Archive for 2026

April 21, 2026

CHANGE: “Alan Dershowitz … Republican? Yes. Not independent. Not disaffected. The famed appellate attorney and Harvard con-law professor has not just renounced his lifelong political affiliation, but Dersh has signed up for the other team. What happened?”

October 7th and the Corbynization of the Democratic Party spreading like wildfire are what happened. Read the whole thing.

For a contrarian take, Christopher Rufo has you covered:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 21st, 2026

A DATA REPUBLICAN THREAD ON THE COLOR REVOLUTION HERE AT HOME:

Read the whole thing, but this part stands out: “The color revolution playbook has one tool for security forces: social pressure through professional networks to induce defection. Driscoll is embedded in those networks. He can be pulled away. Hegseth isn’t.”

Aside from Trump, Hegseth might be the most important individual in the entire executive branch, and for reasons most Americans can’t even imagine.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

HMM: Are We Seeing the Makings of an Iranian Civil War? “So we see that when Iranian President Pezeshkian, who seems, as a rule, more pragmatic than the IRGC, signaled he’s ready to be reasonable and will negotiate, the IRGC didn’t follow along, but rather launched a war against Iran’s civilian government. It is the IRGC who have been working against every diplomatic channel that Pezeshkian has been trying to open.”

Posted at 12:12 pm by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

WHO PAYS FOR FEDERAL WASTE AND FRAUD? All of us do, because hundreds of billions of tax dollars are lost every year to waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy. It’s one of those issues on which everybody pretty much agrees, but nobody has bothered to quantify its cost to individual Americans. Until now, that is.

James Agresti and his colleagues at Just Facts did a deep data dive on the issue and, as I report today for The Washington Stand, found that every one of this country’s 132 million households will in the normal course of things lose more than $140,000.

And because that figure only applies to losses due to fraudulent activities like Medicare benefits going to non-existent hospice patients, the ultimate total will grow when the impact of losses due to waste and other forms of irresponsible management are calculated.

Posted at 12:02 pm by Mark Tapscott on Apr 21st, 2026

AID AND COMFORT? YOU MAKE THE CALL:

UPDATE (Charlie): Regular readers know I’m suspicious of most cries of “treason” for all the reasons stated in Federalist 43 and various SCOTUS rulings. But then there’s ex Parte Bellmon (1807): “To constitute that specific crime [of treason] war must be actually levied against the United States.”

I think the current unpleasantness makes treason a colorable claim.

UPDATE (From Ed): In 2023, the local Fox affiliated reported “Murphy pushes back against Senate Republican resolution that targeted LGTBQ+ kids.” Today, he’s rooting for the side that hangs gay people from construction cranes. That’s one serious case of TDS running amok.

Also apparently Murphy approved:

MORE (From Ed): Predictably, Murphy falls back on the “botched joke” get out of jail free card:

Posted at 11:50 am by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

OBAMA MADE EVERYTHING WORSE. EVERYTHING:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

CHANGE (IT BACK): ‘Killing the idea of a Palestinian state’: West Bank settlement of Sa-Nur reestablished.

Cabinet ministers, members of Knesset, local politicians, and hundreds of settler activists celebrated the reestablishment and repopulation of the settlement of Sa-Nur in the northern West Bank on Sunday, nearly 21 years after it was evacuated under the Disengagement Plan.

Samaria Regional Council Chairman Yossi Dagan, who was one of the residents evacuated from Sa-Nur in 2005, was one of the 16 families who took up residence anew in the settlement on Sunday.

Speaking at the ceremony, Defense Minister Israel Katz repeated previous promises that the government is working on legalizing 140 illegally established farming outposts around the West Bank.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described the reestablishment of Sa-Nur as a “national holiday” and a “historic correction” to the “sinful expulsion from northern Samaria,” in reference to the four settlements in the northern West Bank, including Sa-Nur, that were evacuated under the Disengagement, which also saw Israel dismantle all its settlements in Gaza and pull out of the Strip.

“On this moving day, we are honored to make a historic correction to the sinful expulsion from northern Samaria,” said Smotrich. “We are abolishing the disgrace of expulsion, killing the idea of ​​the Palestinian state, and returning to the settlement of Sa-Nur. This is a day of celebration for the settlement movement and a national holiday for the State of Israel.”

The Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank rejected statehood in favor of terrorism, so this is what they get.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Misunderstanding Mr. Spock.

In the wake of the cancellation of yet another ridiculous “Star Trek” property, this time the hilariously cringe-inducing “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” sane audiences are once again asking the question “why can’t anyone get ‘Star Trek’ right?” The answer may be as simple as this… it’s because the studio’s leadership, as well as the creatives so far tasked with bringing new “Star Trek” stories to life, do not understand what “Star Trek” is, they only know what they wish it was.

These days, Hollywood creatives seem to want to write overtly about their own personal politics more than they want to tell great stories. In the Trump era many of Hollywood’s biggest writers, directors and actors believe deeply that the most important thing they can do with the positions in Hollywood to which they have ascended is to use their art to advocate for Progressive policies. It is the Great Cause which has finally brought meaning to their lives.

The problem is that this approach creates terrible drama every time it’s tried… a truth to which Hollywood has remained uniquely allergic over the last twenty years, in part because they believe “Star Trek” is an exception to this iron rule of story. To the modern Hollywood Progressive, the original “Star Trek” series was one which successfully combined exciting sci-fi adventure stories with constant Progressive political agitation. This is a tragic misunderstanding, but one in which Progressives believe so deeply, they have convinced themselves not only that “Star Trek” can continue to agitate for their preferred political outcomes while succeeding as a piece of popular entertainment, but that it must, because Progressive politics is built into the DNA of the “Star Trek” universe and you cannot have one without the other.

The original Star Trek was JFK’s muscular liberalism projected into space.  The young JFK became the young Captain James T. Kirk. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” became “The Final Frontier.” Trek was gunboat diplomacy, in space. Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon, his best writer-producer both served in WWII; Roddenberry would go on to become a Los Angeles policeman. Coon created Star Trek’s “United Federation of Planets” as the intergalactic equivalent of the United States of America.

As James Lileks wrote in 2007 in a piece titled, “A Conservative Trek,” “You could say [Capt. Kirk] did his part for God and Country, but of course Trek believed in neither:”

Nevertheless, the best Trek was conservative: it was rooted in the unchanging nature of man, be they hooting hominids on the plains of Earth throwing rocks at prey, or civilized spacefarers Money, power, lust, war: These were the constants, and Star Trek knew they’d follow us to infinity and beyond. At best we could find enlightened, savvy ways to avoid the pointless fights. But some people only understand a photon torpedo up the dorsal vent port, and we’d best be prepared to deal with them. The Federation, after all, had something called General Order 24, which called for the total destruction of a planet’s surface if the civilization was considered a threat to the Federation. As Vader might have said: Impressive.

Kirk actually invoked General Order 24, in “A Taste of Armageddon.” He used it as a threat, and didn’t carry it out. You can imagine his relief; the paperwork alone would have been a nightmare. But he would have done it if he had to, and not just for the reputation you get back home at the Officer’s Club. Not for Kirk the niceties of diplomacy: If he had to violate a treaty, he’d do it. If he had to save a civilization from the lifeless machinations of an ancient operating system, he’d harangue its computer until it smoked and crashed. In “The Arena,” Kirk didn’t win the battle against a rubber-suit Gorn because they hammered out a six-point Roadmap to Peace. Granted, he got the thumbs-up from the League of Judgmental Effeminate Aliens because he didn’t cave in the Gorn’s head with a stone. But prior to that, he nailed him in the chest with an improvised cannon that shot diamonds. In a cannon-free zone, no less.

All of which is a reminder of how closer to the center did the Kennedy era hug before his assassination, Vietnam, Nixon, and eventually an obsession with identity politics drove Hollywood Democrats completely insane.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 21st, 2026

WELL, GOOD:

Posted at 10:23 am by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

SCRATCH A DEM, FIND AN AUTHORITARIAN DEMAGOGUE:

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Tough Luck, Haters — The Glorious Warthog Gets Another Reprieve. “The A-10 has been a fixture in the Tucson sky since the mid-1970s. Even I was young then. When they take off from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base they fly right over my neighborhood. I get a great view of them when they are landing too, and could sit outside and watch them all day.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green on Apr 21st, 2026
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