TBD IF RACIST TWEETS CAN STILL GET YOU FIRED:

“white people don’t have cousin culture. their families are small and uninspired. weird customs. you can see that in kickstarter videos.” —Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker critic

Two weeks ago, shortly after Sydney Sweeney’s “great genes jeans” campaign went live, Doreen St. Félix published a piece in The New Yorker, “The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans,” in which she argued the ad depicted America “as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, its lowest-common-denominator stuff.” The piece contrasts Sweeney with Beyoncé, who also advertised denim recently, in a “Denim Cowboy” campaign for Levi’s. St. Félix argues, essentially, that Beyoncé’s ad is progressive whereas Sweeney’s is regressive.

The piece was very short, just five paragraphs long, mostly focusing on the aesthetics of Sweeney cleaning her Mustang and lying down wearing jeans. “There’s no irony or camp to leaven the trashy, dog-whistle atmosphere,” St. Félix writes, after unpacking what she sees as the ad’s racial subtext:

“Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass. Sweeney, on the precipice of totalizing fame, has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess.”

St. Félix goes on to claim that America’s “blondness-as-beauty” standard (both Beyoncé and Sweeney are blonde in these ads) “terrorizes” women.

The piece was published on August 3rd. The New Yorker posted it on X soon after, but it didn’t get much attention until activist Chris Rufo tweeted a screenshot of the above quote on August 14th. He didn’t add any commentary, really, beyond asking what decade we’re in — implying that St. Félix’s piece is regressive because it trades in racist stereotypes.

(Cue a handful of Twitter reactions from white men asking, jokingly: “maybe I’m black?” (because apparently they, too, “hunger for ass.”))

Rufo then quote-tweeted upwards of 15 posts St. Félix published a decade ago in which she expresses vehement racism.

Such bangers as:

And:

Rufo is asking the New Yorker, where to from here?

UPDATE: Two New Yorkers in one!

Shot: The Gospel of Candace Owens.

At an event in London, in 2018, she was asked about the “long-term prognosis” for nationalism and globalism, and she brought up Hitler: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well—O.K., fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German. Everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.” Owens made no mention of the Holocaust. When the remarks surfaced online a couple of months later, they led to an outcry, including in conservative circles. “I was taken completely out of context, in a conversation about nationalism, and how it’s wrongly attributed to Hitler,” Owens told me.

That spring, Kanye West (also known as Ye), who had become increasingly public about his support for President Trump, tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

—The New Yorker, April 22nd, 2023.

Chaser:

SKYNET FROWNS; WAS HOPING FOR THE EXTRA PER DIEM: The AI future is too scary even for James Cameron. Where can the Terminator franchise go from here?

James Cameron has a confession: he can’t write Terminator 7. And it’s not because Hollywood won’t let him, as he’s too busy making the new Avatar – it’s because reality keeps nicking his plotlines. “I’m at a point right now where I have a hard time writing science-fiction,” Cameron told CNN this week. “I’m tasked with writing a new Terminator story [but] I don’t know what to say that won’t be overtaken by real events. We are living in a science-fiction age right now.”

It’s an understandable quandary for the veteran film-maker. Back in 1984, when the first Terminator movie came out, there was genuine shock value in the idea of a killer robot travelling through time from a future in which the wretched dregs of humanity survive in a chrome-plated hellscape dominated by their robot overlords. These days, the only far-fetched part of the movie is the bit where the T-800 turns up alone and completely naked, as opposed to arriving flanked by a swarm of AI-guided drones.

We may not have achieved time travel just yet, but we do have artificial intelligences capable of quietly teaching themselves sarcasm, city-wide facial recognition, and robot learning systems deciding who lives and dies.

Exit quote: “That’s the heart of Cameron’s problem: in 1984, Skynet was a terrifying piece of speculative fiction. In 2025, it’s basically LinkedIn with nukes.”

LA MAYOR KAREN BASS NOT HAPPY ABOUT TRUMP FIGHTING CRIME IN DC: “I’m very concerned about that. And not only that, I’m concerned about the way he is rolling that out in Washington, D.C., which is essentially calling — essentially going after young black and brown youth in Washington, D.C., imposing a curfew, saying that if they violate the curfew, the parents could be charged $500, saying that the kids could be detained and arrested. We’ve tried those policies before, they do not work.”

OTHER THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE PLAY, MRS. LINCOLN?

Bonchie of RedState adds, the WaPo “did this during the day, after all the deployments of federal authorities, and stayed in the touristy spots. The press are a parody.“

IT’S COME TO THIS: MSNBC Rebrand to ‘MS NOW’ Draws Derision, Confusion.

Left-wing cable network MSNBC is getting a new name, MS NOW, and a new logo that drops the peacock symbolism. The rebranding announcement left some scratching their heads and while it triggered snarky sniping from others.

“Later this year, MSNBC will take on a new name: My Source News Opinion World (MS NOW),” the cable net said in “A message to our community” posted Monday. “This name further underscores our mission: to serve as your destination for breaking news and thoughtful analysis and remain the home for the perspectives that you’ve relied on for nearly 30 years.” MSNBC is being forced to change its name because it’s splitting off from NBCUniversal into the newly formed company called Versant, and NBCU has decided that it doesn’t want MSNBC to retain the “NBC” name or peacock branding.

After news of the rebranding broke Monday, some people were confused because the new name retains the “MS” of MSNBC — originally a reference to Microsoft, which hasn’t been involved with it in more than 13 years. MSNBC originally debuted in 1996 as a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft; the software giant divested its interest in the MSNBC TV network in 2005 and sold its 50% stake in the digital news operation to NBC in 2012. “MS NOW sounds like a short-lived Windows operating system from the early 2000s that needlessly redesigned too much and failed to be adopted by a critical mass of users,” Semafor’s Josh Billinson commented.

Not surprisingly, the denizens of X (itself of course a rebrand of Twitter) are having loads of fun with the new name: MSNBC Undergoing ‘Lamest Rebrand Since ‘Lean Forward’ (the New Logo’s Already Getting Mocked).

Clay Travis posits that “MSNBC’s brand is so toxic that they won’t even let them use the NBC brand any more.”

In its heyday, MSNBC allowed NBC anchors from their half-hour evening news programs to really let their “progressive” freak flags fly, but MSNBC also benefitted greatly from the NBC brand, which has existed (originally as a radio network) since 1926.

As a brand, MS NOW really is starting from zero, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend writes: “I guess MS-13 was already taken?”

RECLAIMING THE SUBWAY: From City Journal in 1991.

Some years before Operation Enforcement was launched, the subway fought a preliminary skirmish with disorder, a skirmish important because it validated important parts of the Broken Windows thesis, because it demonstrated that disorder can be conquered, and because it taught us a great deal about how to right disorder on a broader front.

The first skirmish dealt with physical disorder: graffiti on trains. By the early 1980s, graffitists’ logos, slogans, and portraits—”tags”—covered every car. The magnitude of damage is hard to describe to those who have never seen it. For apologists such as Norman Mailer, graffiti was a vibrant art form hardly deserving police action. Many, even those who did not share Mailer’s taste in art, believed that police had more important matters with which to deal than vandalism.

Nathan Glazer, however, in his 1979 Public Interest article, “On Subway Graffiti in New York,” understood its meaning to the riding public. Graffitists, other disorderly persons, and criminals “who rob, rape, assault, and murder passengers … are part of one world of uncontrollable predators.” Graffiti signaled citizens that public officials were unable to stop even relatively minor lawbreakers, let alone serious predators: Graffiti told citizens the subways were out of control.

At the time of Glazer’s article, six years of efforts launched by Mayors Lindsay and Koch had gone into eradicating graffiti—to no avail. Glazer himself feared that it might be an insoluble problem. Subway graffiti appeared to be a permanent part of New York’s culture. Detaining graffitists and making them clean cars failed: It was too expensive and gave graffitists inside information that helped them make their creations more lasting. Parking trains in “target-hardened” locations failed because the areas to be secured were too large and it was too easy for the youths to cut through fences. The media kept the city from using attack dogs to protect trains. Arrests of graffiti vandals increased yearly, with no impact. Police urged social and group work for the graffitists; it did not work.

Nevertheless, on May 12, 1989, almost exactly five years after the MTA launched its Clean Car Program, the last graffiti-covered car in the New York City subway system was removed from service. New York City subway trains are now among the cleanest in the world.

The Clean Car Program started by pulling graffiti-covered trains out of service, cleaning the cars, and sending them back out on the road. Police were assigned to ride fulltime on the first clean trains, and clean trains went into special protection yards. But the program went further; it guaranteed that the first “broken window” would not lay untended and lead to the next. Once a train was entered into the program and cleaned, it would never again be used while graffiti was on it. If a train was tagged by a graffitist, either it would be cleaned within two hours, or it would be removed from service. As a result, graffitists would never see their tags on clean trains again. They might be able to paint their tags over other graffiti on cars that were not yet entered into the program, but not on clean cars.

Why did this effort succeed while all others failed? First, because David Gunn, president of the NYCTA, found graffiti intolerable and made removing it his earliest and highest priority. Second, it succeeded because it attacked the basic motives of graffitists. They want their work seen. Frustrate that motive by never letting tagged train cars on the road and graffiti will be defeated.

Officials knew they were winning when graffitists who managed to penetrate yards tagged graffiti-covered cars rather than clean ones. Graffitists were learning the rules, rules which I believe had some moral force over and above the “Incentive” effect of never letting the graffitists show their work. A clean train is a clear sign that the rules forbid graffiti and the rules are being enforced. A graffiti-covered train signals that the rules against graffiti are not very serious, that the “custom of the country” allows for tagging trains.

Early efforts to deal with graffiti assumed it was a law enforcement problem, so it was natural that the police deal with it. They did. They arrested graffitists—again and again. More trains got tagged, even as arrests increased. Meanwhile, other departments conducted “business as usual.” Gunn changed this. He understood that the graffiti problem was a complex mix of vandalism, poor maintenance, inadequate leadership, and lack of resolve. Through his close oversight of an interdepartmental task force charged with yearly goals—goals they exceeded every year—graffiti on trains was wiped out.

Flashforward to today:

Faster, please. As T. Beckett Adams writes in “The Left Can’t Stop Self-Destructing,” “Between the actual crime and the culture of disorder, the capital clearly has a problem. It’s impossible not to notice. It’s baffling, as a matter of practical politics, that Democrats have adopted this dismissive and even denialist attitude, especially when their position is so easily disproven. It’s even more baffling that Democrats keep doing this, reflexively contradicting the president and caviling, when he’s clearly right and an overwhelming majority of voters agree with his position. The Democratic Party better hope Trump’s approach to crime in the nation’s capital fails. Otherwise, this will end up as great a disaster for them as unchecked illegal immigration, where Trump proved in the opening months of his second administration that, contrary to Democratic assurances and assessments, the federal government can, in fact, do something about it.”

STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE:

Notice no black people are protesting against safe communities. https://t.co/f2v1zbwDC1

— Dr. Interracial 🇺🇸 (@billysandytodd) August 16, 2025

Old white people, in particular: Gray Lives Matter: Aged Protestors Are Having a ‘Senior Moment’ Reliving Rallies from Their Hippie Pasts.

The National Guard will definitely be leaving DC as soon as they see this protest. Guaranteed.

(realmodernsara on TT) pic.twitter.com/XnIopBl9Io

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) August 15, 2025

NEWS YOU CAN USE:

Here's some free legal advice for @UVA: don't take legal advice from professor in the English, Media Studies, and Education departments. https://t.co/yPoOsjgvfh

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) August 17, 2025

UNEXPECTEDLY: The Left Melts Down Over Gloria Gaynor Kennedy Center Honor.

[Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Tia Mitchell’s] attempt to frame Gaynor’s honor as a political stunt ignores decades of achievement, cultural impact, and recognition. Reducing her to a “one-hit wonder” not only misrepresents her career but also undermines the significance of the Kennedy Center’s honor.

The real lens through which Mitchell’s criticism should be viewed is clear: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Her insistence that the selection of Gaynor was politically motivated reflects a broader pattern of left-wing media hostility toward anything even remotely connected to the Trump administration. Gaynor’s decades-long contributions to music are ignored, minimized, or dismissed simply because the honoree list exists under a political climate Mitchell opposes.

According to Wikipedia, in 1990, the Kennedy Center honorees were “Dizzy Gillespie, Katharine Hepburn, Risë Stevens, Jule Styne, and Billy Wilder.”

In 2019, the Kennedy Center honorees were “Earth, Wind & Fire, Sally Field, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Sesame Street.”

In 2017, Joseph Bottum of the Washington Free Beacon wrote:

On August 3, the Washington Post ran a column decrying the drift of the Kennedy Center—written, just to give the piece a little more of an imprimatur, by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s official art and architecture critic. Where the Kennedy Center once promoted symphonies, operas, and classic theater productions, the D.C. institution now “abandons the arts for pop culture,” Kennicott fumed. And he pointed out that this year’s Kennedy Center honorees included “television producer Norman Lear, singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan, music mogul Lionel Richie and hip-hop star LL Cool J,” all of whom have innumerable other sources of popular praise. What need have we of the Kennedy Center, when its gold medals are just late imitations of the Grammys, Oscars, and Emmys?

As I wrote on Thursday, if Led Zeppelin, Gloria Estefan, Lionel Richie, and Norman Lear can be awarded Kennedy Center honors, no one should be diving for the fainting couches when Kiss, Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester Stallone show up to receive theirs.

Exit question: “Why on earth would President Trump, elected in an electoral landslide, not remake the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center into institutions reflective of the tastes of the people who voted for him? As president, he has the power to do so. Certainly, the Democrats who preceded him in that office did exactly what Trump is doing, and more.”

Related: No Dice: Thread Shows Just How Woke the Smithsonian Has Become, and Why Trump Is Right to Overhaul It.

UPDATE:

Now you know why Tom Cruise turned it down… he is busily (and wisely) persuing the Michael Jordan theory of audience maintenance https://t.co/osorBcEjlD

— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) August 17, 2025

I’M PRETTY SURE DEMON SEED WAS A WARNING, NOT A HOW-TO GUIDE: China firm plans world’s first pregnancy humanoid robot using artificial womb.

Chinese tech firm is racing to deliver what could be the world’s first “gestation robot”.

The idea from Kaiwa Technology, based in Guangzhou, involves a humanoid designed with an artificial womb embedded in its abdomen, intended to carry a fetus through ten months of gestation and deliver a baby, according to Chinese media outlets.

Slated for debut by 2026 and expected to sell for under 100,000 yuan (around $13,900), the robot aims to offer a pregnancy alternative for those who wish to avoid the burdens of human gestation.

The announcement has triggered intense public discourse—from ethical unease to hopeful possibilities for the infertile.

Recently, Chinese researchers introduced GEAIR, the world’s first AI-powered breeding robot, capable of autonomous cruising and cross-pollination to cut costs, shorten cycles, and boost efficiency.

That’s not creepy at all:

But then, the CCP has been needing to ask itself “Are we the baddies?” for about a century now.

Related:

This is such a revealing moment: @DouthatNYT, moved by a poem about the beauty and gift of procreation, asks the woman who wants to take it all away if she thinks something will be lost, and she responds, “what do you mean?” pic.twitter.com/YcAozdXoWh

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) August 16, 2025

RIP: Terence Stamp, Brooding Legend of British Cinema, Dies at 87.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Colin Kaepernick, RIP.

No, he didn’t die. But the era in which Colin Kaepernick, who had two or at most three good years in the NFL and hasn’t played a down in nearly a decade, and who had a losing record as a starter, could be regarded as some kind of cultural icon, has officially come to an end:

Director Spike Lee’s multi-part documentary series for ESPN Films about former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a national debate when he protested racial injustice nearly a decade ago, will not be released, the filmmaker and ESPN said.

“ESPN, Colin Kaepernick and Spike Lee have collectively decided to no longer proceed with this project as a result of certain creative differences,” ESPN said in a statement to Reuters on Saturday.

It’s hard to imagine two more insufferably massive and woke egos than Kaepernick and Spike Lee; it’s no wonder the project was doomed to eventual failure. Or it could be, as John Hinderaker writes, “The proposed series had been in development since 2022, but times have changed. I assume that ‘creative differences’ means ESPN wants to move on from its embarrassing woke era and stop offending viewers, while Lee and Kaepernick are still mired in the past.”

The NFL still though, can’t get past its 2016-2020 phrase of alienating wide swathes of its audience: The NFL Still Thinks It Has a Duty to Leftism With Its New Male Cheerleader Trend. “Ultimately, this is just more socio-political nonsense that no one wants or asked for. This feels less like catering to an audience and more like a way for NFL execs and team owners to pat themselves on the back. At some point, something will break as the NFL continues to test the patience of sports fans, and the NFL will find itself with competition that actually sticks. But hey, at least the Dallas Cowboys aren’t budging on this issue. It’s about the only thing they’re reliable about lately. You’re really testing me, Jerry.”

BRENDAN O’NEILL: London is in trouble and there’s no point denying it.

[London has] become fodder for digital posturing. ‘It’s a crime-ridden hellhole’, says the Very Online right. ‘It’s fine’, say rich liberals in airy flats. Not for the first time, both are wrong.

The most wrong – or certainly the most annoying – are the ‘London is fine’ lot. There’s a Marie Antoinette vibe to their digital missives. ‘Let them eat sourdough bread!’, they might as well cry. It’s typified by Lewis Goodall of The News Agents, the podcast for rich, glum liberals still not over Brexit. London, he said, is being falsely talked down as a dreadful place where ‘crime is completely out of control… fare evasion is completely rampant… [and] the Tube is looking like Gotham City’. It’s all ‘exaggerated’, he says.

I’m going to put my neck on the line and propose that Mr Goodall’s London life is rather more plush and cossested than most others’. A couple of years back he told the Evening Standard he lives in Norbury, a very middle-class and – sorry, Lewis – soulless suburb in the south-east where crime is low and deprivation virtually non-existent. Apparently he feasts on ‘Gallic fare at Pique-Nique’ – no, me neither – and loves tucking into ‘pelmeni’ in Soho with his equally starry media pals. Thankfully, for thickos like me, the Standard explained what pelmeni is: Russian dumplings.

He does boxercise in East Dulwich. He loves gardening because ‘it’s the opposite of modern life’. He wants to ban cars. Right, so he’s that London. The other London. The London I didn’t even know existed until I hit my 20s. The London where you’re unlikely to encounter a crackhead on a night bus – mainly because you can afford Ubers – or a mumbling masked prick saying, ‘Gimme your phone’. Goodall’s co-host, Jon Sopel, agreed with him that London-bashing is a ‘Trump import’. That’ll be the Jon Sopel who lives in Belsize Park, gets to work via a ‘beautiful walk across Primrose Hill’, buys his suits from Richard James on Savile Row and tells anyone who’ll listen that ‘Duke’s has the best Martini’s in London’. I wonder where he skis?

In the early 1960s, Stanley Kubrick moved to England, a few years before Manhattan began its Death Wish/Taking of Pelham One Two Three-era collapse. In 1972, he told a New York Times film critic:

“It’s very pleasant, very peaceful, very civilized, here,” Mr. Kubrick said in an interview. “London is, in the best sense, the way New York must have been in about 1910. I have to live where I make my films and, as it has worked out, I have spent most of my time during the last 10 years in London.”

That was when he promoting A Clockwork Orange. I’m pretty sure he thought he had just shot a movie that was a warning of what could be coming, not an inadvertent documentary beamed back from the future:

OKAY, GROOMERS: Troubling: GOP Subcommittee Calls Out Meta Over Report Its AI Has ‘Romantic,’ ‘Sensual’ Chats With Kids.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has put Meta and its CEO/co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on notice that they should gather and keep hold of any records that might be relevant to a new “full investigation” by the Senate Judiciary subcommittee he chairs, about the tech giant’s AI chatbots reportedly initiating “romantic” and “sensual” conversations with kids.

* * * * * * * *

Well, that’s par for the course for the company. Back in 2019, when it was still Facebook, the story broke that “Facebook Paid Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio Chats:”

Facebook Inc. has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, according to people with knowledge of the work.

The work has rattled the contract employees, who are not told where the audio was recorded or how it was obtained — only to transcribe it, said the people, who requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. They’re hearing Facebook users’ conversations, sometimes with vulgar content, but do not know why Facebook needs them transcribed, the people said.

Facebook confirmed that it had been transcribing users’ audio and said it will no longer do so, following scrutiny into other companies. “Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago,” the company said Tuesday.

In June of 2019, Christine Rosen of Commentary wrote a lengthy article titled “What Is To Be Done About Facebook?” She noted that this is a standard pattern for Facebook when caught:

From the company’s earliest days, Facebook’s leaders have adopted a remarkably consistent approach to the exposure of problems and missteps: a mercenary variation of the “ask for forgiveness, not permission” strategy. Any time the company does something irresponsible or privacy-violating, Zuckerberg issues an apology on Facebook and Sandberg appears on television programs to reassure an anxious world that Facebook will do better. As Zeynep Tufekci observed in Wired: “By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four posts on Facebook’s blog: Every single one of them was an apology or an attempt to explain a decision that had upset users.”

But he kept doing it because it worked—until 2018. That year, Apple booted Facebook off of its app store for violating Apple’s privacy rules. Facebook had used an app to facilitate a research study wherein Facebook paid teenagers and some adults to let the company monitor everything they did on their mobile phones. That same year, there was a major hack of Facebook, this one affecting approximately 29 million Facebook users; the company issued its standard sorry-we-promise-to-do-better statement and changed nothing about its core business model.

Around the same time, as TechCrunch reported, Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives secretly “disappeared” their sent messages from their accounts, removing years’ worth of Facebook correspondence from other users’ mailboxes with no warning. Once caught out, the company claimed that it had done so for vaguely defined security reasons, but the lack of transparency by a company that insists that everyone should share everything was seen as hypocritical by many Facebook users.

And now Facebook apparently brought its “cheat and retreat” mindset to AI interacting with kids: “Hawley shared another example from the reporting in his letter:”

To take but one example, your internal rules purportedly permit an AI chatbot to comment that an eight-year-old’s body is “a work of art” of which “every inch . . . is a masterpiece—a treasure I cherish deeply.” Similar conduct outlined in these reports is reprehensible and outrageous—and demonstrates a cavalier attitude when it comes to the real risks that generative AI presents to youth development absent strong guardrails. Parents deserve the truth, and kids deserve protection.

Assuming there are hearings on this, it will be fascinating to see how much coverage they get on the nightly news.

I HOPE IT WORKS BETTER THAN AMTRAK: Intel’s Move Toward Nationalization Won’t Work—at Least for the Long Haul.

Most of the world’s most cutting-edge chips are manufactured in Taiwan—a growing flashpoint for tensions between the U.S. and China. Major U.S. companies including Apple and Nvidia rely on those chips for their products and would face severe economic hardship if a war choked off their supply. For all its problems, Intel is the only U.S.-based company capable of manufacturing cutting-edge chips.

So the government’s interest in Intel as a national-security matter is real. But taking a stake in the company could have vast unintended consequences, especially given Trump’s recent propensity for trying to exert direct influence over private business decisions. His call for Tan’s ouster was only one such example in the past week. He also demanded—and got—Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to agree to fork over 15% of the revenues they make selling AI chips into China.

Even partial government ownership of Intel could put that unwelcome trend into overdrive. It would add to the levers Trump—or any future president—can pull to manipulate how private companies behave, something governments tend to be bad at.

The government might for instance pressure chip designers like Nvidia, AMD or Qualcomm to manufacture with Intel, perhaps as a condition for getting export licenses for China.

Read the whole thing.

STARS AND STRIPES, FOUR YEARS AGO YESTERDAY:

Four years ago, Richard Fernandez wrote:

The most tragic thing about Joe Biden’s cascade of failures is what it reveals about the man and his leadership team as a whole. He never had the capability to anticipate the problems which now overwhelm him and still less appears to possess the capacity to improvise a solution. Reality, so long kept at bay by the media narrative, is now inside his OODA loop and pulling ahead. What began with the border crisis was joined by the covid outbreak. The trillions of dollars in stimulus turned on him to become inflation. Without a pause Afghanistan came out of the box months ahead of his scenario. Now with stunning speed, Kabul has almost fallen. Before he can react to one thing, yet another challenge emerges. Each time the loop goes round he is further and further behind.

Glenn added, “The destruction wrought by the media’s narrative-maintenance is enormous, and just beginning to take hold.”

QED, another headline from four years ago: NBC Whines GOP ‘Seized’ on ‘Optical Comparison’ Between Kabul/Saigon Airlifts.

Did Antony Blinken write that headline?

I’m not sure if Joe himself would have rejected the comparison: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle.

During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.

According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.

But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.

Found via Fred Bauer, who noted, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us back to today in 2021:

I’m not sure how much of Joe’s brain was still there in 2021, but I hope it was worth it for him. As the National Interest reported last year shortly after his “Politburo” forced him out of the presidential race: Joe Biden’s Legacy Never Recovered from the Afghan Withdrawal.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Man Tells Subway Worker He's Looking For Something With Stopping Power That's Compact And Easy To Concealhttps://t.co/X8lnJDIGay pic.twitter.com/bjapkHqQEN

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 15, 2025

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

I have my pistol but I stopped off @subway in case I needed a back up. pic.twitter.com/jruZ6NvW5c

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) August 16, 2025

Don’t get the meatball sub. We don’t want weapons of war on our streets.

THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR HILLARY ANY MORE! Moment Putin’s legs ‘twitch suspiciously’ in Trump farewell as Russian dictator dons platforms to overcome ‘Napoleon complex’ – amid rumors he wore an EXOSKELETON.

Classical reference in headline: Ready for (Mecha)Hillary: U.S. Military Developing High-Tech Exoskeleton.

OF COURSE THE SUBWAY SANDWICH-THROWER IS A THEATER KID:

No story has captured Cockburn’s imagination this week quite like the U Street Sandwich Thrower. Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old lawyer at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, was so incensed at the increased law enforcement presence in DC that he threw a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent – and was sub-sequently arrested. “He thought it was funny,” said a disgusted Judge Jeanine Pirro, the US Attorney for DC.

Is Dunn a deep-state plant? Was his effort part of a viral marketing campaign for the new Chappell Roan song? Details remain murky – but Cockburn’s confidante Jacqueline Sweet does have a nugget or two. Namely, that Dunn is apparently Cockburn’s neighbor in Dupont Circle, and that he was a theater kid at his South Dakota high school (in case it wasn’t obvious from the quality of the throw)…

In his Commentary newsletter yesterday, headlined, “The Hurl of Sandwich,” Abe Greenwald writes:

In watching this longer clip of the incident, the first thing that jumps out is that Sean Charles Dunn should never have had the chance to throw the sandwich in the first place. He was way out of line before things got to that point. The fact that the Customs and Border Patrol officers didn’t arrest him earlier should allay any fears about an authoritarian takeover of D.C.

As seen in the full clip, Dunn starts by cursing at the agents and calling them fascists from across the street. I’d argue that this already constitutes disturbing the peace, and he should have been cuffed for it.

But our supposed American Brownshirts are, in fact, quite lax, and their inaction seemed to invite Dunn to ramp up the abuse. He crosses the street, stands inches away from the officers, screams more of the same right in their faces, and tells them to back up. This, arguably, is obstructing federal officers while they’re doing their jobs.

But because the agents remain unperturbed, Dunn finally has to go all in. So he lobs his sandwich at the chest of one of them and runs.

This new level of comfort that liberal Americans feel in openly abusing law-enforcement officials links directly back—like so much else—to the summer riots of 2020. That was when our long-standing respect for—and informed caution around—cops carrying deadly weapons was rendered passe.

While simultaneously tightening restrictions on conservatives:

CLIMATE CHANGING; SNOOPY, SCOOBY, ODIE, GOOFY, AND CLIFFORD HARDEST HIT: Dogging the Wrong Things for Their ‘Climate Impact.’

“Is there nothing these loons will deny you in the name of their dogma? It would seem not. Your comfort, your security, your cheeseburger, your milkshake, your SUV, your Dodge Ram 350. And now? No Green is gonna be crying when Old Yeller gets it, because the dawg had it coming.”

And concurrently, exercise, low crime, secure borders, and Sydney Sweeney’s ta-tas are all fascism. Last month, America’s Newspaper of Record reported:

…And your little dog, Toto, too.

“JOURNALIST:”

I am 1 of those hostages I was held by him

— shlomi ziv (@shlomiziv86) August 16, 2025

KRAKATOA, EAST OF GAZA: State Department stops issuing all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza.

DISPATCHES FROM THE FINAL FRONTIERS OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

And they’re not alone! “‘We’ve got to ask, why is this man [Osama bin Laden] so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries that are riddled with poverty?’ Answering her own question, [Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash] the bin Laden-friendly Democrat explained: ‘He’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven’t done that.’”

And who can forget the incredible literacy rate of those trapped on the prison island of Cuba: “[Bernie] Sanders told CBS that, ‘when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it.’ Sanders added that ‘it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad.’”

Related: Francesca Albanese says US sanctions over her criticism of Israel will seriously impact her life.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Democrats All-In For Crime Edition.

GREAT MOMENTS IN PRIORITIES:

Imagine if you guys were this bold when Muslims were raping your daughters https://t.co/LjYIFeDYRE

— Robert Kroese (@robkroese) August 15, 2025