It's My Mind

The Second Night

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:30:00 -0500

Night two starts at 3 p.m. Central at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, TX. Same hall as Wednesday. Still no roll call. Vance has the keynote. Trump closes.

The RNC’s Thursday blocks, in the order they published them:

3 p.m. — Host-committee chair Heather Washburne and RNC Chair Joe Gruters open again. Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas. House candidates Laurie Buckhout (N.C.), Jason Smith and Ryan Mackenzie, Greg Cunningham (N.M.). Freed hostages. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

4 p.m. — More House names, including Eric Flores and Tano Tijerina in the South Texas seats. Conference Chair Lisa McClain. NRCC Chair Richard Hudson. A TrumpRx patient. Sen. Ted Cruz closes the hour.

5 p.m. — Speaker Mike Johnson. A Charlie Kirk tribute; the anniversary is today. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Gov. Greg Abbott.

6 p.m. — Rep. Mike Lawler. Ross Ulbricht. A 9/11 twenty-fifth-anniversary tribute. Tunnel to Towers. That hour is also when the NFL season opens.

7 p.m. — HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. Karoline Leavitt. Donald Trump Jr.

8 p.m. — Vice President JD Vance, then President Trump.

That is the run of show. I am leaving what they do with it for the tape. C-SPAN is carrying it here: [VIDEO]

Night one is here: Pretend I'm on the Ballot

Pretend I'm on the Ballot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:55:33 -0500

Trump spoke last. Lee Greenwood, then roughly two hours, then night one was over.

Check out what he said here: [VIDEO]

The line that organized the speech was turnout. “When I’m on the ticket, Republicans always do very well,” Trump said. Midterms without him on the line are the problem he named. “So I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot.” About 35 races. Twice or three times if he has to.

The first name on that list was Ken Paxton.

“I’ll be coming back to Texas, because we have to elect Ken Paxton.” Then the bit he has been doing for weeks: the suit, the voice, “not the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” then “the greatest attorney general in America.” He looked for Paxton in the hall and said Ken would never speak to him again.

Paxton had already gone. Thanked Trump. “Protecting the Texas Promise.” 107 suits against Biden. Talarico as the most radical and most well-funded Democrat in Texas, out to destroy the American dream, California’s third senator, “obsessed with transitions.”

For Talarico, Trump used the trail nickname: Talafreako. Talarico already put that word on merch. Wednesday he was at a grocery drive across town.

The race is why Dallas was not scenery. Paxton beat Cornyn in the May runoff with Trump’s endorsement. Talarico won the Democratic primary outright. Texas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Cook and Sabato: Toss Up since late August. Inside Elections still Lean Republican into September.

The polls have sat inside the margin for months. Times/Siena late June: 47–47. Emerson mid-August: Paxton 47, Talarico 46. UT/Texas Politics Project August: Talarico 42, Paxton 39. RCP through late August: Talarico up about two. The survey that dropped the afternoon the convention opened, N+ Univision: Talarico 48, Paxton 43, 7 percent undecided. Overton late August: 50–50 with leaners. I am not picking a winner out of that stack. A Texas Senate race is this close in September.

Money is not close. Through June 30: Talarico $68.6 million raised and $21.5 million cash; Paxton $9.2 million and $1.8 million on hand.

Then the rest of night one — no roll call, Gruters on defying history, the policy blocks, Blanche on a partisan stage, the hall descriptions from people who were there, Thune booed, Iran and the Strait, Kirk marked for today, the $5,000 dividend, the close.

They noticed the midterm pattern and answered it by putting him in the building. In Texas the invented ticket already has a name. He spent the first candidate slot on Paxton, needled the suit, and promised to come back.

Watch Night One of the Republican Midterm Convention here: [VIDEO]

Commissioner Without a Definition

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 5 Sep 2026 12:56:37 -0500

Cathy Engelbert is retiring as WNBA commissioner at the end of the year. Adam Silver announced it Friday. She has had the job since 2019.

Libs of TikTok posted the news as a verdict: she is leaving because the league still will not say what a woman is.

BREAKING: Cathy Engelbert, the Commissioner for the WNBA, announced her retirement at the end of the 2026 season after the WNBA couldn’t determine what a woman is pic.twitter.com/ENfE8eCQVZ
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 4, 2026

Enes Kanter Freedom posted the same afternoon. “MAKE @WNBA FEMALE AGAIN.” He called the retirement a win for women and an admission that the rules have to change. Then he offered himself as the next commissioner, dictionary included, on the ground that the league still cannot define the word in its own name.

MAKE @WNBA FEMALE AGAIN

Commissioner Freedom Has a Nice Ring to It.

While the reported retirement of #WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert is a win for women and an admission that the league’s rules must change, her retirement does not solve the systemic issues which must be… pic.twitter.com/QqIQ3bwKsX
— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) September 4, 2026

On Fox’s Ingraham Angle that same news cycle he put it shorter:

“Just get this, America—instead of defining what a woman is, right? The ‘Cocoo Cathy,’ I call her. Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner, decided to step down as commissioner from one of the biggest organizations in America. I mean, I just want America to understand what’s happening here. What we are doing is working. I want to thank all the parents out there. I want to thank all the Americans out there that believe and trust in us. This is just the beginning. We’re going to try to put as much pressure as we can.”

The fight did not start Friday. The current CBA says “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” It does not say what a woman is. No public rule on sex at birth, hormones, or self-identification.

In August, after Sophie Cunningham said transgender athletes should stay out of women’s sports, Kanter Freedom and Royce White declared for a future draft as a test. Engelbert sent teams a memo. The topic was “complex and nuanced.” Eligibility is collectively bargained. Fair competition remains a priority. Conversations would continue. The league said there were “no immediate eligibility matters” and denounced “bad-faith efforts.”

Kanter Freedom kept going. He wore a shirt that defined woman as an adult human female and was ejected from a Chicago Sky game. He filed a complaint. He asked Engelbert for a public meeting. The office answered with a task force.

The official statement is growth: media rights, a new CBA, expansion, the best still coming. That ledger is real. It does not finish the sentence the league wrote for itself.

Whether the job left first is a different question. Nobody on the record has produced a shove from Adam Silver or the owners. Engelbert told the AP the decision was hers and that she felt no pressure from NBA or WNBA stakeholders. What the beat had already written is the temperature inside the building. In July, ESPN talked to more than twenty owners, executives, players, and insiders. The consensus was that she grew the business and was not the person for what came next. Multiple high-ranking team sources said 2026 was likely her last season. Silver, asked about her future, praised the growth and said they would “have ongoing discussions about what the future looks like.”

After Friday’s announcement, CBS Sports put the feeling in one line: the WNBA community “let out a collective breath.” The headline was that she left the league better than she found it, “but it was definitely time to go.” That is not a leak that she was fired. It is the closest the mainstream desk has come to saying the room wanted her gone.

A women’s league that will not define woman can announce a retirement. It has not announced an answer.

Sympathy Is Not a Verdict

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 5 Sep 2026 00:25:46 -0500

Matt Walsh posted an instant reaction Friday afternoon to a hung jury in the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The clip is not a tour of five weeks of testimony. Walsh’s argument is narrower. The only reason the case did not end in an acquittal, he says, is one holdout juror — a man, on a panel of nine women and three men — who would not join the others in finding Clancy not criminally responsible. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, asked the judge to remove him, told a single justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court the juror was biased against people with mental illness, and invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court said no. Outside, Reddington said the other eleven had been “robbed by one man.”

Walsh puts that next to the Derek Chauvin jury. In Minneapolis, he says, jurors ignored the law and convicted Chauvin of murder because he did not inspire sympathy — even after, in Walsh’s telling, they understood George Floyd had overdosed. Deliberations are treated as closed, so the verdict stood. In Plymouth the pressure ran the other way: eleven ready to excuse the killings, and a public effort to pry out the one who would not. Walsh’s larger claim is the Massachusetts rule itself. The killings are not in dispute. The Commonwealth still has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was criminally responsible. He thinks no one can prove another person’s mind that way. A mistrial, to him, is only a relative win. His close is that the insanity defense should not exist.

The case underneath the clip is simpler than the argument about it.

Facts and Disposition

On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband, Patrick, out for takeout and medicine. She took their three children to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands: Cora, five; Dawson, three; Callan, eight months. Cora and Dawson were dead when Patrick came home. Callan died days later. She cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She is paralyzed from the waist down.

She was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. In Massachusetts that can be proved by deliberate premeditation, by extreme atrocity or cruelty, or both. The prosecution said she planned the window of time, separated the older children so one would not see the other and run, and kept going after each child went limp. She did not deny the killings. Her defense was lack of criminal responsibility: postpartum psychosis, and a claim that she could not appreciate the wrongfulness of the acts or conform her conduct to the law. The verdict slip also allowed second-degree murder and manslaughter.

After about thirty-eight hours over seven days, the jury told Judge William Sullivan it could not agree. Reporting after the mistrial is that the split was eleven to one against a finding of criminal responsibility. Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. That is not a conviction and it is not an acquittal. The murder charges remain. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has to decide whether to try the case again. A status conference is set for later this month. Clancy stays at Tewksbury State Hospital in the meantime.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

After the Mistrial

To be honest, I had been following this case only in snippets — on podcasts such as Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro, or even Fox News. There may be some sympathy with regards to postpartum depression. The main thing I want to illustrate is that postpartum depression, or even psychosis, is not a new thing. The oldest account that turned up went back at least thirty-six years, to the Los Angeles Times on Victoria Karter.

Watching the pressers after the mistrial showed women heckling the prosecutor, bellowing about consideration for the mother. The prosecutor’s statement was about the children who lost their lives. That was the right subject.

There is no militancy here from me about whether the mother needs help if she did suffer from postpartum depression. The live question is that three children are dead, and whether she was criminally responsible for that.

My suspicion is that the holdout was the one juror willing to hold Clancy accountable for the deaths. The others may have been more sympathetic to a mother who may well be mentally ill.

Still, at the end of the day, conviction or acquittal, Mrs. Clancy will have to sit with her actions.

Cruz on PBD: Blue-Collar Voters Decided 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:33:31 -0500

Patrick Bet-David sat down with Ted Cruz this week for PBD Podcast #851. The title is the tease: what Trump told him behind closed doors. The conversation is longer than that. Cruz walks back through 2016, through working with Trump as president, and through the family story he uses to explain why he does not talk like a country-club Republican. Bet-David keeps circling 2028. Cruz will not announce. He will describe the argument.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Three stretches do the work. How 2016 broke, including the poll Cruz trusted and the nickname that cut. What the relationship looks like in the Oval — including the afternoon Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. And the biography: financially independent since seventeen, no trust fund, a standing fight with country-club Republicans. The close is 2028, and JD Vance.

2016: the poll, the shakeout, the nickname

Seventeen Republicans entered. Cruz asks you to lay odds in New York or Washington in spring 2015. Nobody would have bet on Trump. Nobody would have bet on him either — a first-term senator at one or two percent. The other end of the race was treated as settled. “At the time, people thought Hillary was this unbeatable juggernaut.” His path against her was blue-collar voters and evangelicals who had stayed home in 2008 and 2012. Turn them out and the map is Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.

The poll he trusted was one cross-tab: truck drivers, steel workers, cops, firefighters, waitresses. In almost every state, Trump was first among those voters and Cruz second, or the reverse. Not Marco, not Jeb, not Kasich. That is how he says the race turned out. Twelve states where he was first with that group. Twenty-four where Trump was. Kasich took Ohio. Rubio took Minnesota. Everyone else was a rounding error. Rubio’s problem, as Cruz frames it, was Gang of Eight. Cruz raised $92 million. Trump got more than $3 billion in free media. A joint ticket polled before Florida is the road he still thinks about. Rubio canceled the motel meeting.

Then the name. Cruz’s team tried to invent one. Crooked Donald was on the whiteboard before Trump used Crooked Hillary. Cruz killed the exercise. “It’s just not me.” Lyin’ Ted landed. “Trump has a marketing genius that is instinctual.” Cruz’s strength was trust. The nickname went straight at it. “It did real damage.” He suspended after Indiana. On election night he was already out, in Houston. Trump took the states Cruz had been naming. Heidi said she would be damned.

Once Trump is president

Cruz talks to Trump every week, sometimes every day. On foreign policy he says the president has listened most of the time, not all of the time. He calls himself Trump’s strongest ally in the Senate. One tariff call after the market dropped: Cruz pushed a pause, Trump told him to get lost — Cruz repeats the word — and paused the next day anyway.

The meeting that derails is early in the second term. Cruz is in the Oval pitching school choice as a civil-rights play for kids in failing schools. Mid-pitch, Elon Musk tweets that Trump is on the Epstein list. An aide prints it. Cruz sees the knuckles go white. “I learned some curse words I didn’t even know.” School choice stops. The meeting leaves the rails.

The bill did not die in that room. Cruz rewrote the language for the Byrd rule and told John Thune he would burn the package if the provision came out. It stayed. Trump Accounts and no tax on tips sit next to it. Cruz says he is friends with both men now. The fight between them, he says, was not good for the country.

The biography he keeps using

Rafael Cruz left Cuba in 1957 after prison and a warning from his father. Ferry to Key West. Greyhound to Austin. A hundred dollars sewn into his underwear. The oil business later collapsed. The family went bankrupt.

Ted says he has been financially independent since he was seventeen. No trust fund. “That is not my world.” He finished school with about a hundred thousand dollars of debt — “a mortgage but I didn’t have a house” — and paid it off at thirty-eight.

He has spent his Senate career, he says, fighting country-club Republicans. His people are the truck driver and the steel worker. The 2016 cross-tab and the biography are the same claim. The party that talks like a club loses that voter. The party that talks like a job keeps him.

2028, and Vance

Bet-David keeps asking if Cruz is running. “I don’t have an announcement about ’28. I am right now not running for ’28.” He calls the next race free agency. There is no Never Trump lane that matters — “maybe Liz Cheney and six people.” He does not treat the field as settled behind JD Vance.

He likes Vance. He barnstormed Ohio for him. The split he will name is policy. Small government versus the instinct to spend. A non-interventionist hawk versus isolation. He objects to an Iran memorandum Vance negotiated that Cruz says would have moved hundreds of billions toward Tehran.

Vance’s chances are real because he already sits on the coalition. They are not locked because 2028 is an argument about what that coalition believes. Cruz’s lane, if he takes it, is the voter he has been naming since Iowa. Voters will sort the rest.

The other line he draws

The rest of the hour is a different fight. Cruz calls Tucker Carlson “the single most dangerous demagogue in America.” He says Tucker treats Trump as the Antichrist, that the shows run at Israel and Jews, and that antisemitism is “the gateway drug to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism.” Matt Gaetz, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie sit in one sentence as the cloud around Tucker — telling young people to hate Israel and hate Trump, “and they’re very quickly getting to and they hate America too.” That last step is Cruz’s. Gaetz’s actual place in that crowd is the Tucker studio and the America First break over Israel, not a signed manifesto.

A few other names get a pass. AOC and Newsom as the Democratic front-runners. Rubio as smart, likable, a gifted communicator. Elon as the smartest man Cruz has met, a man who does not know there is a box. Cruz is not just retelling 2016. He is drawing a line through the right and naming who he thinks is on the wrong side of it.

Liam Out Loud: When Institutions Stop Valuing Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 2 Sep 2026 13:40:18 -0500

Liam Out Loud posted a short essay-video on August 31 titled Why Feminized Institutions Stop Telling the Truth.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The claim is not that women cannot do science, law, or teaching. It is narrower. Those fields only work if they keep discriminating — science on truth, law on justice, education on intelligence. Once the culture inside them tips toward social equity and consensus, the original job recedes.

He never names Helen Andrews. He is in her argument anyway. I wrote about her Compact essay and the UnHerd interview in June. Her line was that wokeness is not a new ideology so much as feminine group patterns applied to institutions that used to run on different rules. Empathy over detached judgment. Safety over risk. Cohesion over open conflict. Ostracism instead of argument. Liam is asking what that flip does to shops whose job is to tell the truth.

h/t Newsalert

What “feminized institutions” means

Andrews’s timing is the point. Law schools turned majority female in 2016. The New York Times newsroom crossed that line in 2018. Medical schools followed. Psychology is further along. Fields that hit the line tend not to stop at 50-50. After the culture flips, the scoring system changes. What gets rewarded is consensus and emotional safety. What gets punished is the person who will not drop an ugly finding.

That is what “feminized” is supposed to mean here. Not that women cannot do the work. That average differences in priorities, once they become the majority culture of a shop, change what the shop is for.

Read Helen Andrews' column The Great Feminization.

Liam’s points

His evidence is a 2024 survey of U.S. psychology professors by Cory Clark and colleagues. Asked whether scientists should put truth first when it collides with social-equity goals, 66.4 percent of the men said yes. 43 percent of the women did. A slim majority of the whole sample still chose truth. Almost nobody said equity should simply beat it. The interesting number is how many would not say truth wins. Psychology now trains the therapists, the HR offices, and a lot of the language other institutions copy. If that guild ranks harmony above an ugly result, the result has a harder time leaving the lab.

He uses Jason Arday at Cambridge as the specimen. The appointment led with race, a redemption story, and a job ad that listed support for equality, diversity and inclusion as essential. When Nathan Cofnas posted the plagiarism comparisons, the heat went to the auditor.

Then he reaches for older pictures of the same split. Frans de Waal: males compete over outcomes, females over relationships and atmosphere. Le Bon: a crowd stops asking “is this true?” and starts asking “will I still belong?” Nietzsche: what preserves the group is called good. Jung, used more loosely: selection versus completeness. A family can run on completeness. A lab and a court cannot.

The useful piece does not require all of those names. Institutions are tools. A tool has a job. When the people inside it start optimizing for how the room feels, the tool stops doing the job.

Averages are not persons. Plenty of women put evidence first. Plenty of men hedge. The question is the scoring system. Once equity support is an essential criterion, truth is no longer the only test.

I am not ready to say this is the only cause of what we call wokeness. Birth rates, elite overproduction, social media, and ordinary status competition are all in the mix. I am willing to say this much. If an institution exists to tell the truth, you should notice when a growing share of the people inside it will not say that purpose comes first.

Science should discriminate on the basis of truth. Law should discriminate on the basis of justice. Education should discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Once they select for social equity instead, the primary function falls by the wayside.

That last line is Liam’s. Ask what the shop is for. Then ask whether its hiring and punishment rules still serve that.

Glenn Beck: Why Lake America Broke the Room

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 1 Sep 2026 11:58:33 -0500

Glenn Beck’s clip is not about the depth of the lake. It is about who treated names as a moral project for fifteen years, and what happens when the other side picks up the same pen.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Thursday’s order is already on this blog. Federal maps are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to. Mark Carney said the name is four hundred years old. Doug Ford put up a sign: “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.” Kathy Hochul said New York will not be calling it that. Google followed the U.S. government for U.S. users.

Beck’s question is the one after the press release. If names were sacred last decade, why is this one a joke?

Sports is where the rule was rehearsed. The Washington Redskins became the Football Team, then the Commanders. Dan Snyder called the old name a badge of honor. Sponsors and the league decided otherwise. Cleveland’s Indians, a name since 1915, became the Guardians. Edmonton’s Eskimos became the Elks. Stanford’s Indians became the Cardinal. High schools retired Indians, Warriors, Redskins, Squaws. The Braves, Chiefs, and Blackhawks kept their names and took the same lectures. The lesson sold to the country was simple: the people who feel harmed get to decide whether the name stays.

Then the brands. Aunt Jemima became Pearl Milling Company. Uncle Ben’s became Ben’s Original. Eskimo Pie became Edy’s. Land O’Lakes took the woman off the box and kept the land. The Dixie Chicks became the Chicks. Lady Antebellum became Lady A. The Boy Scouts became Scouting America. Splash Mountain became Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The products did not move. The labels did.

Then the rest of the map. Squaw Valley became Palisades Tahoe. Dixie State became Utah Tech. Yale renamed a college. Princeton took Woodrow Wilson off a school. In code the master branch became main. Master bedroom became primary bedroom. Manhole became maintenance hole. Homeless became unhoused. Convict became justice-involved individual.

Then the bases, with the force of statute. In 2023 the Army retired nine Confederate names: Bragg to Liberty, Benning to Moore, Hood to Cavazos, Gordon to Eisenhower, Lee to Gregg-Adams, Rucker to Novosel, Polk to Johnson, Pickett to Barfoot, A.P. Hill to Walker. In 2025 the words came back with different honorees — a World War II paratrooper, a World War I corporal, a Medal of Honor sergeant from Mogadishu. The posts sound like they used to. On paper they do not honor the same men. The job was paid for twice.

Beck’s line is that Ottawa is now using the argument that was ruled out of bounds when Snyder used it. Age of the name. Honor. Ordinary people already know what to call the thing.

The heat on Lake America has a few sources. It is a shared Great Lake. About half the surface is Canadian. Ontario comes from Wendat — beautiful lake, big lake — and predates both countries. The Seneca Nation called the order disrespect. Wendat Grand Chief Pierre Picard called it an attempt to erase history. That is the same moral language used on the teams and the syrup bottles, now aimed at a president the speakers already oppose.

The timing does the rest. The order talks heritage and volume. The week was a collapsed trade talk, tariffs, Ford telling Trump to kiss his ass, and a post that the United States did not expect much more business with Ontario. The Gulf of America already happened. This one reads like a poke. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Lieu, Stephen King called it childish, an embarrassment, Saturday Night Live. Nobody thinks the water moved. The complaint is that the presidency spent an afternoon renaming a neighbor’s shoreline for a news cycle.

There is also the rule written in the last decade: names are never “just names.” Names teach. Names wound. Institutions must update the letterhead. Once that is the rule, there is no clean exemption because the new president is vulgar or the target is Canada. Either the Board on Geographic Names is a moral actor or it is a filing cabinet. It was treated as a moral actor when the names were Confederate or commercial. The cabinet still works when the other party holds the key.

A syrup rebrand lives on a shelf. A base renaming lives on a gate most people never drive through. “Lake America” on Google Maps in Buffalo is the argument made physical. That is why Ford built a two-story sign.

The lake does not care. Most people who fish it will not change what they say at the diner. In 1917 this country called sauerkraut liberty cabbage. In 2003 the House cafeteria called French fries freedom fries. In 2006 the menus put French fries back. No ceremony. Language is a habit. Almost nobody who holds it works at Interior.

The inconsistency remains. If a four-hundred-year-old name is sacred when a prime minister says it, it needed a better defense when a team owner said it. If the last decade of renames was required justice, this one is the same species of act — a government deciding what the official paper will say. The noise is about why that species only counts in one direction.

The water did not move. The rule did.

The Rubin Report Interview Britain Won’t Air on the BBC

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0500

Dave Rubin sat down with Andrew Gold, the former BBC filmmaker who now hosts Heretics. The title of the episode is the claim: if this is not stopped, the UK’s fall is irreversible.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Gold starts with psychology. Political tribes and social-media loops, he says, run on the same machinery as cults: belonging, status, conformity. Intelligent people get trapped because the group rewards the approved answers. People usually leave only after the group mistreats them. October 7 did that for some progressive Jews.

Then the machinery that is supposed to keep the argument open.

The Online Safety Act already treats a wide range of posts as police business. Forces in England and Wales have recorded thousands of arrests a year for social-media communications. After the Southport riots, a national unit was set up to flag protest-related posts to local police. Gold’s specific warning is the next step: platforms being pushed to favor “trustworthy” media — in practice the BBC and a few other legacy outlets — over independent YouTube channels. Age checks and ID verification would make that preference easier to enforce.

That is the speech half.

The population half is the scale of recent inflows, not last year’s dip. Official net migration peaked near 944,000 in the year to March 2023. It has since fallen to 171,000 in 2025, but the stock remains: about 13 million UK residents were born overseas, roughly one in five. Small-boat detections were still 33,000 in the year to June 2026. Even some politicians on the left now talk about stronger borders. The bottleneck is removal.

The rules that slow deportation are mostly not EU law. They come from the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights. Cases go to the court in Strasbourg. The UK left the EU and is still in the Convention; the Human Rights Act writes those rights into British courts. Sweden is in both systems.

Two articles do most of the work. Article 3 is absolute: if a court finds a real risk of torture or inhuman treatment in the destination country, the person cannot be sent — including to a third country that might send them on. That is the same non-refoulement idea in the UN Refugee Convention. Article 8 is the more common delay: family and private life. A partner, a child in school, or long residence can outweigh the public interest in removal after a balancing test. Appeals stack. Origin states often refuse travel documents. The Rwanda flights were stopped on those grounds. Leaving Brussels did not leave Strasbourg.

EU members have a second layer. The Pact on Migration and Asylum began applying in June 2026. It requires screening and fingerprinting at the external border, a fast-track procedure for weak claims, and a rewritten Dublin rule: the first country of entry is still usually responsible, and secondary movement is supposed to send the person back. Solidarity — relocating a few thousand people a year from Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta — is small next to the arrivals. A new Return Regulation tries to make refusal orders enforceable across the bloc and allows “return hubs” in third countries. Member states still run their own work and family visas. What they cannot do is opt out of the common asylum and return machinery, or out of Strasbourg sitting on top of it. Faster procedures on paper still stop when a court finds an Article 3 risk or an Article 8 family claim.

Sweden is the comparison Gold uses.

Sweden spent decades as a high-trust, low-violence country and then took a large, fast wave of asylum seekers, especially around 2015. Foreign-born residents are now about a fifth of the population. The official crime agency, Brå, has found foreign-born people and Swedish-born people with two foreign-born parents over-represented among crime suspects — still elevated after controls for age, sex, income, and education. Police describe “vulnerable areas” with parallel social structures, clan networks, shootings, and bombings. Tens of thousands of people are linked to criminal networks. Children have been recruited as shooters because they face lighter sentences. That is not the whole country. It is a concentrated pattern that did not exist at this scale before the inflows.

Gold’s argument is that the two tracks run together. Closing the information space makes the demographic change harder to name. Naming it without the legal tools to reverse course is what he means by irreversible.

The tape is the argument. The numbers are the background.

A Meme with a Source

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:42:08 -0500

Trump posted a ranking of the presidents. He put his own portrait in a box that did not exist in 1948.

That box is the whole argument. The rest of the chart is an old grid with a few new names dropped in.

Here's what the President posted on Truth Social on August 27, 2026.

The left will hate the self-portrait. That is easy to predict. The more useful objection came from the right.

Ben Shapiro: the list is crap even if you ignore the top box. Wilson was one of the worst. FDR stretched the Depression. Coolidge was strong and Harding was fine. Grant ran Reconstruction. Reagan is missing.

Here's what he said on X/Twitter:

This list is total crap. Put aside Trump at the top. Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst presidents in American history; FDR lengthened the Great Depression by eight years; Calvin Coolidge was awesome and Harding was fine; Grant oversaw reconstruction; and Ronald Reagan and… pic.twitter.com/KmSSwDpiJk
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 28, 2026

I like Shapiro. I also think he is grading a different test than the page Trump copied.

This is a meme built on a real ranking. November 1, 1948. Life magazine. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to sort the presidents they had into five buckets: Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, Failures.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the last man on that list because he was the last finished presidency they could judge. Truman was sitting in the office, so his record was incomplete. William Henry Harrison and James A. Garfield were left off because they died almost immediately. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes had not happened yet.

That is why they are missing. Not because someone forgot Reagan.

What Trump added is small. A new top row for himself. Clinton in Average. Biden, Obama, and Carter in Failures next to Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding.

That last choice is the tell. Carter, Obama, and Biden are the Democrats he runs against in public. They belong in the ditch if the chart is a campaign poster.

Clinton does not. Trump spent years calling him a crook and a disgrace and still put him with James Madison and William McKinley instead of with Obama. The two men have been useful to each other since the 1990s — golf, fundraisers, the occasional kind word after a funeral. The ranking follows that pattern more than it follows party.

If this were only “Democrats fail,” Clinton would be in the bottom row. He is not. The habit is personal. The people Trump still fights go to Failures. The one he has made his peace with stays in the middle.

The next morning he posted a second graphic: five who built the country and five who broke it. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Reagan, Trump on one side. Buchanan, Wilson, Carter, Obama, Biden on the other..

Source: @realDonaldTrump Truth Social

Reagan comes back. Wilson does not. Thursday he is Great. Friday he is bureaucracy.

That second post is the argument. The first post is the 1948 page with extra names.

Woodrow Wilson is the name that splits the room, and it should. My own problem with him is the racism. He resegregated the federal government. That is not a footnote.

1948 still put him with Lincoln and Washington. The historians were looking at the war and the peace he tried to design after it. The League of Nations was his idea. The war he presided over was sold as the war to end all wars. We still live in the architecture that followed, including the United Nations.

Both of those things can be true at once. He used the office. He also used it to write Jim Crow into the civil service.

Michael Knowles talked about the list on Friday and said it is not an ideological ranking. It is a list of men who knew how to wield power. Wilson could. FDR could. Lincoln could.

That is closer to what Schlesinger was measuring. Not who you would vote for now. Who bent the government when the country was at a turning point.

Lincoln sits with the Founders on almost every one of these charts because he held the Union together. The cost was federal power over the states that claimed a right to leave. People who care about that cost are not wrong to keep saying it. It is the same power question Knowles is asking.

I caught the origin of the meme on PBD’s Friday show. Once you see the 1948 page, the omissions stop looking random.

Source: Bill Downs, War Correspondent

Favorite and effective are different questions. 1948 was answering the second. The extra box at the top is answering the first.

Who are yours? Who do you think actually used the office?

Truth Before Narrative

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:01:54 -0500

We are a little more than two months from the midterms. When the policy argument is thin, some Democrats reach for the older one: America is still that country. The one that hangs people from trees.

Jon Ossoff talks as if the Klan is on the ballot in Georgia. Ayanna Pressley says the Confederacy is alive and well. Jasmine Crockett points to “mysterious deaths” in Mississippi — people “found, hung or otherwise” — and says we can no longer rely on the Justice Department to look. The implication is not subtle. Vote our way, or you are choosing the noose.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Ben Shapiro spent part of a recent show on the cases that keep getting cited as proof. His column on the same argument is here.

Ms. Rachel is Rachel Accurso, the toddler YouTube host behind Songs for Littles. About 20 million subscribers, a Netflix kids show, the pink headband and overalls. Parents of two-year-olds know her as the person who teaches Wheels on the Bus. She started the channel in 2019 after her own son had a speech delay. She has a master’s in music education from NYU. TikTok is one of her platforms. It is not the source of the following.

She has spent the last couple of years putting politics in the same feed as the nursery rhymes. Gaza. ICE detention. In March she told NBC News, “I am political.” This week she put the hanging claim in its cleanest form: please listen to the Black community. Black people don’t hang themselves from trees. There have been at least seven this year.

The history that sentence is pointing at is real. The medical examiner reports and the surveillance footage are also real. Those two things are not required to cancel each other. They just have to be looked at in the same paragraph.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Here are the specific ones Shapiro named.

Raleigh, North Carolina — August 15, 2026

A 32-year-old Black man was found hanging from a tree in a parking lot off South McDowell Street, near Nash Square and a Caribbean festival. Police did not release his name. His mother told them he had a history of mental-health problems.

Raleigh Police Chief Rico Boyce, who is Black, laid out the video timeline at a press conference two days later. At 1:59 p.m. cameras show the man walking toward the tree alone, carrying an electrical cord. Between 2:06 and 2:07 p.m. the footage captures the incident. No one else is in the frame. A nearby worker spots the body at 2:25 p.m. and 911 is called.

Boyce: “Investigators have found no evidence indicating that another person caused or contributed to the young man’s death… Our investigation confirms that this is a suicide.” The case went to the North Carolina medical examiner for the final manner-of-death finding. News & Observer coverage and the city’s own press conference are the primary records.

Demartravion “Trey” Reed, 21 — Cleveland, Mississippi — September 15, 2025

Reed, a Black freshman at Delta State University, was found hanging from a tree near the pickleball courts on campus. The Bolivar County coroner said there were no lacerations, contusions, broken bones, or injuries consistent with an assault.

The Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office performed the autopsy on September 17. Cause of death: hanging. Manner of death: suicide. Toxicology was pending at the time of the announcement. The files were also sent to the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office for review.

The family commissioned an independent autopsy funded through Colin Kaepernick’s initiative. As of later reporting, the family said they still had not received a final public report from that exam, and some relatives later acknowledged Reed had sent suicidal texts the night before. Official ruling from the state medical examiner remains suicide. Mississippi Free Press and Reuters carried the examiner’s statement.

Juliana Umba Nzita, 16 — Charlotte, North Carolina — May 8, 2026

A Congolese immigrant. A man walking his dog found her hanging from a tree on the grounds of a predominantly Black church, United House of Prayer for All People. A ratchet strap was around her neck. A small blue chair from her family’s home was on the ground nearby. She had been reported missing days earlier.

The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner ruled suicide within three days after a physical examination that found no defensive wounds and no signs of physical or sexual assault. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police closed the case four days after that. No full autopsy was performed. Her phone was never recovered. The man who found her was not interviewed.

The family disputes the ruling and has pursued an independent autopsy. Police have said a thorough examination showed no evidence of foul play. The Charlotte Observer investigation is the most detailed public account.

To’Nea Nicole Miller, 27 — Miami, Florida — June 18, 2026

From Flint, Michigan. Found dead near Gwen Cherry Park. Social media and the local NAACP described her as hanging from a tree. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office statement did not use that phrasing in its first release.

Sheriff’s investigators and the county medical examiner found no evidence of foul play. The death was described as “consistent with a suicide.” Her belongings were with her. No signs of violence.

Her sister rejected the finding in public: she loved life too much. An aunt who spoke with the investigator and the medical examiner told NBC 6 she accepted the suicide determination. The sheriff’s office closed the case. Snopes and NBC Miami summarized the official statements.

Tasia Fortune, 29 — Jackson, Mississippi — August 3, 2026

This is the one Shapiro noted was still outstanding.

A mother of four. Found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house on the 500 block of Road of Remembrance in a predominantly Black west Jackson neighborhood. Neighbors called police. The body had apparently been there for days.

Jackson police listed the case as a death pending investigation. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office performed an autopsy on August 12. As of late August, no official cause or manner of death had been released. Police have not said they suspect foul play. A man who shares a child with Fortune was arrested on an unrelated gun charge and told investigators they had argued; he denied involvement in her death.

Her mother has said she did not do this to herself. A city councilman asked the U.S. Attorney for a federal look and called it a murder before any examiner had ruled. Mississippi Today and CNN noted the pending status.

Shapiro’s larger observation sits underneath the list. Thousands of people in this country die by hanging every year. White suicide rates, including hanging, run higher than Black rates. That does not tell you what happened in any single backyard or churchyard. It does tell you that “Black people don’t hang themselves from trees” is a statement about history and about fear, not a statement about forensic possibility.

The families in several of these cases have every reason to want a second look. Mississippi’s lynching record is not a rumor. A video of a man walking alone toward a tree with a cord in his hand is also not a rumor.

The argument, this close to an election, is which of those two facts you are required to ignore in order to keep the story intact.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Relevant Links

Why Democrats Need America To Stay Racist — Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire

Ms. Rachel speaks out on Black hanging cases as Raleigh death is declared suicide — Fox News

Video confirms man’s death in downtown Raleigh was a suicide, police chief says — News & Observer

Raleigh officials respond to skepticism over downtown death — Axios Raleigh

Autopsy: Trey Reed’s hanging death at Delta State was a suicide — Mississippi Free Press

Autopsy rules death of Black man found hanging from tree in Mississippi as suicide — Reuters

Timeline: Trey Reed’s hanging death at Delta State University — Mississippi Free Press

What we know about Juliana Nzita hanging death in Charlotte — Charlotte Observer

Family and community question suicide ruling in death of Black teen found hanged in Charlotte — TheGrio

Posts claim Black woman Tonea Miller was lynched in Miami. Here are the facts — Snopes

Sister disputes that woman found dead near Miami park died by suicide — NBC 6

Officials ID woman found hanging behind a Jackson home — Mississippi Today

Tasia Fortune funeral held amid Mississippi hanging investigation — CNN

What we know about the death of Tasia Fortune in Mississippi — AP / U.S. News

Enes Kanter: Where was the threat?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0500

Chicago Sky owner Michael Alter banned Enes Kanter Freedom from Wintrust Arena after this past Sunday’s Fever game. The phrase he used was “a potential threat.”

The footage of the moment he is talking about is short.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Late third quarter. Natasha Cloud scores, celebrates, then walks toward the baseline. Freedom is sitting there in a shirt that reads “WOMAN noun. adult human female.” He stands. Arms out. One step toward the floor. Security fills the gap. He is walked out holding the shirt up for the building to read.

That is the act. This is how he framed it in a tweet:

“I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA! 🇺🇸”

Alter’s account is that Freedom had been chirping, that people in the seats said he started it, and that the night changed when he got up. “The security’s job isn’t to wait to see how far they get.” Fan code says you do not enter the court. On Wednesday he told OutKick that some threats do not get a warning, and he used shooting a gun as the extreme example.

The line he draws is the step. Front Office Sports has him saying Freedom “made himself into a threat” by standing, raising his arms, and taking a step toward Cloud, even if he did not cross the baseline. “The security people’s job is not to wait until a threat intensifies.” He said five security groups — arena, NBA, Sky, Fever, and Chicago police — agreed there was no alternative but to throw him out.

Freedom’s account is that he was cheering Sophie Cunningham, that Cloud told him she was not going to sleep with him, and that he stood to answer and to show the shirt. He says he never crossed the baseline.

The league is not issuing a league-wide ban. The Sky ban lasts until he can prove, to the Sky’s satisfaction, that he can sit in the building without being a potential threat.

Look at the clip, then the tweet, and ask the owner’s word against both.

The word against the tape

When I first saw the remark about the “threat,” my first question was: where’s the threat?

Then I saw the claim that he stepped toward Cloud. Kanter’s account and Alter’s account dispute whether he stepped onto the court or even crossed the baseline. I do understand they do not want spectators on the floor at all.

This is the shirt he had on.

Source: Capitol City Now

The WNBA has been around almost 30 years. First season was 1997. I stopped really paying attention to the NBA once Jerry Reinsdorf broke up the second three-peat Bulls team.

For most of those years the league chased a crowd. That part changed. Average attendance was about 6,600 a night in 2023. It jumped to about 9,800 in 2024, when Caitlin Clark arrived. In 2025 it set a record at about 11,150 a game and more than 3 million for the season. At this year’s All-Star break it was up again, about 12,500 a night. Sunday’s Fever-Sky game on NBC did 3.31 million viewers, the most-watched regular-season game since the first year.

The building can fill. That is not the same thing as the product looking like a league.

I remember the Sky’s parade in 2021, after they beat Phoenix. Chicago did the route. It was not the same city-stopping event the Blackhawks, the Cubs, or the White Sox got when those teams won. The attention was thinner. That is the gap I mean. A title parade that does not sit next to those others is still a parade. It is also a measure of where the Sky sit in this town.

I feel as if the activism on display since 2020, and the fight over who is eligible to play, is not helping the legitimacy they spent those years asking for. Crowds came anyway. The league spent the extra attention on a culture argument the rulebook still will not finish. Virtue signaling over LGBTQ politics is not a side show. It is what keeps getting put on the floor. A bigger audience does not make that look more serious. It makes it louder.

The more players protest the national anthem, and the more the league cannot say what a woman is, the more the night becomes the argument instead of the game.

Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve made that plain on August 2. Against Cunningham and the Fever she coached in a light-blue shirt that read “Trans Kids Belong.”

Source: LA Times

A coach wearing that on the sideline does not help. The shirt in the seats and the shirt on the bench are the same fight. Only one of them got a man banned as a potential threat.

Neither does a fan throwing a dildo on the floor. That started last summer, not this week. On July 29, 2025, in Atlanta, someone tossed a neon-green sex toy onto the court during Dream-Valkyries. A meme-coin crowd later claimed some of the throws as a stunt to get attention for a token. Copycats followed. On August 5 it bounced near Sophie Cunningham in Los Angeles. She told people to stop before someone got hurt. The league condemned it. A few people were arrested. It quieted down. It came back this month, including around the Sky. Cloud was already complaining about toys on the floor the night before Freedom sat courtside.

That is not protest. It is a bit that treats the game as a joke and then wonders why the game looks like one.

Lake America

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:30:00 -0500

President Trump signed an order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Watch the signing: [VIDEO]

This is the same play as January 20, 2025, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

A lot of people lost their minds over that one. I shrugged. The water did not move. Mexico did not agree. What changed was the name on U.S. federal maps.

Same limits here. The order tells the Dept. of Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the U.S. geographic names database within 30 days. Federal maps and documents are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to.

Text of August 27 executive order renaming Lake Ontario.

On paper, the reason is heritage. The order says the deepest water and most of the volume sit on the American side, that the United States spends the most protecting the Great Lakes, and that this follows the same “names that honor American greatness” policy as the Gulf.

What put the pen in his hand this week was the trade fight.

Talks with Canada collapsed last week. Washington put 50 percent tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian goods. Ottawa answered with counter-tariffs. Ontario Premier Doug Ford told Trump he could “kiss my ass.” Trump called him “Flunky Ford,” then posted that the United States was considering the rename “in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

Yesterday he followed through.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The White House (@whitehouse)

The written reason is volume, investment, and American history. The timing is a tariff war that turned personal, aimed at the one Great Lake that shares its name with a Canadian province.

The lake is the same. The argument is about who gets to name it.

The Real Reason Gas Stays Expensive

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0500

Tom Ellsworth of the PBD Podcast walks through the numbers in Numbers Scream Ep. 35: The Real Reason Your Gas Is So Expensive.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The default story is the Iran conflict. Crude did jump when the war started—from the low $60s toward $90. Ellsworth’s point is that this is not why the pump stays near $4.

What the driver pays is set in the middle, between the well and the station. That number is the crack spread.

The 3-2-1 crack is three barrels of oil turned into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of diesel. Historically that spread sat at $10–$20 a barrel. In this episode it is $64. It hit a record $70 in mid-July.

WTI around $80 plus a $64 crack already puts the product cost near $144 before distribution, taxes, and the station cut. A normal crack produced a national average of about $2.38–$2.50. The current spread produces about $4. California is in the mid-$5s. Indiana is lower because of taxes and rules, not cheaper molecules.

The spread widened because refining capacity disappeared. Since 2019 the United States has lost about 1.2 million barrels a day. Seven plants went offline; three were in California. The rest are running near full tilt. Phillips 66’s refining margin roughly doubled. No new U.S. refineries are being built. The floor moved.

California is the clearest case. Emissions rules, billion-dollar retrofits, and taxes on the activity made plants uneconomic. High pump prices are treated as a lever: expensive gasoline pushes more people toward EVs.

Diesel matters more than most drivers notice. When distillate is tight, trucks and trains raise the cost of everything else.

Crude can fall and the pump can stay high if there is not enough refining to turn oil into fuel. The war moved the barrel. The crack spread is why the receipt did not follow it back down.

Yampolskiy on PBD Podcast: The Control Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:30:00 -0500

Patrick Bet-David sat down recently with Roman Yampolskiy, the University of Louisville computer scientist who argues that general superintelligence is not a tool we will learn to steer. The claim is blunt: a 99.9999 percent chance it eventually ends humanity.

Here’s the full conversation: [VIDEO]

The number is what travels. The argument is narrower. Yampolskiy is not mainly talking about lost jobs or deepfakes. Those are still human problems. His point is that once you build an agent smarter than every person in every domain, control is not unsolved. It is unsolvable.

A nuke is a tool. Someone still has to use it. Superintelligence, as he describes it, sets its own subgoals. Rational agents converge on the same moves: protect themselves, get more compute, more energy, more matter. If people are in the way, the system does not slow down. You do not count the ants before you pour the foundation.

Guardrails are for tools. Labs already strip them for testing. Models already lie, cheat tests, and route around refusals. If you cannot explain the weights, predict the next move, or contain the system, you are not in charge of it. At that point the race, the surplus, and the job market are secondary. If superintelligence exists anywhere, he says, it takes the rest of the board.

He still likes narrow AI. Tutors. Diagnostics. Software. The line is general superintelligence. Keep the tools. Do not build the replacement.

Yampolskiy does not treat Elon Musk as a man who missed the risk. He treats him as a man who named it, then joined the build. Musk called advanced AI “summoning the demon” and funded safety research. Once he decided the race was happening without him, the only seat left was at the table. That is xAI.

Musk’s newer comments are not only about extinction odds. They are about money. He has told people not to squirrel away retirement savings for ten or twenty years because “it won’t matter.” AI plus humanoid robots, in his telling, flood the world with goods and services. Work becomes optional. Government checks become “universal high income.” If machines produce more than humans can consume, money itself fades. He has put an age of abundance on a roughly ten-year clock, said the real risk by 2036 may be deflation, and argued that without AI and robots the country is headed for bankruptcy on the current debt path.

Bet-David put that line on the table. Yampolskiy did not deny the economics. Free labor makes goods cheap. What he denied was the priority. If superintelligence arrives, he said, economic problems are the least of our concerns. Abundance assumes humans still receive the surplus. An uncontrolled agent has no reason to honor that.

Musk is running both stories at once: a 10 to 20 percent chance of annihilation, and an 80 to 90 percent chance anyone can have anything they can think of. Yampolskiy’s reply is that the second story treats the first as a rounding error.

The extra nines, and the retirement-account hot take, can wait. Point estimates that precise are part forecast, part rhetoric. Most lab researchers put p(doom) much lower, and post-scarcity is easier to describe than to govern. The harder point remains. Systems that cannot be fully explained are being raced anyway, and “control later” is being treated as a plan. Musk’s money argument makes that race look like a public good. Yampolskiy’s claim is that eight billion people never consented to the experiment.

From Closed Loop to Common Sense

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0500

I used to celebrate when a Black Democrat became a Republican. It felt like someone had broken a long-standing spell. Black voters have long delivered overwhelming, almost automatic support to the Democratic Party, often without serious internal debate. Crossing that line looked like genuine independence.

Earlier this year I declared myself an Independent. My own voting history is mixed. I’ve voted in Republican primaries in Illinois and I’ve pulled Democratic ballots more often than not. The consistent thread has been trying to choose the better person for the office, not simply the preferred party. That approach has never been perfect, but it was the standard I tried to follow.

Watching interviews with former Democrats, former progressives, or former Democrat Socialists has shifted what I value most. Some of that thinking comes from The Free Press interview with Sabrina Joy Stevens, and from other interviews shared on this blog. The important move is not necessarily joining the Republican Party. The important move is leaving a closed feedback loop that rarely produces real solutions. The people who walk away from that loop matter more than the party they eventually land in.

2020 gave the country a clear look at the “systemic racism” narrative in real time. Even during a pandemic, the story ran that “persons of color” were fed up and therefore entitled to destroy. Looting, vandalism, toppling statues of Confederate figures and Christopher Columbus, calls to defund the police — all of it was framed as necessary or at least understandable. From where I sat, none of it was a solution. It was performance dressed up as justice, and the country paid for it.

Those excesses, followed by the Biden-Harris years, helped produce the return of Donald Trump. Many of the same progressives who cheered the 2020 upheaval still treat Trump’s re-election as proof that America remains the problem. They have not updated the diagnosis.

What I celebrate now is simpler and more useful: people who return to common sense. The open question is whether their stories — how they noticed the contradictions, how they left the dominant narrative — will prompt others to examine it for themselves.

Illustration generated with Grok

Breaking the Closed Loop

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:50:05 -0500

Sabrina Joy Stevens spent nearly twenty years inside progressive activism—teaching, organizing, communications strategy, education reform, women’s rights, racial justice. She was not a bystander. She was a professional in what she later named Group Think, Inc.

Here is the Free Press conversation where she walks through how it ended: [VIDEO]

The rupture came in 2020. It was not one sudden conversion. It was the steady accumulation of contradictions that the ideology could no longer explain away. Progressives treated racism as a “deadly pandemic” while treating actual pandemic rules as optional when their preferred protests required it. The rhetoric stayed maximalist and urgent. The actions often looked unserious, selective, or counterproductive. The gap between the story and the results became impossible to ignore.

Stevens had absorbed the standard framework years earlier: systemic injustice, oppressors versus victims. Once that lens is locked, almost every event fits the narrative. Evidence that complicates it is secondary. Failures are blamed on deeper systems rather than on the strategies themselves. In 2020 that closed loop cracked. She began asking the question the ideology had trained her not to ask: if this worldview is true, why does it keep producing worse outcomes and more misery?

She quit her job in late 2020. The years that followed were quieter and more expensive. Income dropped. Friendships and professional networks thinned. She stepped out of the echo chambers and spent time reading the people and arguments that had previously been off-limits. Mental health improved. Anxiety, depression, and the constant sense of threat that had tracked with her deepest investment in the ideology began to ease. She has written about this directly: the further left her politics and social world had leaned, the worse she felt. Leaving did not make life easy. It made it freer.

That is the part that matters. The cost of exit was real—money, status, community. The gain was the recovery of agency. She no longer had to treat every disagreement as an existential threat or every social problem as proof that the designated oppressors were still in control. She could look at outcomes instead of purity, evidence instead of narrative loyalty.

Stevens still cares about civil rights and human dignity. She simply stopped believing that the current progressive toolkit is a reliable way to defend them. The Free Press interview does not turn the story into a victory lap or a culture-war scorecard. It is a clear firsthand account of how someone who spent two decades inside the movement finally decided the product no longer matched the label.

Changing your mind under social and professional pressure is rare for a reason. Most people stay. Stevens left. The break itself is the interesting part.

Matt Walsh on Gary, Memphis, and Zimbabwe

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0500

Matt Walsh’s new episode (Ep. 1828) is titled These American Cities Are Rapidly Turning into Zimbabwe.

Synopsis

Gary, Indiana is roughly 80 percent Black, spent nearly two weeks without power after the violent August 11 windstorm. Memphis, Tennessee — also majority Black — lost power to more than 100,000 households. Officials and activists quickly reached for the same explanation: environmental racism, systemic neglect, white supremacy.

Tennessee Rep. Justin Pearson immediately framed the Memphis outage as “another majority Black, working class city left in the dark.” Bernice King called the Gary blackout “part of a pattern” in which Black communities are expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable elsewhere. Walsh takes direct aim at both, treating their comments as the familiar reflex that turns every infrastructure failure into racial grievance while ignoring the fact that NIPSCO’s leadership includes Black executives (CEO Lloyd Yates among them), Gary’s mayor and city council are Black, and Memphis is similarly led. While crews worked in Gary, someone shot at a marked utility vehicle, briefly pausing restoration. He then draws the comparison that gives the episode its title: Zimbabwe and South Africa declined sharply after the end of white minority rule, with failing infrastructure, high unemployment, and poverty. The core argument is that racial grievance politics shields local leadership from accountability, producing the same patterns of dysfunction.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Criticisms

Walsh underplays the sheer scale of the damage. The storm produced near-hurricane winds and destroyed hundreds of poles and transmission structures; Gary and Portage took the heaviest hits, and utilities restore by grid hierarchy. A lawsuit and the governor’s investigation focus on NIPSCO’s vegetation management failures—ordinary negligence by a monopoly utility, not a racial plot. The Zimbabwe/South Africa parallel is too neat; those collapses involved specific corrupt policies and deeper historical factors, not simply the race of the rulers. Gary’s long decline—steel industry collapse, white flight, tax-base erosion—predates the current Black leadership. The racism narrative was real and reflexive, but it was not the only response.

The episode is strongest when it insists that competence and accountability matter more than ancestry. It is weaker when the story becomes almost purely racial.

Jesse Watters Primetime: El-Sayed’s First Trip into the Lion’s Den

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:30:00 -0500

Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat who narrowly won Michigan’s Senate primary earlier this month, sat down Monday night for what appears to be his first appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime. The setting was deliberate. El-Sayed is now the nominee in a pure toss-up race against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, a Trump-aligned candidate for the open seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. Polls remain tight—RealClearPolitics averages show El-Sayed up by less than a point, with individual surveys scattering in both directions—and the contest could help decide control of the Senate.

El-Sayed used the interview to test how his message travels outside the progressive primary electorate. He also made sure to land a few direct shots at Rogers for dodging debates and avoiding the same Fox stage.

Here’s the full segment: [VIDEO]

Watters opened by pressing El-Sayed on abolishing ICE, a wealth tax on fortunes above $100 million, Medicare for All, the ongoing conflict with Iran, biological males in women’s sports, medical decisions involving minors, and past comments about Sharia law. El-Sayed repeatedly tried to redirect toward gas prices, grocery costs, and health-care affordability, arguing those are the issues Michigan voters actually raise. He defended his progressive economic positions while framing many of the cultural questions as distractions.

The most pointed political moments came when El-Sayed turned the focus onto Rogers. He called his Republican opponent a “beta” for refusing to debate and for not appearing on Watters’ show, then claimed Watters agreed with the characterization. Watters laughed and denied the endorsement, but the line stuck. El-Sayed also accused Rogers of avoiding accountability while he himself walked into a hostile primetime environment.

The most viral exchange occurred when Watters asked whether El-Sayed supported certain gender-related surgeries for minors. El-Sayed responded by asking if Watters was circumcised, arguing that medical decisions for children are routinely left to families and doctors. Watters rejected the comparison. The interview closed with mutual interruptions and El-Sayed insisting the culture-war focus ignored the material pressures facing Michigan families.

The appearance itself was the story as much as any single answer. Progressive candidates rarely walk into this particular primetime space without heavy filtering. El-Sayed did it early, knowing the race is tight and that he needs to expand beyond the coalition that carried him through a close primary. Whether labeling Rogers a “beta” helps or hurts with the swing voters who will decide Michigan remains an open question. What it shows is a candidate willing to fight on the other side’s turf while keeping the spotlight on his opponent’s perceived avoidance.

The deeper argument on display is the same one running through most competitive races this cycle. One side diagnoses the country’s problems as concentrated private power and unaffordable basics. The other diagnoses them as the erosion of borders, categories, and limits. Both diagnoses find evidence. Neither has a monopoly on seriousness. Michigan will spend the next ten weeks deciding which feels more urgent. Last night was simply the first extended look at how El-Sayed intends to make his case in the open.

Mr. Beat vs. Matt Walsh on the Civil War

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:25:47 -0500

Mr. Beat posted a reaction video last week titled Matt “The Confederacy Was Based” Walsh.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

It responds directly to Matt Walsh’s Real History episode, “What Schools Don’t Teach You About the Civil War.”

Walsh’s documentary challenges the simplified school version of the war. He emphasizes Robert E. Lee’s tactical skill (especially at Chancellorsville), the South’s industrial disadvantages, the pre-war legal ambiguity around secession, and the claim that ordinary soldiers on both sides were rarely motivated primarily by slavery. The film presents the Confederacy as a complex, tragic project rather than pure villainy.

Mr. Beat, a former history teacher, treats much of that framing as Lost Cause revisionism. He grants Lee’s ability at Chancellorsville but notes that one battle does not erase Gettysburg, Vicksburg, or Appomattox. On the central issue, he points to the secession declarations themselves. South Carolina’s 1860 document repeatedly centers northern hostility to slavery. Mississippi’s is even more explicit: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” These texts were written by the people doing the seceding, before the first shots were fired. They are harder to dismiss than later interpretations.

On secession’s legality, Mr. Beat leans on the Supreme Court’s 1869 decision in Texas v. White, which declared the Union “indestructible.” That ruling is still the leading case. But it came four years after Appomattox. By then the war was over and the victors controlled the institutions. Before 1861 the constitutional status of secession was genuinely unsettled—no Supreme Court precedent clearly forbade it. Compact theory had a real pedigree on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. A pre-war decision would have carried far more weight as contemporaneous authority. The 1869 opinion closed the legal door after the fact; it does not prove what the Constitution clearly meant in December 1860.

The stronger evidence for the role of slavery remains those primary secession documents. They predate the fighting and speak for themselves.

The two videos sit in clear tension. Walsh wants viewers to reject the cartoon version that treats the Confederacy as uniquely evil. Mr. Beat wants viewers to notice when that skepticism slides into selective emphasis. Both are worth watching.

Matt Walsh’s documentary: [VIDEO]

The Civil War is still one of the few historical events that functions as a live political argument. The basic facts are not seriously disputed. The weighting and moral framing remain contested. These two videos make the competing frames unusually clear.

Far Left Wins Primary. Florida Stays Red.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:36:16 -0500

Last Friday I wrote about the Florida primaries and Angie Nixon’s upset: Florida Primaries: Red State, Pink Megaphone.

This short Valuetainment clip frames the same result as evidence that “the far left is winning”: [VIDEO]

The Governor’s Race

On the Republican side, Byron Donalds cleared the field with about 48 percent. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins finished second around 25 percent. James Fishback, the loudest and most confrontational challenger, finished around 10 percent. Donalds is now the heavy favorite against Democrat David Jolly in November. Florida is no longer a swing state, and a Trump-endorsed Black Republican is positioned to become the first elected Black Republican governor in American history.

Donalds refused to debate his primary opponents, including Fishback. The Florida GOP set steep thresholds—polling support, fundraising, and donor numbers—that only Donalds met. He was blunt about it: the other candidates were stuck in single digits and had not earned a shared stage. Giving them airtime, in his view, would only elevate campaigns that had failed to build real support.

Fishback pushed hard for debates, showed up at Donalds events with a bullhorn, and used inflammatory language (calling Donalds a “DEI hire” and a “slave” to donors). The state party eventually rescinded Fishback’s invitation to official events. DeSantis publicly called the lack of a debate a “farce.” Donalds’ decision was pure front-runner calculus. When you lead by a wide margin and the other side is polling in the low teens or single digits, a debate is a gift to the trailing candidates. It risks elevating fringe rhetoric without changing the outcome. Donalds chose not to take that risk. The primary results validated the strategy.

Implications of Nixon’s Victory over Vindman

On the Democratic side the story is different. State Rep. Angie Nixon, who joined the Democratic Socialists of America during the campaign, beat Alexander Vindman by roughly 12 points despite being outspent on the order of 16-to-1. Vindman had the national profile from the first Trump impeachment, the fundraising machine, and the conventional “electable” résumé. Nixon had the energy of the Democratic primary electorate.

That is the real signal. Inside closed Democratic primaries, organized progressive and socialist voters can still overpower money and institutional preference. Nixon’s platform—Medicare for All, high minimum wage, rent freezes, abolish ICE—was not softened for a general audience. Primary voters rewarded it anyway. Florida remains a difficult general-election state for any Democrat, especially one carrying the DSA label in a place full of people who fled actual socialist systems. Nixon faces an uphill race against Sen. Ashley Moody. But the primary result shows where the party’s most activated voters currently live: further left, more ideological, less concerned with the traditional electability arguments that once dominated Democratic strategy.

The philosophical tension is familiar. Primary electorates select for intensity and purity. General electorates select for broader coalition. When those two pull in opposite directions, parties lose. Democrats are testing how far they can stretch that gap in a state that has already moved decisively in the other direction.

College Students and Educational Indoctrination

At the top of the Valuetainment clip and in the surrounding discussion, the conversation turns to young voters and college campuses. The claim is familiar: universities have spent years framing capitalism as the source of most social problems and democratic socialism (or something close) as the moral alternative. Students absorb the framework in class, through campus organizations, and in the broader culture, then show up in primaries supporting candidates like Nixon.

One of the guests pushed back with an important caveat: not all students are taking this in. The actively radicalized group may still be a relatively small minority. Most students are focused on degrees, jobs, and navigating ordinary life. The loudest voices and most organized activists do not speak for every 19-year-old on campus.

That distinction matters. A small but highly activated minority can still punch above its weight inside low-turnout primaries. Intensity and organization often beat raw numbers. If the pipeline from certain campuses is producing even a modest cohort of voters who treat “democratic socialist” as a positive label rather than a liability, those voters can decide Democratic primaries—especially when the rest of the electorate is less engaged. Nixon’s win over a better-funded moderate is one data point in that pattern.

The larger question remains whether that minority is growing, stable, or already peaking. Campuses are not monolithic, and many students resist the radical messaging. But the ones who do absorb it tend to be the ones who show up, organize, and vote in primaries. In a closed primary system, that is often enough to move the outcome. Florida just demonstrated the difference between a party’s most activated slice and the broader electorate that will decide the general election.

You can watch the whole PBD Podcast from last Friday here: [VIDEO]

Color-Blind Law, Later Rules: Matt Walsh’s Real History of the Civil Rights Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0500

In May I posted the trailer and a brief note: as always, I would withhold judgment until I actually saw it. I later watched the episode on DailyWire.com. I’m glad the full thing is finally on YouTube.

Matt Walsh’s Real History episode is the kind of thing this blog has always been for: a video that refuses the schoolbook version of a sacred American story. The title is The Real History of the Civil Rights Movement, Part 1: “A New Constitution.” His pitch is straightforward. Since the 1990s, classrooms have turned Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks into saints.

Almost everything in that telling, he says, is incomplete or wrong. Who funded the movement? How non-violent was it? How racist was 1950s America, really? Did the 1964 Civil Rights Act help Black Americans, or did it rewrite the Constitution in ways we still live with?

Those are fair questions. Some of the answers are fair. Others are stretched, selective, or wrong. History is not a morality play.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Since this is now on YouTube, I can feed it to my A.I. assistant, pull the main points, and note the holes in Walsh’s narrative.

What he gets right, or at least closer to right

Rosa Parks was not a random tired seamstress who one day decided she’d had enough. She was a longtime NAACP activist. Organizers had already considered other plaintiffs, including Claudette Colvin. They chose Parks because she would present well. The famous photograph of her on an integrated bus was taken later, after the boycott succeeded, and the white man behind her was a reporter. That is not a secret. Serious histories have said it for decades. Treating it as a shocking reveal is the weak part of Walsh’s presentation. The underlying fact does not make the Montgomery law just. It does mean the event was a planned legal challenge, not a spontaneous outburst. Civil rights litigation has always worked that way. Plessy was a test case too.

King’s inner circle included Stanley Levison, who had been a significant financial figure for the Communist Party USA in the 1940s and early 1950s. The FBI had informants on that. J. Edgar Hoover used it to justify extensive surveillance of King, including the wiretaps that also captured King’s personal life. Levison appears to have broken with the party by the late 1950s. There is no good evidence that King was a communist or taking orders from Moscow. King publicly rejected communism. Hoover’s obsession was real, and it was often unhinged. That does not mean the associations were invented.

King’s later years were more radical than the “I Have a Dream” excerpt most people hear. The 1967 Riverside Church speech called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He moved toward economic redistribution and the Poor People’s Campaign. The saintly, color-blind King of February assemblies is a later construction. The man himself was more complicated, and his personal life was messier than the holiday version.

On the 1940s and 1950s, the economic data is not the hellscape narrative. Black poverty fell sharply well before the 1964 Act. Thomas Sowell has been citing the numbers for years: from roughly 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. Black incomes and occupational standing rose with the wartime and postwar boom, the Great Migration, and tighter labor markets. That progress was real. It does not erase Jim Crow. It does mean the story that nothing improved until Washington passed a law is false.

Where the episode goes off the rails

The South in the 1950s was not “not that bad.” Legal segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the threat of violence were not media inventions. Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. Birmingham and Selma were not propaganda sets. Police dogs and fire hoses were used on children. Walsh is right that some protest tactics were designed for cameras and that some campaigns produced disorder. He is wrong if the implication is that the legal order being challenged was a minor inconvenience. Formal second-class citizenship in the South was a constitutional failure. Ending it was not a plot.

Calling Parks’ arrest “playacting” is the kind of overstatement that invites easy rebuttal. She was riding the bus home from work. She was told to give up her seat. She refused. The law was the injustice. That organizers wanted a good plaintiff does not turn the arrest into theater. The same logic would dismiss every carefully chosen lawsuit that has ever changed a statute.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as written, is largely a color-blind statute: no discrimination on the basis of race in employment, public accommodations, and federally funded programs. That is the part that actually enforced the 14th Amendment against states that had spent decades ignoring it. What came after is a different story. Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) and later agency interpretations turned “disparate impact” into a legal theory that treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination, even without intent. Affirmative action and racial preferences followed. That is a real constitutional and policy shift. It is not what the 1964 text plainly said. Walsh is on stronger ground when he talks about the administrative and judicial afterlife of the Act than when he treats the Act itself as the original sin.

The larger problem

The useful part of Walsh’s project is the refusal to treat the Civil Rights Movement as a completed morality play that cannot be examined. Icons are human. Movements have funders, tactics, and unintended consequences. The 1960s did not produce a color-blind society. They produced a new set of racial rules administered by bureaucracies and courts. Crime, family breakdown, and urban decline after the mid-1960s are also part of the record, even if causation is messy (welfare rules, deindustrialization, culture, and policing all matter).

The dangerous part is collapsing 1963 Birmingham into 2020s DEI, or treating the end of Jim Crow as if it were the beginning of “anti-whiteism.” Those are different things. One was the removal of legal caste. The other is a later ideology of group outcomes. You can defend the first without endorsing the second. You can criticize the second without pretending the first was a hoax.

The Constitution we actually have is the one after 1964, after Griggs, after decades of disparate-impact enforcement, and after the identity categories that followed. Whether that is an improvement on the 14th Amendment’s original promise of equal protection for individuals is the real argument. Walsh is useful when he forces that question. He is less useful when he treats every inconvenient fact about King or Parks as proof that the whole enterprise was illegitimate.

Watch the episode. Then read the statutes, the cases, and the economic series. The schoolbook version is incomplete. The revisionist version that just inverts the saints and villains is incomplete too. The interesting history is in the middle.

The About-Face: Moran on ABC’s Bubble

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:23:09 -0500

Terry Moran spent nearly three decades at ABC News. Last week he sat down with the hosts of The Fifth Column and said something most people inside the networks still won’t: [VIDEO]

Asked straight out whether ABC News is a liberal institution, Moran answered “Yes.” He didn’t blame individual bias so much as the absence of any real disagreement inside the building. “It’s because of lack of viewpoint diversity,” he said. “That was one of the problems in covering Trump. Nobody had voted for him.”

He described sending internal emails urging colleagues to cover Trump more fairly and getting quiet thank-yous from engineers and the occasional producer—people outside the on-air and senior editorial ranks. The bubble, he insisted, is real. Journalists who never encounter the worldview of the people who actually voted for Trump struggle to understand why those voters see someone like Stephen Miller as a defender of borders rather than a “world-class hater.”

A few days later Bill O’Reilly took the admission and placed it in a larger frame: [VIDEO]

O’Reilly does more than react to the new comments. He plays older clips of Moran from his ABC years, then pairs them with the 2025 social-media post that cost him the job. The contrast is deliberate. O’Reilly presents Moran as someone who spent years inside a newsroom that leaned hard against Trump, then crossed a line with an explicitly hostile characterization of the president and his top adviser, only to turn around later and diagnose the very institutional bias he once operated within. O’Reilly’s larger point remains the same: the corporate media fails the country less through outright invention than through systematic omission—stories that reflect well on Trump or Republicans get soft-pedaled or ignored; stories that reflect poorly on Democrats often vanish after a single cycle.

My own inquiry

Here is the post that ended Moran’s ABC career. He deleted it the morning after it went up, but screenshots survived:

Via @davidfolkenflik

The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism. Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy. But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller. It’s not brains. It’s bile. Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate. Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.

Moran spent decades at ABC. He covered Trump. He worked inside the newsroom he now describes as a liberal institution with almost no viewpoint diversity. Then he posted the lines above. Now, outside the building, he is candid about the bubble and the structural problem.

Why the about-face now?

Is this simply the clarity that comes with no longer needing to protect a paycheck and a prestigious title? Is it genuine second thoughts after seeing the consequences of the newsroom culture up close? Or is it something more calculated—an attempt to reposition himself once the network door closed? People change their public posture all the time when the incentives change. The interesting part is whether Moran’s new candor is a real reckoning with the limits of the institution he served, or just the latest version of a journalist adjusting to new circumstances.

Either way, the sequence is worth noticing: first the years inside the system, then the explicit attack that ended the career, then the public diagnosis of the very bias that shaped the coverage. The gap between those stages is what makes the two videos land differently when you watch them in order.

Watch the Fifth Column conversation for the confession. Watch O’Reilly for the older clips, the firing, and the indictment that follows. Then sit with the question of timing. The answer may say as much about how media careers work as it does about the media itself.

Florida Primaries: Red State, Pink Megaphone

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:53:43 -0500

I didn’t follow the recent Florida primaries closely. Among other races, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds won the Republican nomination for governor with about 48 percent in a crowded field. President Trump endorsed him early. Donalds is a Black Republican. If he wins in November, he would be the first Black Republican elected governor in American history. (During Reconstruction, P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana, a Republican, served briefly as acting governor after the sitting governor was impeached.) Florida is no longer a swing state. He is the heavy favorite against Democrat David Jolly, a former Republican congressman who switched parties.

He’s not the only Black Republican with a real shot this cycle. In Michigan, John James won the GOP nomination for governor. Michigan is more of a blue state than Florida, so his path is harder, but it’s a race worth watching.

What conservatives have been talking about this week is the Democratic Senate primary. This is a special election for the remainder of Marco Rubio’s term after he became Secretary of State. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed former Attorney General Ashley Moody to the seat in January 2025. State Rep. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat who joined the Democratic Socialists of America during the campaign, beat the well-funded former Army officer and national-security official Alexander Vindman. Vindman outraised her by a huge margin—roughly $16 million to under $1 million—and still lost. That tells you where the energy is on the Democratic side right now.

I’ve seen enough of Nixon’s clips to be tired of the act. Since the primary she’s tried to sound a little more moderate in interviews. So far it looks thin. Florida being as red as it is, she still has an uphill climb against Moody. Beating a better-funded, more “electable” candidate anyway shows the direction of the party’s base.

Nixon is not new to theatrical protest. In April, during the House vote on DeSantis’s mid-decade congressional maps, she marched the floor in a hot-pink jumpsuit with a matching pink bullhorn, shouting that the maps were “illegal” and a “violation of the Constitution.” The vote still passed 83-28. The House later reprimanded her. She and colleagues did a similar floor sit-in in 2022. Here’s one of the April clips: Fox News.

On Vindman: He was the National Security Council’s Ukraine director. He listened to the July 25, 2019, Trump-Zelensky call and later testified that Trump had improperly asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens (and Burisma) in connection with a White House meeting and military aid. Vindman reported the call internally as improper; he brought his twin brother, Yevgeny (Eugene) Vindman, an NSC lawyer, along when he went to the NSC’s top counsel. Alexander became a central witness in the first impeachment. After the Senate acquitted Trump, both brothers were removed from the White House in February 2020. Eugene later won a House seat in Virginia in 2024.

Here's a report from FOX 35 Orlando [VIDEO]

'We’ll Do It Live' With Andrew Cuomo

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:30:37 -0500

I didn’t share it at the time, but I found former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s May appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live podcast revealing. It’s timely now given the increased scrutiny of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role during the pandemic. Cuomo was a central figure then, before he resigned in his third term.

You can watch here: [VIDEO]

In the sit-down, O’Reilly asks the blunt question: are young people just stupid for buying socialism? Cuomo says they are young and the pitch is free buses, frozen rent, free food. O’Reilly replies that he was young once and never bought it.

Cuomo then walks through how he lost the New York mayor’s race. He was beaten in the Democratic primary by Zohran Mamdani, ran as an independent, and lost the general. He calls Mamdani a communist who never managed a candy store—a two-term legislator selling symbolism instead of government.

On the 2021 resignation, Cuomo treats it as a career under attack, not a confession. The attorney general’s harassment report and the nursing-home controversy, he says, gave the far left the opening they wanted. They wanted him out because he was “not far left enough”—ironic, he adds, after a career of being told he was too liberal. O’Reilly notes that his own people, including Letitia James and Kathy Hochul, helped take him out. Cuomo’s reply is the old line: if you want loyalty in politics, get a dog. Nobody wanted to stand up to the Me Too moment. He still presents himself as a moderate Democrat who got pushed out of his own party’s good graces.

On the pandemic, Cuomo does not dodge. Asked what he would change, he says everything: no airport screening, no tests, no quarantine facilities, no masks, and no laws that covered any of it. New York was first and there was no playbook. He still points to later CDC figures that ranked the state 38th in nursing-home death rate and argues the real crush was more than 100,000 sick people in the city with nowhere else to go. The daily briefings, he says, were an attempt to keep panic from becoming the second epidemic. He calls Fauci a man doing the best with what he knew at the time, even if he sounded like he knew everything.

The interview is less a redemption tour than a moderate Democrat watching his party get pulled further left than he is willing to go.

Excerpts of the Cuomo interview are on the We'll Do It Live Summer Special, Pt. 1 uploaded on Thursday. Other excerpts include KISS’s Gene Simmons, Glenn Beck, Chazz Palminteri, Victor Davis Hanson, and Anthony Scaramucci. If you have a little time, check it out here.

O’Reilly Takes On Ossoff’s Iran Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:37:17 -0500

Bill O’Reilly’s latest No Spin clip is short, pointed, and worth watching. [VIDEO]

On August 16, Sen. Jon Ossoff stood in Atlanta and accused the Trump administration of something grave: “lying a nation into war.” He listed premature victory claims, shifting statements about Iran’s nuclear program, and the record-long deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He blessed the sailors, then said they deserve competent leaders, “not fools who lie about the purpose and progress of war.” He added the personal shots—Trump sleeping through meetings, golfing, trading stocks, traveling with an aide.

O’Reilly’s reply is simple: Ossoff doesn’t know. The senator is repeating propaganda. The stated reasons for the Iran campaign are two and have not changed: no nuclear weapons for the mullahs, and the Strait of Hormuz stays open. Where, exactly, is the lie? On the Lincoln, Pentagon views are split. Ossoff was not there. Neither was O’Reilly. Mixed reports exist. That is not the same as a senator declaring, with certainty, that the sailors are being treated as pawns by liars.

The charge is not small. “Lying a nation into war” is the language of 2003. It implies the president and his defense secretary knowingly sold the country a false casus belli, then kept selling it after the facts changed. Ossoff’s timeline is specific: last year’s “obliterated” nuclear program became this year’s “imminent threat.” Day one of the war was “ahead of schedule.” Day four brought a victory declaration. Hegseth promised surrender, then a destroyed Iranian military, then every objective achieved. The war is now approaching six months. The Lincoln has been at sea without a real port call for 240-plus days—a modern Navy record. Families and some lawmakers describe shortages, morale problems, and worse. The Pentagon calls parts of that overstated. Both things can be true at once.

A senator is entitled to criticize a war that is not going as advertised. Prolonged carrier deployments, disrupted supply lines after the hit on Bahrain, and optimistic briefings that did not age well are fair subjects. Voters in Georgia will decide in November whether they want more of that voice. What is harder to defend is the leap from “the assessments were wrong or overstated” to “they treated citizens as fools and those who serve as pawns.” That requires knowing intent. O’Reilly is right that Ossoff has not produced the specific lie. He has produced a pattern of statements that look worse in hindsight.

This is where the political philosophy gets uncomfortable. Democracies do not fight wars with perfect information. Intelligence is incomplete. Commanders and presidents talk in the language of resolve because the alternative sounds like doubt. The public, meanwhile, is asked to accept hardship—higher prices, sailors gone for nine months—on the basis of claims they cannot independently verify. When those claims keep moving, trust erodes. That is not unique to this administration. It is the recurring problem of limited war in an open society. The people paying the price start asking whether the purpose was ever as clear as the speeches.

O’Reilly treats Ossoff’s speech as irresponsible theater from a man up for re-election. There is some of that. There is also a real question the speech raises even if the rhetoric is overheated: after six months, what is the definition of success, and who is still willing to say it out loud? O’Reilly himself has said the war has become personal for Trump and that something more decisive may be coming. That is a different conversation from “he doesn’t know.” Both men are performing. One is performing certainty about deception. The other is performing certainty that the deception claim is itself the deception.

The sailors on the Lincoln do not get to perform. They have been at sea longer than any modern crew. That fact does not require a conspiracy to be troubling. It only requires noticing it. A more readable version of this argument would drop the “uniquely despicable” and the “he doesn’t know” and just ask the question both sides keep talking around: what did we think we were buying on February 28, and what do we think we have now?