NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…: 1 person killed in shooting near Columbus, Ohio mosque, police say.

One person was killed in a shooting near a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday afternoon, but the shooting was not connected to the mosque or those who were inside, police said.

“We want to make it clear this was not an attack on the mosque,” said Sgt. James Fuqua.

The Columbus Division of Police said they received multiple calls of shots fired in the area shortly after 2 p.m.

“This incident occurred in the parking lot of an apartment complex adjacent to a mosque,” the police statement said. “While we are still in the preliminary stages of the investigation as to the details regarding this shooting, this was not a targeted attack on the mosque, nor did this incident occur at the mosque.”

So why put it in the headline, CBS?

Seriously, Bari Weiss has a lot of work left to do.

CBS IS STILL DOING THE “MOSTLY PEACEFUL” MEME:

CCTV footage from Nice, France shows the moment a mob of looters broke into a phone case store over the weekend, destroying displays and stealing merchandise.

The incident comes after largely peaceful anti-government protests in many cities across France descended into riots,… pic.twitter.com/8Xn2OMxZRy

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 20, 2026

Bari Weiss needs to hurry up with that cleanup effort.

VICTORIA TAFT: Girls Are Forced to Compete With Boys in Washington. Now They Sleep and Bathe With Them. “Boys are officially allowed to compete against girls in Washington state. And, if that’s not ridiculous enough, now they sleep and take baths with them.”

YOU CAN ELIMINATE A THIRD OF MINNESOTA GANG ACTIVITY WITH THIS 1 WEIRD TRICK: 1 in 3 Minnesota Gang Members are Somali Muslims. “Somalis may only be between 1% and 2% of the state, but they’re between 30% to 15% of its gang members. That’s an overrepresentation of between 650% and 2,900%.”

COMMUNITY NOTES FOR THE WIN:

X users can help this one achieve Helpful status here.

IT GOT WEIRD: Ohio Dem Gubernatorial Candidate Has Mommy Issues That You Won’t Believe. “The 1980 election was when 11-year-old me first got heavily into all things political, and I can tell you that in nearly five decades of political activism, political engagement, and writing about it as a career, I’ve never seen anything like Arthur’s video today.”

CYBERSECURITY: How one hacker used AI agents and a few thousand dollars to break into scores of sites.

Over the past couple of weeks, a cybersecurity researcher watched as a Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including farm equipment maker Deere, home appliance ​company SharkNinja, and engine manufacturer Cummins.

Yet the hacker did almost none of the work.

The cybercriminal instead outsourced the hacking spree almost entirely to artificial intelligence, tasking AI agents ‌with spending hours autonomously probing and breaking into targeted sites, according to Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at the cybersecurity company NorForge.

In a report provided to Reuters ahead of publication on Monday, opens new tab, Fagerland said the hacker was one of several he discovered while scanning the web for inadvertently exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform popular with hackers.

Where are the counter-intrusion bots?

CORRECTION: BECAUSE SHE’S A FASCIST/COMMUNIST/CHOOSE-YOUR-IST WOMAN:

Amazingly and predictably Elissa Slotkin has managed to make herself the victim after calling for fascist government prosecutions of everyone who disagrees with her political ideology so that they're too scared to ever work in government https://t.co/PGzql960OZ

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) October 19, 2026

REQUIRED READING: The Useful Idiot: A Natural History.

The Useful Idiot: A Natural History

Specimen: Western, educated, well-meaning.
Habitat: universities, NGOs, quality newspapers, dinner parties where the wine is good and the opinions are better.
Status: abundant.

The useful idiot is not exactly stupid. This is the first and… https://t.co/YCpanzyljB pic.twitter.com/luYzfoytcj

— Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 (@Kristof_Poland) October 20, 2026

Read the whole thing, but this stands out:

The useful idiot is not exactly stupid. This is the first and most important thing to understand. Stupidity would be a defense. The more precise diagnosis is what we in Poland call pół-inteligent – the half-wit. Not the bottom of the intelligence distribution, which is too obviously lost to be useful. Not the genuine top, which tends to develop the inconvenient habit of following arguments wherever they actually lead. The sweet spot: smart enough to absorb a complex ideological framework, to deploy its vocabulary with confidence, to feel the social rewards of appearing sophisticated – but not quite sharp enough to interrogate the framework itself. Enough horsepower to run the program. Not enough to question who wrote it. The pół-inteligent is the useful idiot’s technical specification. And the specimen is typically convinced – this is crucial – that it is among the most independent thinkers in the room. The delusion is important. Remove it and the whole architecture collapses.

The problem, of course, is that removing the delusion is like extracting an impacted molar from someone whose jaw is wired shut.

JOANE JACOBS: The unabashed patriotism at the National World War II Museum is startling — and refreshing.

We also visited the National World War II Museum, which opened in 2000 as the D-Day Museum and kept on growing. There are lots of testimonies from men and women who served in the military or on the home front, lots of artifacts, fancy visuals and a “4-D” movie, focused on the American experience in World War II.

I was startled by the old-fashioned patriotism: The museum tells the stories of the “good war” in which we were the good guys and the Axis powers were the bad guys. There is no soul searching, no “interrogating” the narrative. Japanese-Americans were interned — but volunteered to fight and became heroes. Blacks were treated as second-class citizens — but worked in defense plants and served bravely. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a lot of civilians — but it ended the war without a bloody invasion. And so on.

Most Americans probably don’t know the role Andrew Jackson Higgins and New Orleans played in D-Day and the rest of the European theater, which is a real shame.

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK:

Well, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. In New York, you have that big nuclear power plant right? It’s still running right? https://t.co/67nRMCkL8L

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 19, 2026

ICYMI: Where Are the Gendarmes?

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS HEAVILY SEDATED: Don’t Look Now, But Yet Another Chicago ‘Violence Interrupter’ Has Committed Violent Felonies.

Angalwon Gilmore, 28, started his day at a Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny) office flashing gang signs at the anti-violence center’s own security cameras. Hours later he used a Lyft account registered as “Angawon CRED” to get a ride from that same building.

Did he misspell his own name? You make the call. Anyway, he climbed into the back of a 33-year-old woman’s 2013 Acura wearing a COVID mask…and then tried to carjack her. Thank heavens Lyft has a policy against their drivers carrying the proper tools for armed self-defense, right?

Angalwon yelled at her to change direction. When she did what he wanted to keep the situation from turning worse, he attacked from behind in the 6400 block of South Rhodes, wrapping his arm around her neck and trying to pull her out of the driver’s seat into the back. The struggle went on for several minutes. She fought hard, jamming a leg under the dash and steering wheel so he couldn’t pull her free. He eventually bailed with her keys. She called 911.

Gilmore is now detained on attempted vehicular hijacking, robbery, and aggravated battery. Phone data, Lyft records, the driver’s photo-lineup identification, and a police report that lists Chicago CRED as his employer tied him to the attack.

This is not some one-off fluke by a single “violence interruptor” gone bad.

I’d forgotten about the Violence Interruptor scheme, but what I do remember is stories like this one.

NEVER. GIVE UP. YOUR GUNS:

There is no 2a in France.

Imagine: Francois hears someone breaking into his home one night. He has no gun. Gun possession, but for rare cases, is illegal. So, he grabs a golf club. He confronts the intruder hellbent on harming his family. Francois puts a 3-wood to the side of… https://t.co/wfcVRm9xl6

— Larry Alex Taunton (@LarryTaunton) October 19, 2026

THE PLOT THICKENS: No Record of Ilhan Omar’s Father’s U.S. Naturalization?

SCOTUS PREVIEW:

BREAKING: The Supreme Court agrees to review the Reconstruction-era ban on distilling spirits in private homes. https://t.co/Ziz80e4SYH

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 19, 2026

We all saw what happened when home brewing was legalized almost 50 years ago…

LEFTIES WANT TO MICROMANAGE LITERALLY EVERYTHING, BUT THEY CAN’T EVEN MANAGE A SMALL FLOTILLA: Gaza flotilla postpones mission to 2027 after mechanical failures, migrant deaths at sea.

MORE CANDIDATES LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

JUST IN: Canadian man wins city council election after telling voters he has no idea what he's doing, doesn't enjoy politics, & is unqualified for office. pic.twitter.com/S17KPWspQ8

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) October 19, 2026

From the replies: “A politician who doesn’t want the job is the closest thing to small government Canada has voted for in years.”

NICE WORK, FELLAS: ICE Arrests Over 100 Gang Members in Under a Week.

YES: Hero Oregon Dad Showed the Importance of Defying Restrictive Gun Laws. “Last week, not only did Oregon’s restrictive gun laws fail to stop a shooter intent on killing innocent people, but a passing good Samaritan had to violate those laws to end the murder spree. Fortunately, authorities don’t appear intent on prosecuting Kaylub Giamanco, father to two girls who attend the school, for ignoring the ban on guns on school grounds to save lives. But the law is clearly more of a threat to people with good intent than it is to those bent on doing harm. Such laws should and must be defied, but lawmakers need to remove these legal minefields before they do more damage.”

CAN’T WAIT TO READ THE ENTIRE SUBSTACK:

So, is it a coincidence that DOJ is out arresting people in California today for being non-citizens who have registered to vote?

What does that prove?

It proves that there are registered voters in California who are ineligible to vote in federal elections and California has…

— Shipwreckedcrew (@shipwreckedcrew) October 19, 2026

“That is ‘knowledge’ under the ‘aiding and abetting’ theory of criminal culpability.”

THEY WOULDN’T DARE, WOULD THEY? Bring the Charges, Oregon. I’ll Bring the Popcorn.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Returning the first samples from a Martian moon: Inside the science of Japan’s bold MMX mission to Mars. “The mission, known as Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), is a first-of-its-kind endeavor to study the origin of Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos. The robust undertaking includes a landing on Phobos to collect the samples — which will likely be the first from the Mars system to return to Earth — and a search for evidence that could shed light on events during the formation of the solar system billions of years ago.”

OUCH:

The newest painting in the Louvre. “The Girl with the Suicidal Empathy.” Oil on canvas. Go see it while the Louvre is still standing. pic.twitter.com/l52nF5oB4h

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) October 19, 2026

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where Are the Gendarmes? I’ve seen France’s Gendarmerie Nationale up close and in person, and since I just looked up the French equivalent of tough hombres, they’re the des durs à cuire you don’t want to mess with.