February 19, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Make it special.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HOW IT STARTED: Hacked Elmo X Account Used to Spread Antisemitic Incitement to Millions Online.

The official X account of Elmo, the beloved Sesame Street character followed by hundreds of thousands worldwide, was hacked on Sunday and used to disseminate chilling antisemitic hate speech and conspiracy theories — another stark example of how mainstream platforms are being weaponized to spread violent Jew-hatred.

The posts, written in all-caps and riddled with slurs, included genocidal language such as “Kill all Jews” and “Jews control the world and need to be exterminated.” They also invoked conspiracy theories about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and called U.S. President Donald Trump a “puppet” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, echoing classical antisemitic tropes alleging Jewish control and manipulation of world affairs.

—Combat Antisemitism Movement, July 14th, 2025.

How It’s Going: Elmo Wishes Ramadan Mubarak to All of His Friends.

As you’ve undoubtedly seen, it’s that time of year when politicians wish a blessed Ramadan to their constituents. As Twitchy reported, Rep. Sharice Davids copied and pasted her Ramadan Mubarak post, sending her best wishes to all of her Muslim neighbors in Nassau County … which doesn’t exist in Kansas. A lot of time and care go into these things.

A lot of people noted that Ash Wednesday sort of flew under the radar in favor of Ramadan. Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Craig Greenberg lit up the Big Four Bridge in honor of Ramadan.

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What we want to know is, what’s up with Elmo? The last time he popped up was to praise Bad Bunny’s halftime show, which was far from family-friendly. Now, Elmo wishes a blessed Ramadan to all of his friends. Yes, we searched his timeline, too, and came up empty.

—Twitchy, today.

Posted at 9:25 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOD FORBID:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOODBYE, SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP: UK PM Starmer Blocks Trump From Using RAF Bases to Strike Iran Amid Escalating Tensions: Report.

What’s funny is, while Britain carries water for the mullahs, plenty of other Islamic countries are happy to provide us with facilities to attack Iran.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that this might be Trump-inspired theater to make the mullahs drop their guard. More likely that it’s Starmer being a dick, but don’t entirely rule it out.

Posted at 8:20 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SEDUCTIVE AI: People prefer the empathy of humans, but rate ‘fake’ AI empathy higher.

UPDATE: From the comments:

This is going to be a problem. Already is starting to be. Truly skilled first-rate human flatterer/persuader/seducers are rare, and generally end up aimed at high payoff targets. Most people in their whole lives will never have rated more than passing attention from such, and thus will have little or no immunity.

And now that level of individually customized flatterer/persuader/seducer skills is being automated, and will soon be cheaply deployable against *everyone*. I foresee big trouble.

I address these very issues in my forthcoming Seductive AI.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 5:57 pm by Stephen Green

STARMER LIES:

Posted at 5:36 pm by Stephen Green

ACE OF SPADES: The Atlantic Publishes a Viral “Report” Account of a Boy Dying of Measles Because His Parents Didn’t Vaccinate Him. One Small Problem: The “Report” Is Actually Fiction, a “Hypothetical” Morality Play But The Atlantic Presented It As Actual Truth.

I repeat: It is fiction. I don’t mean it’s biased, I mean the Fake Christian lefty just made the story up — based on real reports and real science, she says — to serve as a harrowing morality play about vaccine hesitancy.

And The Atlantic, looking to get some viral advertising, presented it as fact until other reporters started asking about it.

The story — the fiction — was originally published as a 100% true factual “journalistic” account, with no warning or disclaimer to alert readers to the contrary.

At least, not until The Atlantic’s foray into Imaginary Journalism began provoking a reaction from journalists who like to pretend they don’t do this same thing every single day.

When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.

And that’s this journalist’s only concern — not that falsehood is being presented as fact, but just that this story, once revealed to be fiction, would fail to serve its purpose as pro-vaccine propaganda.

“My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.”

Yes, we wouldn’t want readers brushing off a fictitious story as fiction, would we?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

LET’S GET BACK THERE BEFORE IT’S GONE: The Moon Is Definitely Shrinking, Newly Found Geological Features Confirm. “No other world in the solar system has tectonic plates and quakes like Earth, but it doesn’t mean that their ground doesn’t shake. Since the Apollo era, we have known there are moonquakes, and for about a decade and a half, we have known that the Moon is shrinking, losing 50 meters (165 feet) in its radius over the past 200 million years. Now, new evidence strengthens those findings.”

165 feet in 200 million years? I guess we’ve got some time left.

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

FISH DON’T KNOW THEY’RE WET: America’s future looks vulgar.

The latest Super Bowl offers the most recent opportunity to reflect on the terminal state of our national culture, held together chiefly by a distractive and unhealthy mania for commercial sports and perfectly exemplified by the infantile yet aggressively transgressive nihilism of a brainless showoff calling himself Bad Bunny and dressed all in white, suggestive perhaps of an anti-Easter Bunny. Why, one wonders, has no political theorist from Hobbes forward posited the ideal human community as one which would combine political democracy with cultural and intellectual aristocracy – as, indeed, America at the time of her founding and for several generations thereafter did? Such an arrangement might satisfy critics of democratic society on the anti-egalitarian right, such as T.S. Eliot, and those on the egalitarian left, like John Rawls, for whom democracy can never be inclusive and participatory enough.

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Other dissenters (in America especially) from the new world in formation attempted to revive the old agrarian tradition, the most famous being the Southern Agrarians in the American South in the 1920s and 1930s whose members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle and Robert Penn Warren. But Agrarianism failed to survive World War Two, while subsequent and more inclusive and popular attempts at resurrecting and promoting the old  agricultural values and ways of life – the “back-to-the-land movement” in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and Wendell Berry’s protest against industrial agriculture and what he calls “the unsettling of America” – were as quixotic in practical terms as they were productive in literary ones.

The tragic fact is that the recreation of any sort of high culture as something more than a footnote to the mass culture represented by Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, the Kardashians, Billie Eilish, et al. is as impossible as the reestablishment of anything like civil and political peace in the United States – and elsewhere – is. The western world, it seems, is doomed to a future of a vulgar and transgressive popular culture, maintained in the context of angry political division and social chaos.

The earliest halftime performers during the first few years of the Super Bowl included Al Hirt, Carol Channing, the Grambling State University marching band, Doc Severinsen, Lionel Hampton, and Ella Fitzgerald. They would have looked askance at the halftime performers of the last quarter century, which included Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Tom Petty, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. From the perspective of the jazz-infused performers of the Super Bowl’s early years, the Super Bowl has been quite vulgar indeed since the 1990s.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEWS YOU CAN USE? How To Be The Stig — Ben Collins Reveals Trade Secrets (Video):

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CORBYNIZATION AND GASLIGHTING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll