As I joined the growing number of tuxedoed Washingtonians abandoning their Ubers on 14th Street, choosing to brave the frigid temperatures rather than wait another minute behind a blockade, I tried to ignore the biting wind and focus on my mantra: I have to make it to the TikTok party.

Shuffling down the road, I wondered what to expect. Would the Inauguration Eve shindig be just another DC party full of lobbyists and waiters circulating with chicken skewers? Or would I be plunged headfirst into an unfamiliar scene and spend the night awkwardly mingling with too-cool influencers?

It was a little bit of both. I waited in line with a prominent conservative tweeter and a newly-minted White House staffer. The second we got inside, I saw a platoon of trendy partygoers jostling to get their fur-collared overcoats from coat check as a clip of Matt Walsh played on the screen behind them.

Turning to my left, I saw Chelly, a TikTok influencer who specializes in Vivek Ramaswamy impersonations. That pretty much summed up the vibe at the Power 30 Awards and Inauguration Party.

(Shindelverse Photography)

Maybe this is how Democrats feel all the time. You show up to a party and see Beyonce doing lemon drops with Janet Yellen. But most of us aren’t used to this seamless intermingling of politics and celebrity. I can safely say that I’ve never been invited to a party where Liz Truss and Conor McGregor were feted in the VIP lounge while people got bottle service downstairs in honor of Walsh, his fellow Daily Wire hosts, and other conservative influencers like Riley Gaines.

(Shindelverse Photography)

You could argue – and many have – that this party was nothing more than TikTok’s ploy to woo those in Trump’s orbit so the president would save the Chinese-owned app. And that was obviously part of it, as the #SaveTikTok step-and-repeat set up in the lobby suggested.

But there was something else going on here. TikTok didn’t need to spend $50,000 on a party just to lobby the Trump administration — that’s what lobbyists are for. Nor did the party need to be so … cool. The bottle girls with sparklers and signs, like something out of a Miami nightclub; the DJ spinning a set that multiple people described as “like a college party – in a good way!” And of course, the headline event: Waka Flocka Flame, live in person, throwing McDonald’s cheeseburgers to the crowd.

(Shindelverse Photography)

This isn’t the kind of party you throw because you have to. This is the kind of party you throw because you want to.

By now, I’m probably the 100th writer to comment on the vibe shift that followed Donald Trump back to the White House. Whether it’s Nelly performing at the Inauguration or Kim Kardashian praising Melania Trump’s swearing-in outfit, the most unlikely people are rushing to celebrate Trumpworld.

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Critics – the haters, to put it in TikTok parlance – say these celebrities are just acting out of fear. But we know that’s not true, because they didn’t do it last time. For the past eight years, hating Trump has been as en vogue in Hollywood as Ozempic and cropped sweatshirts. But things are different now. Famous people don’t just want to celebrate conservatives – they want people to know they’re doing it.

Oscar de la Renta didn’t just dress Usha Vance — the label bragged about it. Maybe Kim Kardashian felt like she had to praise Melania to seem polite. But her sister Khloe clearly had something else in mind when she shared a Daily Wire reporter’s tweet criticizing Los Angeles’ Democratic mayor. Clearly, something has shifted in the American consciousness.

Which brings us back to the TikTok party.

(Shindelverse Photography)

Watching Taylor Lorenz and her bejeweled mask mingle with content creators and conservative journalists in the VIP lounge, I couldn’t help but think about Joe and Stewart Alsop, brothers whose columns were required reading in midcentury Washington. In 1952, Joe predicted that “Eisenhower’s Washington will, I think, be unbearably boring,” while Stewart dismissed Republicans as “dull fellows who work late and go to bed early.” Years later, Joe cheered the Kennedy administration for reviving DC’s social scene and influencing it with “glamour, which is not a quality usually associated with Washington.”

Since then, Republicans have always been the boring party. When Democrats are in the White House, the media rush to profile where the president dines, what neighborhoods are being made trendy by young staffers, and more. Republican administrations, meanwhile, bring weepy pieces about the death of the district’s cocktail bars or innovative restaurants.

That doesn’t seem to be happening this time. For the first time since the Alsops cheered the fun and freedom that would come with Camelot, the tastemakers and socialites want to hang out with Republicans.

If that’s not a vibe shift, I don’t know what is.

As Americans greeted their New Year’s Day hangovers with pledges to lay off the sauce, the Biden administration took a major step towards making every month Dry January.

Last week, Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory “outlining the direct link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.” Murthy wants health warnings on all alcohol products that mention cancer risk, as well as “a reassessment of the guideline limits for alcohol consumption to account for cancer risk.”

It may sound like benign bureaucratic jargon. But it’s far worse than that.

As The Daily Wire reported in October, a secret committee working deep behind the scenes of the Biden administration is working to revise federal dietary guidelines regarding alcohol. The Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD) is a six-person panel working within the Department of Health and Human Services. But instead of just trying to keep kids from drinking, this panel reportedly wants the United States to adopt the World Health Organization’s position that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”

Now, I love an “I told you so” moment as much as the next keyboard warrior. But this is no reason to gloat. The bureaucracy’s push to stop Americans from drinking is a dangerous development, and not just because it’s profoundly lame. It’s the latest sign of how leftists want to use the government to meddle in Americans’ daily lives. And it’s not even based on real science.

Murthy notes that “alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States.” He further notes that “for breast cancer specifically, 16.4% of total breast cancer cases are attributable to alcohol consumption.”

Much like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, I’m not a biologist. So I have no reason to doubt these statistics. But whenever a government official starts calling for a total ban on anything for my own good, I get suspicious. Banning things that can be unhealthy when consumed in excess is the first step towards nanny statism and universal health care. It’s downright European.

Or, in this case, Canadian. As we previously reported, three of the ICCPUD’s six members are Canadians who helped slash the number of recommended drinks in their frozen homeland back in 2013. That recommendation didn’t even play well in Canada, a country that has basically thrown its hands up and accepted euthanasia and leaders like Justin Trudeau as inevitabilities.

The mere presence of Canadian health bureaucrats should be enough to disqualify whatever the ICCPUD recommends. But there’s also a new study from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Math, which found that “compared with never consuming alcohol, moderate alcohol consumption is associated with lower all-cause mortality.”

That study is hardly biased towards alcohol. In fact, it includes the same cancer statistics that Murthy cites in his advisory. But it also looks at other areas, and finds that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of both heart attack and stroke, compared to never drinking at all.

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There’s also a recent Harvard study that found moderate drinking lowered blood sugar and was associated with lower rates of diabetes as well as lower rates of “thyroid cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and renal cell carcinoma.” Looking at the whole board, the authors conclude that “the data do not justify sweeping statements about the [negative] effects of moderate alcohol consumption on human health.”

Murthy probably won’t get his warning labels. Such a change would require congressional approval, and if the bipartisan opposition to the new drinking guidelines is any indication, it seems unlikely that Congress would vote to slap cancer warnings on liquor bottles.

But Murthy’s advisory is telling nonetheless. Biden is packing up the Oval Office, and his Surgeon General is trying to bring back Prohibition. That would be shocking, if his boss wasn’t spending this time trying to sell off pieces of the border wall, stop offshore drilling, and smuggle in all sorts of policies that would hamstring the incoming Trump administration.

It’s a troubling reminder of how Democrats act when they have power, and of what their priorities will be the next time they take the White House. Fortunately, we won’t have to deal with that for at least the next four years.

I’ll drink to that.

It’s January 6, and a storm is brewing in Washington, D.C.

By the end of the day, the nation’s capital could have more than 10 inches of snow, enough precipitation to bring this spiritually-southern city to its knees. Schools are already closed, there are at least two snowball fights planned for the National Mall, and bureaucrats are anxiously refreshing the government snow day page, hoping to work remotely.

But there’s at least one group of people settling in for a full work day. At 1:00 p.m., Vice President Kamala Harris will gavel in a special joint session of Congress. In her capacity as President of the Senate, she’ll oversee a vote to certify the results of the 2024 presidential election.

In an appearance on Fox News yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, fresh off his re-election, said he does not expect the blizzard to interfere with the vote.

“Well, I hope we have full attendance,” Johnson told Maria Bartiromo. “We’ve got a big snow storm coming to D.C. and we encourage all of our colleagues, ‘Do not leave town. Stay here.’ Because, as you know, the Electoral Count Act requires this on January 6 at 1 p.m. So, whether we’re in a blizzard or not we’re going to be in that chamber making sure this is done.”

Winter weather aside, this is all pretty standard stuff — and a far cry from the last vote to certify, the day that Americans will always remember when they think “January 6.”

A lot has happened since then. Trump, of course, handed power over to Joe Biden, whose disastrous presidency eventually gave way to Harris’s disastrous, insurgent presidential campaign. And after a landslide victory in November, Trump is now set to return to the White House in just two weeks.

He might kick off his term by pardoning the January 6 defendants.

Trump has said repeatedly that he is open to pardoning many of the 1,600 people charged for their involvement in the Capitol Riot, hundreds of whom have been jailed. And Trump has frequently spoken out against what he says is very unfair treatment of mostly peaceful protestors.

“These people have suffered,” Trump said in a December appearance on “Meet The Press.” “Their lives have been destroyed.”

The president-elect has indicated that he would not consider a blanket pardon, and that he would make “some exceptions” for those found to have done something really criminal. But it seems very likely that Trump will kick off his second term by pardoning many of the January 6 defendants.

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This was by no means a foregone conclusion. After January 6, many people predicted that Trump’s political career was over. Many wanted him to go to jail for his role in the protests. And Democrats and the legacy media called the protesters domestic terrorists engaged in a coup, an effort to upend American democracy.

But Trump came back. The election interference case against him failed. In October, the New York Times found that fewer and fewer people thought January 6 was a threat to democracy, while a growing number of people thought Trump was well within his rights to contest the 2020 election results.

In December, an inspector general report determined the FBI had 26 undercover informants on the ground on January 6, many of whom stormed the Capitol without authorization, but were not charged. A few weeks after the report was released, Matthew Graves, the DC attorney general who prosecuted the January 6 defendants, announced that he’s stepping down before Trump returns to the White House.

All of this — combined with Biden’s unpopular decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, and commute the death sentences of brutal murderers — has really softened the ground for whatever January 6 pardons Trump may consider.

A lot can happen in four years.