April 7, 2026

OLD AIRCRAFT, NEW MISSION: The A-10 “Sea-Hog:” Why the A-10 Warthog’s new maritime role could extend the life of a great aircraft — and give America badly needed littoral strike power at exactly the right moment. “That is exactly the sort of work for which A-10s are unusually, perhaps uniquely, well suited. They are being used where their strengths matter most: over cluttered littoral waters, against small, fast, exposed, hard-to-sort targets in an environment where persistence and discrimination matter more than glamour.”

Posted at 6:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NICK GILLESPIE: “The Godfather Likened Big Business and Big Government to the Mafia.”

Since I linked to the video of Ben Stein on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1979 discussing the TV tropes of the era on Saturday, I found a copy of the book he was promoting during his appearance, The View from Sunset Boulevard, in the Wayback Machine. It’s a sort of conservative version of Todd Gitlin’s 1983 book Inside Prime Time, or a first draft version of Ben Shapiro’s 2011 book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. In any case, it’s a fascinating time capsule, a look inside the worldviews of the people who brought you 1970s network television, such as All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and Starsky & Hutch. At one point, Stein discusses the obsessive belief of liberal television producers and writers that “big business” (as if they weren’t supplying product to one of the biggest of big businesses of the decade) went hand in blood-soaked glove with the Five Families. Here’s a ChatGPT transcript of the relative passage:

A dimension of the TV writers’ image of business, and of big business in particular, is the writers’ insistence that it is closely connected with the Mafia. That concept was entirely new to me. It first surfaced spontaneously at an interview. When I included a question about the link between business and the Mafia as part of my questionnaire, and even when I specifically mentioned businesses on the scale of U.S. Steel, I found near unanimity on the answer.

A producer who had worked for many years on adventure shows set all over the country (and recently on two shows set in the Depression in different locales) laid out the matter most baldly: “If you don’t believe that the Mafia is running big business, you must be blind.”

The late Bruce Geller, a writer and executive producer on “Mission Impossible,” “Mannix,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” and “Bronk,” among many others, and then an executive in charge of production at Twentieth Century Fox, got down to cases:

“Of course the two are connected. It’s a very shady area. Organized crime has massive amounts of money that is put in extremely legitimate enterprises.” Geller pointed out that, in his opinion, many parts of show business are financed by underworld money. “It’s understandable in my business where financing is difficult. In any circumstance people tend to take money where they can find it.”

Gary Marshall saw the connection plainly. “There’s definitely a link between big business and organized crime. There has to be a link to make big business work.”

Bob Schiller gave the most popular answer to the question about big business and the Mafia when he said that he saw a link not only between big business and the Mafia but also between government and the Mafia, and between labor and the Mafia.

Again, however, there was less than total unanimity about the situation. Mort Lachman, for one, saw a link but said it was nothing to feel paranoid about. Several people who preferred to remain anonymous simply could not be made to respond to the question as it was asked. They read it as, “Do you personally receive money from the Mafia?” and all denied receiving any.

Not everyone saw the Mafia in bed with IBM and William Blinn, one of the biggest guns in TV writing and author of one or more episodes of “Roots,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “The New Land,” “The Rookies,” “Bonanza,” and “The Interns,” gave a unique and unequivocal answer: “There is a conscious, deliberate un-relationship [sic] between big business and organized crime. They tend to leave each other alone. It’s mutually understood that they have their own territory. By not competing, they actually help each other. They allow each other to thrive in their separate fields.” But the comment of Stanley Kramer that “the Mafia is part of the entire corporate entity now” is far more representative than Blinn’s.

To some extent, the allegation that the Mafia is linked with business explains why businessmen are shown to be such bad people on television. If the businessman is really a Mafioso, then we could hardly expect him to be anything but a bad man. Even if the businessman is a silent partner of the Mafia, he is still a different person from Horatio Alger’s businessman. But that leads to another question.

Why is there such widespread belief in the link between the Mafia and the business world? The belief itself is a phenomenon I had never encountered before.

Part of the answer may be that it is true—the Mafia might be an integral part of the corporate structure. It may be that TV writers have simply discovered something I did not know. Certainly they have often led fuller lives than I have where business is concerned. But a larger part of the reason why so many people think the Mafia is linked to business comes, in my opinion, from the prevailing conspiracy theory of history. In Hollywood, almost nothing is explained except on the basis of conspiracies and cabals. It is here, for example, that serious, intelligent people believe that the world is run by a consortium of former Nazis and executives of multinational corporations.

Why Hollywood should be wedded to the conspiracy explanation of human events is beyond my knowing for certain. It probably has something to do with the unpredictability and randomness of human life in Hollywood, especially in terms of success and failure. It is difficult for people to come to grips with the randomness of events, and rather than do so, they often invent complex reasons for phenomena. Perhaps my reasoning in itself is an example of the prevalence of conspiracy explanations. At any rate, for some reason, people who write for television believe that there is a definite link between the Mafia and business, especially big business.

Fortunately for all concerned, Harvey Weinstein eventually showed up and declared himself “the fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town,” finally cleaning up his industry for good…

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHARLES MURRAY, CALL YOUR OFFICE!

Tweet continues:

However, at the same time, they’ve been in a heterosexual marriage for 20+ years and have 4 children together. By those measures, they are more “trad” in terms of their own lifestyle than most Americans are, even a lot of conservatives aren’t married with 4 kids.

So what that tells me is the Newsoms KNOW that the traditional family model is the best; that’s why they chose it when they both could’ve chosen anything else. But as elites they still promote insidious ideologies that end up harming the ordinary people who listen to them. It’s a perfect illustration of “luxury beliefs.”

As Charles Murray wrote over 15 years ago, “When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT:

And from the replies: “Always great to see the so-called antifascists talk so openly about how they will seize more power when given the opportunity.”

Today’s Democrats certainly aren’t shy about how brutally they’ll wield power, the next time they take it.

Posted at 5:12 pm by Stephen Green

SCHRÖDINGER’S LIB:

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH THE GREAT SATAN:

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: The Left Is Baffled—but Still Repulsed—by the White Working Class.

Democrats realize that their fixations on biological males competing in women’s sports, open borders and millions of illegal entries, radical green agendas, DEI-driven racial essentialism, and massive government entitlements rife with fraud have alienated the middle classes in general and white middle- and working-class voters in particular.

But since Democrat ideologues cannot shed their ideological straitjackets, they have instead tried to finesse the very problem that cost them the 2024 election.

They recall, in particular, the successful blueprint that won them the 2020 election. During that campaign, Joe Biden largely remained out of public view, hiding in his basement, while his handlers reconstructed him as a kind of waxen effigy of “good ol’ Joe from Scranton,” a throwback to the 1970s.

Once the cognitively diminished Biden was elected, his hard-left, Obama-era operatives behind that ossified, working-man veneer enacted the most radical four-year agenda in modern American history.

On the one hand, Democrats claim they will field candidates who can at least playact as good ol’ boy farmers and salt-of-the-earth welders.

The 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate, Humpty Dumpty lookalike Tim Walz, talked incessantly about driving a pickup truck. He assured us he could change its oil and tried to portray himself as a genuine hunter. Yet these claims often came across as inauthentic, strained, and condescending; the more Walz tried to present himself as a man of the people, the more he appeared buffoonish.

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, became a caricature of the sanctimonious, credentialed technocrat—self-righteously and arrogantly projecting expertise without much humility or even a shred of the common touch. As transportation secretary, Buttigieg used to pontificate about racist freeway clover leaves, rather than addressing the more immediate problems posed by the gridlocked and decrepit condition of the nation’s highways.

Now, as the 2028 election looms, Buttigieg has followed Democratic central casting and undergone a complete reboot, reemerging with a beard, a trucker cap, and a flannel shirt.

No matter, he still sounds as pedantic as ever in his riff on green energy and “diversity.”

Does Buttigieg’s love of green energy and hatred of racist roads mean he won’t be eating many carburetors for breakfast in his campaign ads?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JUDGE HIM BY THE WAR-CRIME APPLAUDING COMPANY HE KEEPS:

Posted at 4:04 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: A deep dive into Colorado’s billion-dollar budget deficit.

In a recent episode of Independence Institute’s* public affairs TV show, Devil’s Advocate, host Jon Caldara and the state’s chief economist, Greg Sobetski, dive deep into Colorado’s more than one billion-dollar budget shortfall, finding, among other things, pandemic-era funding, rising Medicaid costs, and federal tax changes as major culprits.

Sobetski explains that during COVID, Colorado enjoyed a glut of federal aid and higher-than-expected revenues. Rather than using that money for short-term needs, the legislature instead spent down those reserves propping up ongoing spending obligations, leaving lawmakers scrambling to sustain a bigger state budget without the one-time money that had been keeping things afloat.

The two also look at runaway Medicaid spending, with Caldara arguing Colorado expanded the program too far, including able-bodied adults and illegal immigrants, and now risks harming more vulnerable recipients when the inevitable cuts come.

The podcast is titled, “Is Colorado Broke?”

We’re still on the “gradually” part, but the “suddenly” part always comes, well, suddenly.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:

Ask yourself why Western elites freak out about any kind of colonialism — except Islamic.

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

RELIGIOUS FERVER: The Legacy of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” 20 Years Later. “Gore’s orations perfectly followed the script of the “New Apocalypticism”: The identification of an existential crisis, the diagnosis of human sin as its cause, the urgency of transformation, and the comfort of redemption for those who heed the warning. The climate science community readily embraced this script and adopted the language of believers and deniers to differentiate those with faith and those yet to be converted, and who risked excommunication.”

Whatever that is, it ain’t science.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

ARTEMIS RETURNING STUNNING NEW IMAGES FROM THE FAR SIDE:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

GRAY ZONE? NO, THAT’S RIGHT IN THE RED:

Posted at 2:31 pm by Stephen Green