everything is collapsing,” she said.
The mayor:
He saw a story online about the firefighter in Comal County who’d just been terminated and shared it on his page. “I am thinking all of these people that have rendered themselves unemployable like this should probably go ahead and self deport,” he wrote. “We don’t want them here anyway.”
They want them (us) to leave the country. If I were younger I would certainly be thinking about it. I lived overseas for a good part of my life and could easily do it again. But I figure I should stay and do what I can since I don’t have all that much time left compared to the youngs.
And for anyone who thinks this is all a sad consequence of liberal cancel culture coming back to bite us in the ass, think again. This piece by historian Nicole Hemmer is worth reading to remind us of who really invented this nonsense. (The right has never really believed in free speech so this is nothing new.)
“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.
She ties it to the conservative movement starting back in the bad old days of the HUAC and McCarthy. But that mayor who went on the jihad against anyone who said something rude about Charlie Kirk is a very Big Christian and I think we can trace our “censorious right” all the way back to the puritans in New England. For some reason these people have a very hard time remembering what Jesus was actually all about.
I don’t think we know how many lives have been disrupted or destroyed by this self-righteous bullshit over Kirk but I suspect the number will surprise us. It was mass hysteria and it exposed a whole lot of people as exactly the archetypes we all learned about in The Crucible. in high school.
Americans in 2025 believed they had the right to speak their opinion, whatever it was. But that’s never been true and more often than not it’s conservative mob mentality that’s brought the hammer down. Today they have the full backing of the federal government.
On the morning of Oct. 3, 2025, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam walked out of Huntingdon State Correctional Institution, the Pennsylvania prison that had confined him for more than four decades. The 64-year-old had spent nearly his entire adult life behind bars for a murder he did not commit.
His conviction had been vacated weeks earlier after a court found that prosecutors had concealed evidence that would have dismantled the state’s case. The Centre County district attorney formally withdrew all charges a day before his expected release. But Subu never made it home.
As he stood on the threshold of freedom, officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were waiting. Acting on a decades-old deportation order, they detained him and transferred him to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an ICE detention facility in central Pennsylvania. His family, who had prepared to welcome him home, instead learned that Subu would remain in custody — not as a prisoner of the state, but as a detainee of the federal government.
“To our disappointment, Subu was transferred to ICE custody and is currently being held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center,” the family said in a statement posted on a website dedicated to building support for Vedam’s case. “This immigration issue is a remnant of Subu’s original case. Since that wrongful conviction has now been officially vacated and all charges against Subu have been dismissed, we have asked the immigration court to reopen the case and consider the fact that Subu has been exonerated. Our family continues to wait — and long for the day we can finally be together with him again.”
Subu’s legal odyssey began in 1982, when he was arrested for the 1980 murder of his friend, 19-year-old Thomas Kinser, in Centre County. Prosecutors argued that Subu had shot Kinser with a .25-caliber pistol — a weapon that was never recovered — and based their case largely on circumstantial evidence. He was initially arrested in 1982 and convicted the following year, being finally sentenced to life without parole.
For the next 42 years, Subu maintained his innocence. His appeals were repeatedly denied, and his case languished until the Pennsylvania Innocence Project joined his defense team. In 2022, the project’s attorneys discovered previously undisclosed evidence in the files of the Centre County District Attorney’s Office — including an FBI report and handwritten notes suggesting that the bullet wound in Kinser’s skull was too small to have been caused by a .25-caliber bullet. That revelation undermined the entire prosecution theory.
In August 2025, Judge Jonathan Grine of the Centre County Court of Common Pleas ruled that the concealed evidence represented a constitutional violation of due process. “Had that evidence been available at the time,” Grine wrote, “there would have been a reasonable probability that the jury’s judgment would have been affected.” One month later, District Attorney Bernie Cantorna dismissed the murder charge, saying a retrial would be both impossible and unjust.
By then, Subu had become the longest-serving exoneree in Pennsylvania history — and one of the longest-serving in the United States. Freedom, however, came with a new peril. ICE cited a “legacy deportation order” dating back to the 1980s, tied not only to the murder charge but also to an earlier drug conviction from Subu’s youth.
Before his arrest for murder, he had pleaded guilty at age 19 to intent to distribute LSD — a charge his family describes as a youthful mistake. Although that conviction carried its own immigration consequences, Subu, who was born in India but arrived in the United States when he was 9 months old, was never deported because he was serving a life sentence. Now, after his exoneration, ICE has revived the decades-old order.
What the hell have we become? My God.
This man is 64 years old and has not been to India since he was 9. He was wrongfully imprisoned for 42 years and now they want to send him back because of a minor infraction when he was 19 — before we imprisoned him for a crime he didn’t commit.
Joe Rogan has been saying that people who have a heart will not stand for all the cruelty but as the saying goes, that’s the point. Maybe someone should tell him about this one.
Update — Get a load of this. Kilmar Obrego Garcia is still in limbo and appearing in court everyone other day while the government insists that he has to be deported. The latest:
For weeks, Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who is married to a U.S. citizen, has made clear that he would not challenge his deportation if he were sent to Costa Rica, which has promised him legal residency and guaranteed that he would not be sent back to El Salvador.
But the Trump administration has refused to deport him to Costa Rica, and in an earlier hearing this week, Judge Xinis pressed the administration to consider the option or clarify why it was unacceptable.
She did not get the clarity she was seeking. Mr. Schultz not only could not explain why the administration had refused to consider Costa Rica but also said he had been unaware that Costa Rica had provided such assurances to Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Bullshit. They just want to send him someplace where he will be a total fish out of water with no way to make a living and where he might be tortured or sent back to El Salvador, which is what they really want.
Government officials had presented Eswatini, a tiny nation in southern Africa, as the leading option for Mr. Abrego Garcia at a hearing on Monday. But Mr. Schultz said the State Department requested that Eswatini take Mr. Abrego Garcia on Wednesday, two days later. Mr. Schultz learned a few hours before the hearing on Friday that Eswatini had refused, he said.
There was also discussion of Ghana at the hearing, but Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s foreign minister, said on social media on Friday that the country was “not accepting Abrego Garcia,” a position that he said the Ghanian government “directly and unambiguously conveyed to U.S. authorities.” Mr. Abrego Garcia objected to being deported to Uganda, expressing fear for his safety in the country, an argument that Trump officials have yet to challenge.
Why not North Korea? I’m sure Kim would be happy to do Trump a solid.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The White House border czar, Tom Homan, was recorded on an FBI surveillance tape in September 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash. Did he keep that money or give it back?
VANCE: George, you’ve covered this story ad nauseam. Tom Homan did not take a bribe. It’s a ridiculous smear. And the reason you guys are going after Tom Homan so aggressively is because he’s doing the job of enforcing the law. I think it’s really preposterous. I know Tom. I think that he’s a good man. He gets death threats, he gets attacked, he gets constantly threatened by people because he has the audacity to want to enforce the country’s immigration laws.
I think that it would be a much more interesting story about why is it that Tom Homan, who is simply enforcing America’s immigration laws, is constantly harassed and threatened to the point of death threats. That’s a much more interesting question that I think journalists should focus on. We can agree to disagree on that question.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But, wait, you said he didn’t take a bribe. But I’m not sure you answered the question. Are you saying that he did not accept the $50,000?
VANCE: George, this story has been covered ad nauseam. He did not take a bribe. Did he accept $50,000? I am sure that in the course of Tom Homan’s life he has been paid more than $50,000 for services. The question is, did he do something illegal, and there is absolutely no evidence that Tom Homan has ever taken a bribe or done anything illegal.
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: No, I’m asking — I’m asking a different question. I’m asking you did he accept —
VANCE: Which is why he’s working in the administration.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m asking you, did he accept the $50,000 that was caught on the surveillance tape? Did he accept that $50,000 or not?
VANCE: George, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did he accept $50,000 for what?
STEPHANOPOULOS: He was recorded on an audiotape in September of 2024, an FBI surveillance tape, accepting $50,000 in cash. Did he keep that money?
VANCE: Accepting $50,000 for doing what, George? I am not even sure I understand the question. Is it illegal to take a payment for doing services? The FBI has not prosecuted him. I have never seen any evidence that he’s engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Nobody has accused Tom of violating a crime, even the far-left media like yourself. So I’m actually not sure what the precise question is. Did he accept $50,000? Honestly, George, I don’t know the answer to that question. What I do know is that he didn’t violate a crime.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you don’t — what was caught on the tape, you’re saying right now, you don’t know whether or not he kept that money?
VANCE: I don’t know what tape you’re referring to, George. I saw media reports that Tom Homan accepted a bribe. There is no evidence of that. And here’s, George, why fewer and fewer people watch your program and why you’re losing credibility, because you’re talking for now five minutes with the vice president of the United States about this story regarding Tom Homan, a story that I have read about, but I don’t even know the video that you’re talking about.
Meanwhile, low-income women can’t get food because the Democrats and Chuck Schumer have shut down the government. Right now, we’re trying to figure out how to pay our troops because Chuck Schumer has shut down the government. You’re focused on a bogus story, you’re insinuating criminal wrongdoing against a guy who has done nothing wrong, instead of focusing on the fact that our country is struggling because our government shut down.
Let’s talk about the real issues, George. I think the American people would benefit much more from that than from you going down some weird left-wing rabbit hole where the facts clearly show that Tom Homan didn’t engage in any criminal wrongdoing.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It’s not a weird left-wing rabbit hole. I didn’t insinuate anything. I asked you whether Tom Homan accepted $50,000 as was heard on an audiotape recorded by the FBI in September 2024, and you did not answer the question.
Thank you for your time this morning.
VANCE: No, George, I said that I don’t —
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: — is up next.
We’ll be right back.
I suppose the MAGA horde thinks this is very clever. Blatantly avoiding the question with bullshit like this is a snotty bitch mainstay and the GOP is full of them. It’s the Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson act. But I have to give it to JD. There’s nobody more obnoxious than he is. I’m sure he got a big “attaboy” from the White House.
The big question is whether ABC will force Stephanopoulos to apologize. Anyone want to make a bet?
Costumed brigades of protesters were out in force again Friday night at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland, and at about 7 p.m., they rolled out a red carpet for an actual wedding.
The bride, resplendent in a unicorn outfit, and the groom, dressed as Kenny from South Park, tied the knot in front of a crowd of about 30 onlookers, some decked out in Care Bear and pickle costumes.
The betrothed Portland couple, who arrived and departed the scene by motorcycle, declined to be identified by name. They said they’d known each other for two decades, started dating more recently, and decided to get hitched on site to bring some joy and fun to a dark time
The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised. pic.twitter.com/Yhthe0LA2V
I think this is very clever. Normal protesting isn’t working. It’s just giving them an excuse to knock more heads.
I know this doesn’t properly portray the seriousness of what Trump is doing there in Portland. But with all the inane cos-playing in the various Federal police are doing I’m not sure there’s a better way to deal with this. You want costumes? We’ve got costumes! The whole operation there is a joke because Trump ordered the escalation when he saw some footage from 2020 and Stephen Miller took the opportunity to expand his fascist crackdown. I don’t know if it’s possible to embarrass these people but it’s worth a try.
It looks like it has plenty of room for Trump’s name in huge letters at the top. Maybe even a statue of him as Zeus. (Stephen Millers head on a couple of vultures on the side would be a nice touch.)
On Trump’s desk in the Oval Office today was a plan for a triumphal arch on the other side of the river from the Lincoln Memorial pic.twitter.com/PyulIhlmHE
Miller’s keeping Trump very busy with his megalomaniacal obsessions while he runs the country:
Across from the Lincoln Memorial, barely inside the boundaries of Washington, sits a traffic roundabout known as Memorial Circle — familiar to commuters primarily as a major entryway to the city from Virginia.
But if President Donald Trump and his advisers have their way, the small patch of federal land will soon host a new monument — a triumphal arch to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary next year, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, who has advised the Trump administration on its architectural plans, presented the idea to Trump and other officials earlier this year, and they were enthusiastic about the concept, the people said.
Photos of a model for the proposed arch in the Oval Office emerged this week, with Trump displaying it to Canadian officials on Tuesday. A mock-up again appeared on Trump’s
[…]
The arch initially was intended to be temporary and require expedited construction to coincide with next year’s anniversary, the people said. Now White House officials are considering plans for a permanent arch, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
They always go there:
A rendering of architect Albert Speer’s planned “Triumphal Arch” (Triumphbogen) for Welthauptstadt Germania, the capital Hitler intended to build in Berlin
His answer to Welker’s query about Donald Trump invoking the Insurrection Act were “keeping options open” vague. Pulling the trigger on the Insurrection Act would be about crime that “has gotten out of control in our cities.” (It hasn’t.)
Welker: "Are you seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act?"
The White House’s concern is an alleged 1000 percent increase in violence against ICE agents, not the percent increase in violence committed against citizens and non-citizens alike by ICE agents. Nor about Trump administration violence against the U.S. Constitution and to the rights guaranteed therein.
The problem is the American media, says Vance. When you begin hearing the term “pacification” from administration spokespersons, brace yourselves.
Hannah Arendt distinguished totalitarianism “from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship” in that totalitarianism seeks to subjugate civil society and private lives, not just political opponents, using psychological, not just physical, repression.
Will Trump 2.0 invoke the Insurrection Act? Magic 8 Ball says yes. As the late Charlie Kirk would say, prove me wrong, Donald.
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth…but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood–is being destroyed." — Hannah Arendt https://t.co/jWuzDhzsXj
The clip below (from Portland) has eaten at me ever since I first saw it. Overnight we’ve become a country where masked men in unmarked vehicles can jump out and demand to see your proof of citizenship. Don’t have it? Zip ties, handcuffs, jail. Guilty until proven innocent. Your Fourth Amendment protection from the unreasonable search and seizure of your person is gone. Just like for California-born Francisco Miranda:
A Milwaukie, Oregon, resident claims that he was “forcibly abducted” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and held at the Portland ICE facility for several hours, despite being a U.S. citizen. The incident was first reported by Willamette Week.
Francisco Miranda, who was born in California, sent a tort claim to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem through his attorney on Monday, less than a week after his Oct. 2 arrest outside his workplace in Northeast Portland.
A tort is a wrongful act or a violation of someone’s rights that is not part of a contract and can cause harm, leading to civil legal responsibility.
The arrest comes as more U.S. citizens report being arrested or detained by ICE, though this appears to be one of the first such cases in Oregon.
The video eats at Mehdi Hasan for the same reason:
Do most Americans really want to live in a country like this? Treated like this by masked agents of the president’s violent secret police?
Also, the worst ICE agents are the Latino guys, sorry, but shame on them.
Are you a teen on a bicycle? You are a target too.
Chicago: Ice harassing 2 15 year olds without a parent.
At this point with the masks and the vast differences in uniforms….. can we even be sure they are ICE agents and not random kidnappers? Serious question… pic.twitter.com/wIJndUm0KV
— Devin Nunes' Cattle Dog 🇺🇦 🇪🇺🇺🇸🇨🇦 (@Kaos_Vs_Control) October 12, 2025
Or a 15-year-old girl?
This is in our backyard. Hoffman Estates. My district.
I am deeply disturbed by what looks like ICE agents violently detaining a child. A child. She could be yours just as she could be mine.
My team and I are looking into this, but please don’t look away. This is what Donald… https://t.co/Kbd1Ck5nCb
— Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (@CongressmanRaja) October 11, 2025
How many of you could “prove” your citizenship on demand to avoid being handcuffed and detained for hours or even days?
Some months back I checked my birth certificate for the very hospital I was born. Not that any of these ICEmen would care to examine it if I were dark-skinned enough for them to look at me sidewise.
We don’t see what’s going on with the 15-year-old teenage boys after the “agent” claims he’s going to “do facial” (recognition) to verify one kid’s identity. Or is that just an intimidation tactic? If not why didn’t the agents in Miranda’s case do the same instead of hauling him to jail? The Highway Patrol can verify your identity from the front seat of their cruisers. If Miranda is a duly registered Oregon voter (a citizen), agents could verify that with a web search of the state’s database. Or are they just in a rush to make quota?
All of this is as insane as our president is addled.
IN A LATE NIGHT POST, TRUMP DOES NOT REMEMBER WHO WAS PRESIDENT ON JAN 6, 2021 (HE WAS), WEIRDLY SHOUTS “DO SOMETHING” (LIKELY AT CLOUDS). HIS MENTAL ISSUES ARE VERY BAD! https://t.co/ghhdbEpBIq
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) October 12, 2025
The President of the United States is whining–and not for the first time–that the FBI responded to a terrorist attack.
Now of course the Trump administration will scream that using the image at the top of Nazis inspecting a man’s “papers” is inflammatory and puts agents at risk. But that is a sloppy attempt to silence dissent. Fascists are like racists that way. They hate being tagged with name, just not enough to reconsider behaviors that inspire the comparison.
PEOPLE can confirm the legendary actress died in California on Saturday, Oct. 11. “There are no further details available at this time, and her family has asked for privacy in this moment of great sadness,” a spokesperson tells PEOPLE.
Keaton rose to fame in the 1970s thanks to her role in The Godfather films and her collaborations with director Woody Allen. She won an Oscar for Best Actress for 1977’s Annie Hall. Her long career included movies like The First Wives Club, multiple collaborations with director Nancy Meyers and the Book Club franchise.
The actress was born in Los Angeles in 1946 as Diane Hall, and was the oldest of four children. Her father was a civil engineer, while her mom stayed at home. […]
Keaton performed in plays in high school, and after graduating in 1964, she pursued drama in college. But she soon dropped out and moved to New York to try to make her way in theater. She took her mother’s maiden name, Keaton, for her professional name, because there was already a Diane Hall registered with Actors’ Equity. […]
Her film debut was in 1970’s Lovers and Other Strangers, but her big break came when Francis Ford Coppola cast her as Kay Adams, the girlfriend of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, released in 1972. The movie was based on the novel by Mario Puzo but Keaton didn’t read the bestseller before her audition and didn’t really know what the film was about.
“I think the kindest thing that someone’s ever done for me … is that I got cast to be in The Godfather and I didn’t even read it. I didn’t know a single thing,” she told PEOPLE in 2022. “I just was going around auditioning. I think that was amazing for me. And then I had to kind of read the book.” […]
Looking back on her career, Keaton told PEOPLE in 2019, “I don’t know anything, and I haven’t learned. Getting older hasn’t made me wiser. Without acting I would have been a misfit.”
Keaton never married. “Today I was thinking, I’m the only one in my generation of actresses who has been a single woman all her life,” she explained to PEOPLE in 2019. “I’m really glad I didn’t get married. I’m an oddball. I remember in high school, this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you’re going to make a good wife.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a wife. No.’”
I’m taking this one personally. Frankly, I don’t know where to start. She was in so many of the films that formed me as a cineaste. I was weaned on the New Hollywood, and she was one of the key players. For all you youngsters in the audience…what is this “New Hollywood” I speak of, you may ask? In a 2017 essay about the demise of neighborhood movie theaters, I wrote:
Some of my fondest memories of the movie-going experience involve neighborhood theaters; particularly during a 3-year period of my life (1979-1982) when I was living in San Francisco. But I need to back up for a moment. I had moved to the Bay Area from Fairbanks, Alaska, which was not the ideal environment for a movie buff. At the time I moved from Fairbanks, there were only two single-screen movie theaters in town. To add insult to injury, we were usually several months behind the Lower 48 on first-run features (it took us nearly a year to even get Star Wars).
Keep in mind, there was no cable service in the market, and VCRs were a still a few years down the road. There were occasional midnight movie screenings at the University of Alaska, and the odd B-movie gem on late night TV (which we had to watch in real time, with 500 commercials to suffer through)…but that was it. Sometimes, I’d gather up a coterie of my culture vulture pals for the 260-mile drive to Anchorage, where there were more theaters for us to dip our beaks into.
Consequently, due to the lack of venues, I was reading more about movies, than watching them. I remember poring over back issues of The New Yorker at the public library, soaking up Penelope Gilliat and Pauline Kael; but it seemed requisite to live in NYC (or L.A.) to catch all these cool art-house and foreign movies they were raving about (most of those films just didn’t make it out up to the frozen tundra). And so it was that I “missed” a lot of 60s and 70s cinema.
Needless to say, when I moved to San Francisco, which had a plethora of fabulous neighborhood theaters in 1979, I quickly set about making up the deficit. While I had a lot of favorite haunts (The Surf, The Balboa, The Castro, and the Red Victorian loom large in my memory), there were two venerable (if a tad dodgy) downtown venues in particular where I spent an unhealthy amount of time in the dank and the dark with snoring bums who used the auditoriums as a $2 flop: The Roxie and The Strand.
That’s because they were “repertory” houses; meaning they played older films (frequently double and triple bills, usually curated by some kind of theme). That 3 years I spent in the dark was my film school; that’s how I got caught up with Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Peter Bogdanovich, Werner Herzog, Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Wim Wenders, Michael Ritchie, Brian De Palma, etc.
Keaton has been a fixture in my film universe since 1972, the year I saw my first ‘R’-rated feature at age 16. That film was, of course, The Godfather. I’d like to be able to brag that I was able to “sneak in”, but this was a military base (Theater #1 at Fort Wainwright, Alaska) so I had to be accompanied by a parent or guardian; hence I tagged along with my best bud and his parents.
However, it wasn’t until 5 years later that I became truly smitten with Keaton, thanks to her star-making turn in Woody Allen’s classic romantic comedy Annie Hall (I mean…who didn’t?)
Effortless charm. It wasn’t until after I saw Annie Hall in 1977 that I discovered Allen’s “earlier, funny” films with Keaton. One of my favorites from this period is his satire Sleeper:
Someone once famously observed regarding another screen partnership: “Sure [Fred Astaire] was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did…backwards and in high heels.” While she and Allen are not dancing, per se in that particular scene from Sleeper, Keaton holds her own with skillful comic timing (physical comedy is a dance of sorts).
Another gem from this period is Love and Death (1975). I love Keaton’s line delivery here:
Keaton knocked it out of the park again with her performance in Manhattan (1979).
Of course, Keaton’s career cannot be defined solely by her work with Allen, nor be relegated to playing a series of kooky and lovable characters. She proved herself to be a fine dramatic actor as well. She directed several films, including the unique 1987 documentary Heaven (tough to track down, but a recommended watch). She also explored other horizons as a creative artist, e.g. she published a book of still photography in 1980 called Reservations.
More “oddballs” the caliber of Diane Keaton, please. She will be missed.
Here are some more recommendations:
Looking for Mr. Goodbar – Considering that she was still basking in the critical accolades for her audience-pleasing Oscar-winning performance as the kooky and lovable Annie Hall, it was a bold career move for Diane Keaton to immediately follow it up with a leap into the relative darkness of Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Writer-director Richard Brooks adapted his 1977 drama/neo-noir from a novel by Judith Rossner (which was based on the sensationalized real-life 1973 murder of a 28-year old NYC schoolteacher). Keaton gives an outstanding performance as a young woman with a repressive Catholic upbringing who moves to a seedy downtown apartment to escape the verbal abuse and restrictive rules laid down by her tyrannical father (Richard Kiley).
Her newfound sense of freedom and self-confidence sparks a sexual awakening; she soon slips into a double-life, teaching deaf children at an inner-city school by day, and cruising the singles bars at night looking for casual sex (and discovering recreational drugs along the way). When she begins juggling relationships with two men (Richard Gere and William Atherton), her life begins to take a darker turn. Tuesday Weld gives one of her best performances as Keaton’s sister.
The film divided critics at the time; some were upset at Brooks’ deviation from Rossner’s novel (I can’t speak for that, as I’ve never read it). Others appeared chagrined that the film (for them at least) lacked a moral center. Speaking as someone who turned 21 the year the film came out, I’d say it captures the zeitgeist of the “Me Decade” to a tee; I see it as a companion piece to John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever.
Play it Again, Sam – I don’t know what it is about this particular Woody Allen vehicle (directed by Herbert Ross), but no matter how many times I have viewed it, I laugh just as hard at all the one-liners as I did the first time I saw it. Annie Hall and Manhattan may be his most highly lauded and artistically accomplished projects, but for pure “laughs per minute”, I would nominate this 1972 entry, with a screenplay adapted by Allen from his own original stage version.
Allen plays a film buff with a Humphrey Bogart obsession. He fantasizes he’s getting pointers from Bogie’s ghost (played to perfection by Jerry Lacy) who advises him on how to “be a man” and attract the perfect mate. He gets more pragmatic assistance from his best friends, a married couple (Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts) who fix him up with a series of women (the depictions of the various dating disasters are hilarious beyond description). A classic.
Shoot the Moon– Be forewarned: Alan Parker’s 1982 drama about the deterioration of a marriage pulls no punches (it is right out as a “date night” movie). Albert Finney co-stars with Diane Keaton as a couple with four kids whose marriage is about to go kaput. As in Kramer vs. Kramer, the film essentially opens with the split, and then focuses on the immediate emotional aftershocks and its profound impact on all family members. Absolutely heartbreaking, but beautifully acted by a skilled cast that includes Karen Allen, Peter Weller, and Dana Hill. Bo Goldman scripted, and Michael Seresin’s cinematography is lovely (the Marin County environs almost becomes a character itself).
Reds – It’s a testament to Warren Beatty’s conviction and legendary powers of persuasion that he was able to convince a major Hollywood studio to back a 3 ½ hour biopic about a relatively obscure American Communist (who is buried in the Kremlin, no less). As we know now, of course, this 1981 film turned out to be a critical success, and garnered a dozen Oscar nominations (it won three, including Best Director).
Diane Keaton turns in one of her best performances as Reed’s lover, writer and feminist Louise Bryant. Maureen Stapleton earned a Best Supporting Actress trophy with her portrayal of activist Emma Goldman. Jack Nicholson is perfect as the mercurial playwright Eugene O’Neill. Beatty assembled an amazing group of surviving participants, whose anecdotal recollections are interwoven throughout, like a Greek Chorus of living history.
