Archive for 2025

November 23, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 23rd, 2025

SPACE: Stoke Space goes for broke to solve the only launch problem that “moves the needle.” “A little more than a decade ago, Firefly Space Systems in Texas based the design of its Alpha rocket on an aerospike engine, a technology that had never been flown to space before. Although this was theoretically a more efficient engine design, it also brought more technical risk and proved a bridge too far. By 2017, the company was bankrupt. When Ukrainian investor Max Polyakov rescued Firefly later that year, he demanded that Alpha have a more conventional rocket engine design.”

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 23rd, 2025

WHOA: Major Foreign Propagandists Utterly Exposed After X Glitch Reveals Account Locations.

A temporary glitch on X led to a credibility bloodbath for a variety of foreign propaganda accounts that were either posing as Americans or lying about their locations in other ways.

Days prior, Head of Product Nikita Brier had announced a new feature revealing the origin and current location of users. When it rolled out, though, only account owners could view it. That all changed on Friday night, though. In what is assumed to have been a mistake, everyone’s origins and current locations were made public for about an hour before disappearing.

In one instance, it was revealed that one of Hamas’ biggest simps has been lying about being in Gaza.

The above was posted when it was 65 degrees at night (and 80 during the day), just to give you an idea of the kind of propaganda being spewed. For years, the above account has claimed to be reporting from the ground in Gaza. He’s made hundreds of posts pushing fake claims about genocide, famine, and his own supposed hardships. In reality, his account was created in the United Kingdom, and he’s currently residing in Poland.

More account locations revealed here:

Great moments in projection:

UPDATE: The Daily Beast spins the story as being an issue entirely with the right: Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls.

And while the glitch has exposed ostensibly pro-MAGA trolls as being foreign actors…

 

…it’s not just an issue on the right:

MORE: Geographic Reveal Exposes Fakes.

Posted at 1:54 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 23rd, 2025

THE ONLY STRATEGY THAT WORKS AGAINST WEAPONIZED LANGUAGE:

3. Shift the Conversation to Shared Moral Ground

Progressives still claim to value:

  • fairness
  • autonomy
  • freedom of conscience
  • diversity of thought
  • basic dignity

So stand inside their stated principles:

“We both believe people should speak without fear. That’s the principle I’m defending.”

Radicals can’t reject their own values without revealing themselves. Normal people respond instantly to shared moral ground.

The People You Cannot Reach

Accept this early to avoid wasting energy. You cannot reason with:

  • people whose politics function as religion
  • purity activists
  • Antifa-style street ideologues
  • online radicals addicted to emotional escalation
  • anyone who treats emotions as truth and words as ritual

These people aren’t debating. They’re policing. And they are not your audience.

Your audience is everyone watching, the people who still believe language has meaning, that disagreement isn’t violence, and that labels should not replace arguments. Be true to them, not your “debate” opponent.

QED:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 23rd, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN CHUTZPAH: White House press corps becoming ‘Kremlin-esque,’ former press sec Jen Psaki claims.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki accused the Trump administration of forming a “Kremlin-esque” press corps full of “sycophants” during briefings.

Psaki, who served as press secretary under the Biden administration, discussed her time behind the podium with journalist Katie Couric on Wednesday, contrasting her experience with that of the current administration. The MS NOW host argued that more recently the White House has been “re-shaping” the people in the press pool.

“More and more of the questions in there are by sycophants — by people who are not asking about news that the American people care about,” Psaki said, accusing those reporters of pushing conspiracy theories in their questions.

Like Will Smith with the Men In Black memory wipe tool, Psaki wants you to entirely forget her role in propping up Joe Biden’s (p)residency, which began with many on the right noting his already dissipated state during the 2020 campaign, and some spotting “Biden’s Brezhnev vibes” two months before he actually took office:

At least nobody in the Soviet Union voted for Brezhnev — the elections were a sham with Communist party candidates running unopposed. Everything was a sham, actually. In his mumbling, robotic tones, the general secretary delivered long-winded, heavy on Marxist cliches and utterly incomprehensible televised speeches. The economy flattered, dissidents were subjected to psychiatric torture, corruption proliferated, and the rate of substance abuse skyrocketed. That period of Soviet history is known as zastoi, or stagnation. It only made sense that the man on top was some sort of sclerotic.

Like Brezhnev, Biden’s rhetoric is ridden with clichés, but of a different, folksy kind. At the time when political slogans are catchy and provocative — Make America Great Again, Black Lives Matter — Biden’s yard signs read ‘Our best days are still ahead’, and ‘Build back better’. His Twitter account is full of platitudes like ‘This is our moment — ours together — to write a newer, bolder, more compassionate chapter in the life of our nation.’ He’s just a boring ordinary guy — until he lashes out at a voter, or bites on his wife’s finger.

Is Biden the candidate of American stagnation? His cognitive and physical decline is increasingly difficult to hide and it’s highly disturbing to witness it become a subject of speculation. I’ve lived through it before and it gives me the creeps. Free citizens of a free republic shouldn’t need a Kremlinologist to decipher what’s wrong with their president.

As I wrote back then, “Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives getting a head start on their four year nap, and the need to study Biden like a Kremlinologist makes perfect sense.” I had no idea that his inner circle would call themselves the “politburo” as they kept pushing their Brezhnev-like figurehead onstage, while they ran the government (badly) in the background: Meet the Biden ‘politburo’ accused of running the country in secret: There was the aide who demanded $4 million to advise the re-election campaign. There was the enforcer who ‘cast out heretics’. And there was Jill Biden.

However, as the book is published there is little chance of a reprieve for those accused of covering up, or wilfully ignoring, Biden’s decline. “I don’t think there is a way to make it stop,” one Democrat sighs. “Every Democrat is going to need to have an answer on Biden and why we let him stay for so long.”

The blame game is moving to a cabal of advisers, dubbed the “politburo” by colleagues in a nod to the highest decision-making body of the Soviet Union, a group said to have enjoyed unprecedented power.

“Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” one cabinet member claims. “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power. They would make huge economic decisions without calling [Treasury] secretary Yellen.”

Back in May, Glenn wrote, “It was a coup, and they were usurpers. And every Democrat should have to answer for it.”

Including Psaki, who in May tried the KBJ/KJP defense: Jen Psaki Defends Missing Signs of Biden’s Decline: ‘I’m Not a Doctor.’

Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has shared the truth about when exactly she realized that President Joe Biden was in decline: the first presidential debate in late June 2024.

Appearing on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast with hosts Max Tani and Ben Smith this week, Psaki discussed the moment she realized there was potentially no path forward for Biden. She recalled telling her colleagues partway through the debate, “This is a f—ing disaster,” adding that while she didn’t personally know what was going to happen from there, it became clear that many Democrats felt there was no path forward.

In response to a question from Smith about whether there was a cover-up regarding Biden’s condition, Psaki said, “I think ‘cover-up’ is such a loaded phrase… People use that term as related to Watergate or the covering up of not sharing public information about a war.”

During her time as press secretary, she continued, she “never saw that person… that was on that debate stage,” despite being in the Oval Office every single day. She added, “I’m not a doctor. Aging happens quite quickly.”

Psaki infamously kept schtum after the 20204 debate that made Biden’s decline too obvious to continue to deny:

And she was around Biden enough in person prior that to see him malfunctioning regularly:

Although based on past actions and haberdasherial choices, perhaps she doesn’t mean “Kremlin-esque” as an insult: Resurfaced photo shows Biden press sec Jen Psaki wearing hammer and sickle hat with Russian official.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 23rd, 2025

PAUL SPERRY: How Trump’s Own Appointees Aided Russiagate Plot Against Him.

When Obama administration officials manufactured U.S. intelligence tying Donald Trump to Moscow following his stunning 2016 victory, they had no idea Trump’s own political appointees would help them undermine Trump’s presidency – and his chances of reelection in 2020.

RCI’s review of recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with former Trump officials reveals for the first time how key members of Trump’s cabinet and other appointees during his first term shrouded the previous administration’s machinations and either deliberately or inadvertently misled the public into thinking the fake Russiagate intelligence was real.

Former Special Counsel John Durham, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former CIA Director Gina Haspel dismissed or buried evidence that cast doubt on a foundational document of the Russigate hoax – the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) prepared in the waning days of the Obama administration.

Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William Barr, stopped the declassification and release of key exculpatory evidence debunking the ICA on the eve of the 2020 election, which has not been reported previously.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 23rd, 2025
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