April 28, 2026

YES:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

SAY WHAT YOU WILL, BUT HIS CAMPAIGN IS CERTAINLY ENERGIZED:

Posted at 2:31 pm by Stephen Green

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The bougie nihilism that is killing America.

We now have an extraordinary situation where the university campus, once the great refiner of minds, seems to be indoctrinating the young with a fancy for violence. It seems that if you teach people that their self-esteem is the most sacred thing on Earth, and anyone who dents it deserves instant cancellation, then you will give rise to an army of the intolerant. That’s what we are witnessing, in the UK too: a style of politics that feels haughty, dogmatic and tinged with violence. From the trans lobby (‘Kill all TERFs’) to the orgy of Israelophobia that followed 7 October (‘Globalise the intifada’), silence through violence is the dream of those who LARP as progressive. A society where the educated openly clamour for the death of women and Jews is a society that is ill indeed. This is the jagged debris of cancel culture.

Ours is the age of bougie nihilism. That was brought home to me by Zohran Mamdani’s tweet about Saturday’s shooting. ‘Political violence is absolutely unacceptable’, said the New York City mayor. This is a man whose wife liked social-media posts that celebrated the most catastrophic act of political violence of this century so far: 7 October. This is a man who rubs shoulders with Hasan Piker, the leftie influencer who just last week was titillating the silver-spoon socialists of the keffiyeh classes by celebrating bank robberies and making excuses for Luigi Mangione’s murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Bougie nihilism has broken free of the quad and now infects even City Hall. Where next?

Jeffrey Blehar adds, “We Are Sometimes Blessed by the Arrogance of Fools:”

On Saturday, a heavily armed lunatic attempted to gate-crash the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington, D.C., Hilton, while the president and most of his senior administration were in attendance. Cole Allen — the gunman, whose name sounds like a shoe brand from the racks at Payless — was thankfully tackled by Secret Service agents almost instantly after he dashed past the first layer of security, and although he fired several shots, nobody was killed. (One agent was clipped in his bulletproof vest, but his gear kept him safe.)

A potential atrocity was instantly prevented. The most memorable image from Saturday’s WHCD will not be one of blood, or tears, or spectacularly televised violence; it will be that of a naked, hog-tied Cole Allen kissing the carpet as he lies prone with a Mylar blanket draped over his raggedy hindquarters to hide his shame. (Police had stripped him to search for weapons.)

I would have let him lie there myself, but then again, Allen exposed himself in a far funnier way: with his ridiculously cocksure manifesto, written in eager anticipation of a massacre. Leave aside for a moment (but only for a moment) the fact that Allen seems to have been deeply affected by Bluesky-like progressive rhetoric in labeling Trump and his administration a bunch of Epstein-associated rapist pedophiles. Instead, breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that this man was undone in the most Zoomer way possible — by his own unearned and undeserved belief in himself.

How on earth could Allen have become so radicalized?

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

LEFT CAN’T ABANDON ITS VIOLENCE: Richard Pollock says the Left will not, indeed cannot, abandon its addiction to deadly violence against its political opponent because it’s permanently embedded in its ideological DNA. Among much else, Richard cites this passage from Saul Alinsky, who literally wrote the Rules for Radicals:

“Alinsky felt the doctrine of revolutionary change means that ethical standards are not important. ‘That perennial question, ‘Does the end justify the means?’ is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?” (Italics in the original).

“Again, showing that ethics doesn’t govern the revolutionary activist, Alinsky counseled, ‘in war the end justifies almost any means,’ adding, ‘Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.'”

Alinsky’s rationalization for doing whatever the Left thinks it can get away with in its pursuit of absolute political power vividly reminds us that politics is downstream from morality, which is downstream from theology. If you are your own higher power, sooner or later you will practice “anything goes” as your morality.

Richard Pollock is particularly insightful on these matters as he came out of the same New Left that put the Democratic Party on the road to its present and growing fascination with revisiting the French Revolution, Stalin’s genocides, Mao’s purges, and so, so much more blood in the modern era. One of his first Substack columns was on this very topic and is well-worth re-reading today.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Mark Tapscott

MEANWHILE, IN THE MIDDLE EAST…:

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green

HARD DATA SHOWS CHURCH RESURGENCE, ATHEIST DECLINE: More data is showing up indicating that Christianity is no longer declining but rather growing among Americans, even as the atheist/agnostic/nones elements is moving downward, according to Rod Martin.

“Ryan Burge, statistician and professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, finds that the secular surge may not merely have stalled. It may be going into reverse. His numbers, based in part on the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study, show that the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular fell from 36.2 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent in 2023, 34.1 percent in 2024, and 31.8 percent in 2025,” Martin writes.

“Burge notes that the decline is statistically significant, and that the General Social Survey points in the same direction, with religious “Nones” down to just 25.2 percent in 2024. That doesn’t prove a full-scale revival. Not yet, anyway. But it does prove that the old story is dead,” Martin continues.

And Martin offers this spirited observation about the churches:

“There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.

“And they don’t. So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The ‘Jesus was a socialist community organizer’ crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.

“So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.”

Much, much more in this excellent column.

Posted at 1:33 pm by Mark Tapscott

HONEST WEIGHTS AND MEASURES: One major factor behind the confusing and complicated financial records of government at all levels in this country is the fact the most widely used accounting standards allow what amounts to bookkeeping sleights-of-hand concerning promised but unfunded future benefits. Check out my Washington Stand piece on Sheila Weinberg and Truth-in-Accounting (TIA).

Posted at 1:24 pm by Mark Tapscott

CHANGE: Columnist George Will Drops 50 Years of Support for Mass Migration.

Establishment oracle George Will has reversed himself after a career of praising mass migration, dating back to the Reagan administration.

Will’s sudden renunciation of establishment orthodoxy after 50 years of support for mass migration was signaled with a single adjective in his April 24 column, as he lamented slow population growth under President Donald Trump’s low migration policy:

There is one promising solution. Increasing skilled immigration into our nation [emphasis added].

Not “mass migration,” not even just “migration.” Will is now backing only “skilled migration.”

The shift to “skilled” is a big change for 84-year-old Will, whose carefully written nationwide op-ed columns have shaped Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Generation X since 1974.

His careful word choice of “skilled” implies a smaller-scale inflow of highly productive people who can complement, but not replace or sideline, the native wisdom, diligence, and productivity of America’s vast citizenry.

But Will has spent the last 50 years and eight presidencies praising the elite-engineered mass immigration that has changed the United States’ suburban station-wagon politics into a battleground for myriad counterproductive ethnic rivalries.

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people,” Milton Friedman once said. “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll