August 14, 2026

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Plaintiffs in NFA Challenge Press DOJ for Clarification After Injunction Takes Effect.

As of Thursday, certain people could buy suppressors and short-barreled long guns without a Form 1 from the ATF. While the tax stamp died, we still had to have those products registered with the feds to avoid breaking out in handcuffs. However, a federal court ruled that with the tax gone, the registration is unconstitutional, and a temporary stay in that ruling’s impact expired at midnight Wednesday. Thursday was a brand new world.

At least, it’s one on paper.

Right now, no one seems to know precisely what the hell any of it means. The people covered are numerous, but the people who aren’t covered are also numerous. Some gun stores aren’t covered, but individuals are. Then there are affiliated groups that have an exemption because they’re affiliated with a plaintiff organization, even if they weren’t part.

In theory.

What a mess.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

LUIGI MANGIONE ADMITS KILLING BRIAN THOMPSON: Says ‘severe’ back pain drove him to pose as investor with $58 billion before shooting CEO dead, as judge reveals lengthy minimum sentence he now faces for stalking.  “Both stalking charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. His sentencing hearing has been scheduled for December 18. While there is no formal plea deal in place, the judge said there is a letter with a sentencing guideline suggesting a minimum sentence of 292 months, or over 24 years.”

Posted at 12:25 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS:

Posted at 12:09 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE CLOSURE OF THE INTERNET:

Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.

In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times2, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically3 and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.

But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”

The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.

At well over 15,000 words in length, I can’t automatically just say “read the whole thing,” but it’s definitely worth perusing.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: JD Vance refers medical child sex change providers to DOJ for prosecution over fraud.

The Trump administration on Thursday released a new report detailing how hospitals have placed profits over the safety of children in prescribing so-called “gender affirming” medical treatments, such as sex-change surgeries and hormones. Vice President VD Vance announced that he has referred the matter to the Department of Justice.

In a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, Vance wrote that he is referring the report to the DOJ “to determine whether the providers identified have violated federal law, regulations, or policies including, but not limited to, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, 18 USC 24, and federal fraud and conspiracy laws.”

He continued, “When providers miscode treatment in order to secure insurance coverage for gender-transitioning interventions that insurance would not otherwise cover, they should be held accountable. If they have done so intentionally, thereby perpetuating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison. Rather than allow the proliferation of harmful, sex-rejecting procedures on our children, we must sent a clear message that any hospitals and providers that have participated in these practices will face justice.”

Worse, large number of so-called “trans” kids are just ordinary tomboys, gays, and even the autistic just going through an awkward adolescence. Instead of getting counsel or just letting them figure things out like kids usually do, they got permanently altered.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dear Gavin Newsom — When You’ve Lost Ann Arbor… “The adoring throngs never materialized. One could hardly refer to the smattering of people who showed up for Newsom’s public events as ‘crowds.’ Democrats are very adept at astroturfing attendance, but the party wasn’t doing any favors for Newsom.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

ED MORRISSEY: Woke Will Eat Itself, Chapter MCLXII: WNBA Meets to Discover Definition of ‘Woman’, And …

Ahem. It wasn’t Enes Kantor Freedom or Royce White who created this problem. Sophie Cunningham didn’t create it either; an ESPN reporter demanded Cunningham’s opinion on it while Cunningham was criticizing the league’s treatment of her teammate Caitlin Clark. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve made it worse by attempting to troll Cunningham at a game with a “Trans Kids Belong” T-shirt during a game against the Fever, and the Lynx made it worse by attacking women and girls who support Cunningham.

And now that two biological males want to compete in the league, the woke morons who run the league find themselves hoist by their own petard.

So when do these geniuses plan to settle on a definition of woman? Maybe they’ll drop it under the Christmas tree. No, I am not kidding:

The WNBA and team representatives from across the league met Wednesday, Aug. 12 for planned talks on various matters, including ongoing debate over transgender females’ participation in women’s basketball.

“Today’s meeting covered a wide range of topics, including ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online. We will continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months,” a statement USA TODAY received from a WNBA spokesperson said.

“Weeks and months”? Will it take the Women’s National Basketball Association “weeks and months” to define the word “women”? What did the league think it meant for the past thirty years since its founding?

They’ll get back to Ed on that in weeks or months, or after they’ve chosen where to go for lunch, depending upon which comes first:

Related:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll