October 7, 2026

OVER THE FIVE PLUS DECADES I’VE BEEN CONSCIOUS OF POLITICS, I’VE COME TO BELIEVE THE PRIME CHARACTERISTIC NEEDED TO BE A LEFTIST IS TO HAVE YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR ABLATED AT BIRTH:  Humour and the British Green Party.

Posted at 3:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

THIS NEEDS TO BE SLAPPED DOWN HARD:  When you’re legally targeting a company for a small slogan on the box, this ceases to be a 2nd Amendment issue and becomes a 1st. But California isn’t new to this. They’re suing companies for making stickers about 3D printing. They’re going after parts kit retailers. They just passed a law forcing all 3D printers to include “gun blocking” technology that doesn’t exist yet. Once it does, every machine without it will be banned.

Posted at 2:28 am by Sarah Hoyt

THE RUDENESS AND CRUDENESS THAT PEOPLE SEE IN TRUMP IS JUST THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED:  If you make things unspeakable, you give massive power to those willing to vocalize them.  When The Frogs Come Up.

Posted at 1:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

THINGS CAN GET MASSIVELY WORSE:  Don’t Make This a ‘Mid’ Midterm. In the interest of not losing these upcoming midterms, let’s review some key issues that should decide the matter and dispense with the current loser talk.

It’s almost unbelievable how much worse they were just three years ago, from my personal POV. But rightly or wrongly I feel like we need eight years of victories (at least) and a complete restructuring of the Democrats just so some of us mouthy people don’t end up with bullets in the back of the skull.

Posted at 12:31 am by Sarah Hoyt

October 6, 2026

HAHA, WINNER INDEED.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 11:40 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, IT’S THE ATLANTIC:

Posted at 10:36 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JUST DO IT: President Trump Approves Execution of Fort Hood Mass Murderer Nidal Hassan. “Hasan — who laughably acted as his own attorney — was tried and found guilty in 2013 and sentenced to death. Now, finally, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has requested permission and President Trump has approved the execution of the useless oxygen thief who’s been needlessly living at taxpayer expense for the last 17 years.”

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 9:50 pm by Stephen Green

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

REPORTS ABOUT TAKING OUT LOS ANGELES AND SAN DIEGO ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED.

It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling hole. In theory, anyway. Trump has been rallying through red states – Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas – to try and secure existing Senate seats. But today’s Democratic pile-on concerns a throwaway comment he made last night in Nebraska. Mid-weave, of course.

The President said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city… ‘let ’em, let ’em take Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego, that’s…’ this is a very small price to pay… and it’s gonna be over with very soon, it’s essentially almost over with.”

Now anybody who has followed Donald Trump, even passingly, in the last ten years, should be able to discern what he was getting at here.

He was acknowledging the cost of the Iran war, and attempting to justify his decision to start the now seven-month-long conflict.

The clips now going viral on X paraphrase Trump differently. “Trump on Iran: Let ’em take out Los Angeles and San Diego, it’s a small price to pay,” reads the caption of a tweet from “Headquarters,” an account that was previously “@KamalaHQ,” run by the Harris campaign’s rapid response team. The ensuing reaction from the media, and Trump’s opponents, is just as disingenuous. “Trump suggests letting Iran ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego at campaign rally,” reads the Los Angeles Times headline. “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” tweeted Governor Gavin Newsom last night. “He is deranged and dangerous.”

Wait, isn’t Karen Bass doing a good enough job of nuking LA already, without bringing in the Iranians?

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: ‘Cornell 7’ frat boy leaves America for ‘Beverly Hills of Dubai,’ neighbor claims… as details of his international life of privilege and shock phone call with alleged gang-rape victim emerge.

One of the ‘Cornell 7‘ fraternity brothers hit with explosive sexual assault allegations stemming from an alleged gang rape at the Ivy League school is believed to have retreated to Dubai, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.

Umar Matthew Ingalls won a coveted place at Cornell University in 2023, but his promising future unraveled after a female former student accused him and six other men of sexually assaulting her during a fraternity party in October 2024.

Ingalls, 21, was later expelled from Cornell following an internal university investigation.

One of Ingalls’ neighbors told the Daily Mail they believe he has returned to the Middle East, where he enjoyed a privileged upbringing and attended an elite private school in Emirates Hills, the wealthy enclave often dubbed the ‘Beverly Hills of Dubai.’

Related: Kathy Hochul continues to put the band back together:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS PARIS BURNING? Could the Riots in France Lead to the Election of Conservative Marine Le Pen?

President Emmanuel Macron and his supposed “centrists” can scream “Nazi!” all they want about Le Pen and National Rally. That’s been their electoral strategy since Le Pen’s father was running for president in the 1970s. But the colossal failure of Macron’s left-wing policies and those who preceded him, along with the rise of populists in France, has created a genuine opening for the right that Le Pen will almost certainly exploit.

The fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is trying to start a revolution will make Le Pen’s job a lot easier.

UnHerd:

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, levelling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

“Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a ‘Sixth Republic’ — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and ‘a New France,'” writes UnHerd’s Andrew Hussey. “Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants.”

This kind of overreach by Mélenchon is already leading to a significant backlash against the left.

“Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the ‘Old France’ — which still makes up the majority of French people,” Hussey continues. “With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s.”

It’s not hard for “Old France” to decide which side they should be supporting.

And it’s not hard to notice, as John Daniel Davidson writes at the Federalist, that “The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.”

UPDATE: The Parisian Newspaper of Record reports:

Posted at 7:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HUGE, IF TRUE:

Posted at 5:56 pm by Stephen Green

ALEX, I’LL TAKE “DAVID LEAN’S WORST MOVIE” FOR $500, PLEASE: Fox Butterfield of Arabia.

Fox Butterfield is famous for his repeated inability to tell cause from effect in stories like the one headlined “Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.”

We now have the Arab-Israeli conflict version of Fox Butterfield, thanks to a piece in Foreign Affairs authored by Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler. This time the punchline isn’t the headline. Instead, it’s more like a recurring joke throughout the article.

Titled “Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution,” it’s a rare optimistic essay on the conflict. The authors review Palestinian opinion surveys over time and show a clear trend toward a willingness to negotiate. That, by itself, is a positive development, though limited because those polled don’t live in a democracy and therefore their leader, who has already rejected the framework, must still be convinced of the value of peace. A real test will be whether there is any public pressure from Palestinians on their government to reverse its position and to discard the “resistance” culture built into Palestinian cultural and education institutions.

But assuming this desire for a negotiated solution is accurate, what inspired it? Here we have our Fox Butterfield moment:

“Gazans, despite having borne the brunt of destruction over the past three years, tend to be the most pragmatic: an even greater proportion of them are open to a two-state solution than are Palestinians living in the West Bank.”

Gazans, having seen their invasion of Israel ultimately fail, are indeed being pragmatic by expressing their openness to a different strategy. The authors appear to believe that pragmatism fell from the sky like fairy dust. But in fact what’s being described here is quite simple: The Palestinians started and then lost a war, and now they are open to a negotiated end to hostilities.

History has numerous reminders of when happens when the side that started a war loses it:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll