IT MIGHT ALREADY BE AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOU’RE ON THE EAST COAST:  No Man’s Land: Volume 3 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).  With this the whole book is out, finally, and I understand “Tolkien problems” (I.e. book too big to print in one volume.)  My first readers don’t advise buying it and reading it right now, unless you have to be up all night for some reason.

Charlie Martin’s review (because the most comprehensive.)

Volume 3
Skip’s idea of crisis management?
Stress baking. While he’s kneading away his anxiety, Eerlen Troz is fighting for his life—and his unborn child’s—in an ancient and familiar battle.
When saving Eerlen’s life requires forging an unexpected blood brotherhood, it creates something neither person anticipated: a memory bond between two worlds.
Through shared consciousness, they uncover a conspiracy that threatens not just Elly, but the entire Star Empire.
The plot runs deeper than anyone imagined. Lives, fortunes, and freedom itself hang in the balance. But exposing the truth means surviving long enough to tell it—and their enemies have other plans. Two minds. One mission. A universe-spanning conspiracy that someone will kill to protect.
When the fate of worlds rests on an unlikely brotherhood forged in blood and baked goods.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The left’s deep-rooted violence is what insurrection really looks like.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Jay Jones Unwinds After Stressful Day By Repeatedly Stabbing His Republican Voodoo Doll https://t.co/6gWqruOYlR pic.twitter.com/WmOwygBBlQ

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 6, 2025

THE NEW SPACE RACE: New DARPA ‘field guide’ looks for ways to jump-start a moon economy. “DARPA seeks to transform the moon into a vibrant marketplace via an effort dubbed the LunA-10 initiative, a 10-year blueprint aimed at forging scalable lunar infrastructure and unlocking the economic potential of the moon.”

ED MORRISSEY: Conquest Complete? The Bari Weiss Era Starts at CBS And … I Have Questions.

Should we be celebrating Weiss’ success? Absolutely. However, I wonder just how much Weiss can change CBS News, as opposed to how much it can change her — and The Free Press. CBS News has a lot more history and entrenched culture than a webzine, and even though Weiss knows it, it’s not clear whether she can move it in any direction, not even with Ellison’s initial support and endorsement.

Let me offer two examples that feed my skepticism: the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Jeff Bezos bought the WaPo and Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Times, and for a few years let both run without any real intervention to redirect policies and approaches. When Bezos finally got tired of losing money, he tried to change the culture by bringing in Will Lewis and pushing a similar approach as Weiss pledges now … and then spent the next year or so quelling staff revolts. It’s still not clear where the Post is heading now, or even if their profitability has improved in the slightest.

As for the LA Times, Soon-Shiong claims that he will redirect that newspaper in a similar fashion. His staff has pushed back too, and so far, it seems as though Soon-Shiong hasn’t done much but talk about change. At least Bezos is trying.

In both cases, even the owners have had little success in changing the culture and direction at media outlets with entrenched progressive workforces. Ellison’s move here could be akin to Bezos bringing in Lewis at the WaPo, but will Ellison stick to his choice as Bezos did and get rid of staff who stands in the way of change? Or will he be more interested in other issues and future conquests? While I have great admiration for Weiss’ grit and determination, I can’t help but wonder whether Ellison might just get tired of reform at some point if CBS News staff and stars revolt, and give Weiss a golden parachute as the easiest option to keep the operation from collapsing.

The conquest may be complete. The question will be who conquered whom. Only Ellison can answer that in the long run. I’m rooting for Bari, but … color me skeptical, about both CBS and the future of the Free Press.

I very much hope to be wrong, but I agree. Though it’s fun to watch old media absolutely meltdown over Weiss’s new title, including Jesssica Testa, a former colleague of Weiss at the Gray Lady: How Bari Weiss Won. At The Free Press, she battled “wokeness” and buddied up with billionaires. Now she’s the editor in chief of CBS News.

The scare quotes around “wokeness” lets the reader know what he or she is in for:

In its nearly 100 years, CBS has not seen a leader quite like Ms. Weiss. Neither has the media industry. Ms. Weiss, 41, has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot. In 2020, she publicly resigned as an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times to start a newsletter on Substack. Today, she has one of the most prestigious jobs in news.

She achieved this without climbing the typical journalistic career ladder, and with no experience directing television coverage. She is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers. And she is known more for wanting to rid the world of so-called wokeness than for promoting journalistic traditions. While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs, Ms. Weiss has described herself as a “left-leaning centrist,” a “radical centrist,” “a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice” — she is married to Nellie Bowles, a former Times reporter who now works at The Free Press — and a proud recipient of the label “Zionist fanatic.”

Yet she has also come to symbolize the power and potential of independent media. Her world is a patchwork of podcasts, newsletters and videos built around a common idea that legacy outlets have lost their authority and connection with readers. With that power up for grabs, several younger outlets have spent the last few years jostling for it: The Bulwark, Punchbowl News, Puck, Semafor.

* * * * * * * *

Her publication has criticized corporate diversity initiatives and pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Its popular podcast “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” chronicled the backlash over statements by the “Harry Potter” author about transgender women. Ms. Weiss has agreed that “cancel culture” is akin to “social murder.”

“They ousted good people for fake thought crimes and tried to ruin their reputations and their lives,” Ms. Weiss said of the “far left” during that February speech. (Their “insanity,” she said, included acknowledging Indigenous land, adding pronouns to email signatures and wanting to abolishing police and prisons.)

“Conservatives know two things above all else,” Ms. Weiss continued, after warning of similar rising extremism on the right. “That evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.” She told The Free Press readers on Monday, in an announcement about the Paramount deal, that the publication’s values “now have the opportunity to go very, very big.”

It is unclear how much of this sensibility Ms. Weiss will inject into “CBS Evening News,” the former home of Dan Rather and Connie Chung; to “Face the Nation,” which premiered 70 years ago with an interview with Senator Joseph McCarthy; to “60 Minutes,” where Lesley Stahl has been a correspondent for nearly 35 years. Reached by text, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric said, “It will be fascinating to watch.”

Ms. Weiss has insisted The Free Press is not ideologically homogenous. In 2024, the publication said its staff was split equally between voting for Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris and abstaining.

It is theoretically possible to trace this political inscrutability to the integrity of CBS News giants like Walter Cronkite, who claimed to never vote along party lines. “The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of great American journalism,” its introductory note proffered. “Honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.”

Why is 60 Minutes the former home of Dan Rather? Why can’t Lesley Stahl ascertain the ideologies of the people she works with daily? We know from Cronkite’s biographer, a lefty himself, that Cronkite was from politically inscrutable, particularly when he was on the air. At CBS Katie Couric once read a poem on air hoping that Obamacare would pass, and then had a Rathergate moment of her own after she left CBS.

Considering that in the mid-1950s, Edward R. Murrow helped coach fellow Democrat Adlai Stevenson, CBS News’ bias dates back a good 70 years. Good luck to Weiss finding the pony in that stable.

Still though, credit where it’s due; Testa’s article could be far worse:

in awe of this take pic.twitter.com/H3LrjiOYIS

— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) October 6, 2025

THE PROGRESSIVE FLIGHT FROM REALITY:

Unfortunately, this phenomenon gets even more troubling. As fears of political violence have intensified since Kirk’s murder, the New York Times has posted several pieces assassinating his character. One of its star content creators, Ezra Klein, for example, provided little pushback on a recent podcast as the racialist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates repeatedly labeled Kirk a “hatemonger.” The newspaper also published a long essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the paper’s controversial 1619 Project which tried to put slavery at the center of American history, which repeatedly called Kirk a bigot.

Her only evidence to support this inflammatory portrayal is one 168-word paragraph in a 2,568-word piece that cherry-picked, out-of-context snippets – he said ‘there’s a war on white people in this country’ he referred to a transgender athlete as an ‘abomination’ – to cast Kirk’s opposition to the woke agenda, gender affirming care and his concerns about black crime and Islam as “unabashed bigotry.”

To assess the quality of evidence, note that she repeats the long-debunked claims that Trump “called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., ‘very fine people.’ ” To demonstrate that her views have wide currency, she writes that “Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, ‘one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.’” What she ignored was that the author of that piece, Ben Rothove, published a short piece in the New York Times 16 days before her essay was published that declared, “I was wrong about Charlie Kirk.”

Hannah-Jones is, of course, entitled to her views – but not her own facts. It is telling that she and her editors thought it was appropriate to print a piece that made no effort to contextualize Kirk’s statements, or to try to understand why so many people in the world admired him. Their goal, instead, was to demonize an adversary by assertion. This is our truth. Perhaps more disturbing are two quotes in the piece that suggest Kirk’s murder was acceptable. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk,” one black educator told Hannah-Jones.

“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” another person told her. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away.

Such views, of course, resonate with those of thousands of others who celebrated Kirk’s murder; just as many progressives have cheered Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last December.

I hesitate to say that the Times was sanctioning Kirk’s assassination. But it is clear that progressives are proceeding down a dangerous path where facts, truths, and human decency are being overwhelmed by their dark desires.

Related: Douglas Murray on “The mainstreaming of leftist violence.”

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Democratic lawmakers and commentators found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, most of them loathed Kirk. On the other, many felt that they should try to hold the line condemning the shooting through the throat of a young husband and father at an American university.

The New York Times’s Ezra Klein was among those who dipped his toe into the water, writing a piece within the day titled “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.” Unfortunately, Klein then found himself the subject of a backlash from others on the left who thought that by praising Kirk’s invitation to nonviolent debate, he was somehow “legitimizing” Kirk’s views.

In order to try to tidy up this controversy, Klein invited on to his NYT podcast the Democratic left’s most sacred figure – the memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates – to carry out a public struggle-session on Klein. Giving Coates all the deference that the NYT believes is his due, Coates and Klein tried to have the “difficult conversation” about why Coates had reacted negatively to Klein’s initial piece. Coates said that since Kirk’s murder he had, with his usual degree of research, watched some “clips” of the right-wing speaker. He did not like what he saw. In fact, he concluded that Kirk was anti-black, anti-gay and anti-trans. Or, as Coates elegantly summed it up: “This dude was wrong.”

Yet the most important moment in an otherwise interminable conversation was when Klein tried to explain what he was thinking when he wrote his initial condemnation of Kirk’s murder. Coates gave the telling reply: “Was silence not an option?”

And there it was. The same people who had been telling Americans for the past decade that “silence” in the face of violence is “complicity,” that “silence is violence,” now preaching that silence should, in fact, be an option after a political assassination. Welcome to the current state of the American left.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote on Friday:

Ezra’s true capitulation came, of course, on the trans question. Coates:

So, when I read [Kirk’s] words toward trans people — Jesus … I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t. … If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.

Coates, mind you, is the author of this career-defining sentence:

I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died [at Ground Zero on 9/11]. They were not human to me. [My italics]

Klein first makes a pragmatic case — “In losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly … We’ve just begun to lose that argument terribly — and that has put people in real danger” — and then tips his hand:

A huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.

Bingo. That’s Starmer on immigration: restrictionists are immoral but we’ve got to do something or we’ll keep losing. And somehow Keir and Ezra think we can’t see through them. Of course we can. Behind the rhetoric, the woke mindset still reigns.

Exit quote: “We’re not stupid. No amount of fake rhetorical moves to the center will work. When very basic things that most human beings take for granted — that foreigners are not citizens and citizens come first, that men are not women, that children are not adults — are deemed fundamentally immoral in one political party, that party deserves to lose. And they will.”

WHOA: Jack Smith Tracked GOP Senators’ Private Comms in J6/Election Probe Per the FBI.

Here were Sen. Bill Hagerty’s (R-TN) remarks on the matter:

Thank you, Senator Johnson, and Chairman Grassley, thank you for your leadership in making this happen. This is an extraordinary revelation that just took place this afternoon. My colleagues and I found out — all of us Republicans, by the way — that we were placed under investigation by this FBI, under the Joe Biden FBI, that was led, I presume, by Jack Smith and his predecessors. This isn’t the first time that it’s happened, though. Senator Johnson just mentioned this: I served on the Trump transition team in Trump Tower in 2016. Senator Blackburn was vice-chair of the transition committee then, as were probably a dozen or more members of Congress. To think that we were surveilled by the Obama FBI — this corruption runs deep, and it’s gone on for too long.

And the fact that it’s happened here again, the fact that they are looking at our records in 2023 — sitting members of the United States Senate. Again, the only thing that we have in common, the only thing in common in this entire list, is that we’re all Republicans. They’ve decided to come after us — this is as partisan as it gets — the FBI and the corruption that’s running there has to be cleared out. Thank God we have Kash Patel and Dan Bongino there. This has to be addressed. It has to be resolved. It needs to happen today.

It’s not hard to tell that they’re angry — and rightly so.

More here: Jack Smith Spied on Eight GOP Senators, Grassley Reveals.

Fox News obtained the alarming revelations first, posting on X, “Former Special Counsel Jack Smith was reportedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican senators as part of his January 6 investigation, FOX News Digital has learned.”

The Republican senators targeted by Smith and the FBI were Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, per Fox’s article. The document was titled “ARCTIC FROST—Election Law Matters—SENSITIVE INVESTIGATIVE MATTER—CAST.”

One of Smith’s special agents “conducted preliminary toll analysis” on the senators’ records. Smith and his team not only viewed the phone numbers the senators called but the locations of both parties. The surveillance was reportedly tied to the campaign related to the 2020 election certification vote.

Sean Davis tweets, “Smith should be in prison for this,” but will anything of consequence happen to him?

MICROBIOME NEWS: Fragments of Bacteria in Our Gut May Lull Our Brains to Sleep at Night.

FACTS EXPOSE SCHUMER’S ‘MEDICAID CUTS’ MYTH: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claims Trump and Hill GOPers are imposing “the largest cut to Medicaid in history.” Oops, that’s not what the facts say.

GOOD, I TAKE THAT: This Vitamin B3 Supplement Could Cut Your Skin Cancer Risk by up to 54%.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Shark | Pet Cordless Vacuum Cleaner. #CommissionEarned

HMM: Most aspirin use in middle-aged adults may be unnecessary under new assessment.

BREAKING: Jack Smith Spied on 8 GOP Senators, Grassley Reveals.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Mark Sanchez Sentenced To Five More Seasons With The New York Jets https://t.co/aFvXPetGph pic.twitter.com/arg9It1X3F

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 6, 2025

REVIEW: EVs Like the Mercedes eSprinter We Tested Promise Silent Speed. One Out of Two Ain’t Bad.

LAUGHING WOLF HAS LINKS AND FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON EUTHANASIA AND ORGAN DONORS.

PERFECT GUY TO HEAD VIRGINIA LAW ENFORCEMENT:

🚨🚨🚨Jay Jones also wanted police officers killed, not just a political assassination and murder of a family. https://t.co/5aPkYJoOmq

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 6, 2025

Plus:

Gun control group @Everytown dropped six figures on VA AG Dem candidate Jay Jones who said he wanted to shoot his opponents in the head and murder their children: https://t.co/Ao8WCscq4S

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) October 6, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: At Least 30 Shot in Chicago This Weekend.

The mayor has other concerns.

THE NEXT SCANDAL WILL ARRIVE ON TRACK NINE: Another Scandal Threatens to Shake up Virginia’s Elections.

BE COMFORTABLE: True Classic Men’s Jeans. #CommissionEarned

YAMMERING ABOUT “RACISM” IS SO 2020: A.I. powered “sombrero” memes are overflowing on X, and no one seems at all sensitive to the charge that they are racist. “Ironically, the Democrats in that video look better than they do on the TV news shows.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Court Rules Against Post Office Carry Ban.

WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM:

Here is the current Speaker of the House in Virginia, in a church pulpit, telling congregants to ignore Jay Jones's call for the assassination of the prior Speaker and murder of his kids because…politics. Where is The Bulwark? Where are Dem leaders? pic.twitter.com/titRtnAmIt

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 5, 2025

MELTDOWN: Bari Weiss Names CBS News Chief, Progs Lose Their… You Know

You know what Bluesky is, right? Pronounced “brewski” to reflect its Soviet roots (not really… but kinda really), Bluesky is the social media platform where good-hearted progressives fled to escape all the hate on Elon Musk’s X, and where they could wish death upon their political rivals in peace.

Seriously.

I only mention Bluesky because today I set up an account there — I haven’t posted yet, because I will almost certainly have my account suspended within hours or minutes of being honest — after The Spectator’s Stephen L. “Redsteeze” Miller encouraged people this morning to log in and do a search for Bari Weiss, and witness the murderous meltdowns.

Hang on. I have to back out a bit wider.

Much more at the link.