ICYMI, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Ukraine Found Russia’s Weak Spot — and It’s ON FIRE.

COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIPS ARE LIKE THAT: Life Has Gotten Surreal in China.

This past November, in the town of Zhuhai, in southern China, a man named Fan Weiqiu got into his car and plowed into a crowd at a sports center, killing 35 people and injuring 43. Apparently distraught over a divorce settlement, the 62-year-old Fan was found inside the car with severe self-inflicted knife wounds to his neck.

The incident immediately became a political problem. Such a tragedy should never have happened in the happy, harmonious society that Xi claims to have created, free of the violence and divisions that plague other, inferior countries. China’s vast security state quickly got to work making sure it hadn’t: Censors scrubbed videos, articles, and comments about the incident from social-media platforms. Workers at the sports center cleared away the bouquets of flowers that mourning residents had laid there. Police chased off curious visitors. Fan was executed two months later.

Disappearing inconvenient truths has always been a feature of Communist rule in China. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and the family visit Beijing, and as they pass through Tiananmen Square, they find a plaque that reads On this site, in 1989, nothing happened. But Xi has lately taken his efforts to convince people that they live in a socialist utopia to a new extreme.

The Chinese people are content, the state’s propaganda organs insist, as they feed the public good news and suppress discussion of the country’s many economic and social problems. The result is a surreal environment, where public discourse is ever more detached from everyday life, and the government is ever less responsive to the concerns and difficulties of its people.

At the same time, the state intrudes more and more into daily life. My wife and I have experienced this directly. Over the past year, teams of police have made regular visits to our Beijing apartment—four of them just this month. Officers check our passports and visas while recording the interaction with small video cameras. We have already provided this information to the police, as required by local regulations; these repetitive visits are likely meant simply to intimidate.

The resulting atmosphere is a throwback to an earlier era of Chinese Communist rule, before the economic-modernization program of Deng Xiaoping.

Read the whole thing.

YES: Trans-ing Hurts Young People: Gender Clinic Ex-Employee Speaks Out After School Shooting.

GOOD QUESTION:

How do the things that weirdo freak scrawled on his gun differ from Dem talking points?

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) August 28, 2025

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX launches record-breaking 30th flight of a Falcon 9 booster.

Outside of SpaceX, the current record for reuses of an orbital booster [corrected!] stands at zero.

HMM:

Democratic politicians and pundits proclaimed with virtual unanimity that the FBI's investigation into John Bolton was retribution for his criticisms of Trump.

In fact, the investigation began and made substantial progress under Biden. I'm sure they will all be noting this. pic.twitter.com/6kWC9FmMzl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 28, 2025

Exit quote: “Bolton spent his career demanding severe punishment for anyone who mishandles classified docs. He was all over CNN, which reveres him, condemning Trump for it.”

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Ukraine Found Russia’s Weak Spot — and It’s ON FIRE.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

The killer: “If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be against filthy Zionist jews"

“Good would be a target of significance—Musk, Trump or some exec”

"killing children of innocent civilians would bring the most joy"

NYT: We may never know why he killed https://t.co/Ah6FJw8ycT

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) August 28, 2025

CHANGE: The Low Voter Turnout Paradigm Now Favors the GOP With Potentially Startling Implications.

DEAF EARS: Cracker Barrel’s CEO dismissed warnings from a top investor who called the rebranding ‘obvious folly.’

Masino and her board of directors dismissed at least four warnings by a top investor, Sardar Biglari, that the rebranding was “obvious folly,” filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal.

“Cracker Barrel is not a broken brand but it has a broken board,” he wrote, in a scathing seven-page letter to shareholders.

He laid out his criticisms in a 120-page slide-deck presentation with the title, “CRACKER BARREL IS IN CRISIS,” next to the company’s longtime logo of an old man in overalls leaning on a barrel – a logo that Masino would wipe out, unbeknownst to Biglari at the time.

But of course they ignored Biglari — BlackRock owns an even bigger stake.

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Praises Trump’s Takeover of Local Police.

FASTER, PLEASE: South Korean Shipbuilder to Invest $5B in Philadelphia Shipyard.

“Hanwha is also reviewing the build-out of a new block assembly facility. Through this expansion, Hanwha aims to increase Philly Shipyard’s annual production volume from less than two vessels to up to 20,” the release continues. “As a global leader in [liquefied natural gas] vessels, Hanwha aims to produce LNG carriers, naval modules and blocks, and, in the long-term, naval vessels out of its U.S. shipyard.”

During the Monday meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at the White House, Trump acknowledged the length of time needed to ramp up shipbuilding.

“We really gave up the shipbuilding industry foolishly, many years ago,” Trump said. “But we’re going to start it up again.”

Seriously — much faster, please.

VICTORIA TAFT WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A WORD: As Long as We’re Talking About Trans Killers, a Word About Portland’s Anti-ICE Trantifa Thugs.

THROW THE BOOK AT THEM: ‘Swatting for Hire’: Extremist Group Offers Fake School Shooting Threats for Just $20 as FBI Scrambles to Respond.

INDULGING DELUSIONS WITH HORMONES AND SURGERY HAS NOT WORKED OUT AS PROMISED:

This is literally what the Minneapolis mass sh—ter of church children believed. In his manifesto, he has a page expressing some regret about transitioning (he was a minor), but that it was too late for him, and he was going to kill and die.

Death before detransition. https://t.co/euRYOI7kxy

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 28, 2025

And on cue:

It's not at all beside the point, if you've been paying any attention to the trans community's violent rhetoric. Nor is the possibility that giving young people cross sex hormones mentally unbalancing. https://t.co/7Sjf92YhmJ

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 28, 2025

It’s never the actor, it’s always the object.

KRUISER: Starve the Leftist Trolls of Oxygen and Leave Them Gasping for Relevance. “It’s easy to believe the worst of the loudmouth social media lefties. What we don’t need to be doing is giving these cretins a bigger audience, yet that’s what conservatives have been doing with the most vile leftist trolls for years.”

NICE WORK, EVERYBODY:

We were assured that recession was imminent…

.@bloomberg: "The US economy expanded in the second quarter at a slightly faster pace than initially estimated on a pickup in business investment and an outsize boost from trade. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product, which…

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 28, 2025

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russian space official: “We need to stop lying to ourselves” about health of industry.

In his message to the corporation’s thousands of employees, Maltsev said Energia is having difficulty paying wages and delivering the spacecraft and other products it is contracted to build.

“We need to stop lying to ourselves and others about the state of affairs, convincing ourselves and others that everything is fine with us,” he wrote. “The time demands decisive action from us—not to sit, but to fight for the enterprise. I suggest that everyone answer the question honestly: are you ready to work for the result and make a real contribution?”

Maltsev, who was appointed director general of Energia just three months ago, closed his dark missive by suggesting it will take a miracle to save the historic space corporation.

This is an extraordinary statement coming from a senior leader within Russia’s space industry. Although it is widely understood that Russia’s space program is in decline, the most common tactic among Russian officials is to bluster about past greatness and talk about all the new programs that are under development.

What a sad state of affairs for the country that put the first satellite and the first man into space.

More: “In reality, the Russian space program is chronically underfunded, and the war against Ukraine has only accelerated the depletion of talent and resources. Russia cannot afford new spacecraft and rockets when it needs munitions and men for the front lines.”

Putin can have a space program, or he can keep throwing away hundreds of thousands of lives for minimal gains in Ukraine.

He seems to prefer the latter, so that’s what he’ll get.

BILLY JOEL’S “MIAMI 2017” WAS ONLY A FEW YEARS AHEAD OF THE CURVE: If New Yorkers Want to Know What the City Will Be Like When Mamdani Is Mayor, Just Look at Chicago.

WHAT IS A WOMAN? Sorority wins case against Wyoming sisters who sued after man admitted to sisterhood as judge refuses to define ‘woman.’

US District Judge Alan B. Johnson dismissed with prejudice a lawsuit filed by former and current members of the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority at the University of Wyoming, which argued that the organization violated its bylaws by admitting a trans-identifying male as a member of the female-only sorority.

Judge Johnson ruled on August 22 that the sorority has the autonomy to dictate how it wants to define the word “woman,” arguing that the Courts should not interfere with the internal governance of private organizations. “Having considered the issues presented (again), we find that the majority of the claims must be dismissed on the grounds that this Court still may not interfere with [the sorority’s] contractually valid interpretation of its own Bylaws,” Judge Johnson wrote in the final ruling, per Wyoming Public Radio.

The complaint was previously dismissed by Judge Johnson in August 2023, but without prejudice, allowing the sorority members to re-file the suit. The plaintiffs argued in the second filing that President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “Defending women from gender ideology” defines the word “female” as a “person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.”

“We dismissed that complaint without prejudice on the grounds that the sorority was free, as a private organization, to define the word ‘woman’ in its bylaws however it wanted,” Johnson wrote in an order, referring to the initial lawsuit, “and therefore the sorority was not contractually obligated to reject transwomen members.”

Ladies, feel free to reject Kappa Kappa Gamma.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems Gin Up Hate and Let Their Victim Groups Do Their Dirty Work. “Here in the 21st century, an unclear motive in these tragedies is code for ‘The conservatives’ suspicions are correct but we refuse to admit that they’re right AGAIN.’ It also means that the killer was an anointed member of one of the Democrats’ pet victim groups.”

HARRY ENTEN: The Democratic brand is in about as good a position as the Cracker Barrel rebrand. Bad, bad, bad.

What we’re talking here in terms of big party registration changes in the key swing states, let’s look at four key swing states that do keep track of registration by party. Look, the Republican Party is in their best position at this point in the cycle since at least 2005, in all four of these key battleground states.

How about Arizona, Nevada? Republicans haven’t done this well since 2005. Oh my goodness gracious, at this point in a cycle.

North Carolina, I couldn’t find a point at which Republicans were doing better at this point in the cycle. It’s at least this century, probably goes way back to the last century.

Pennsylvania, very similar. Republicans are doing better at this point than any time this century, as far as I could find.

Now, what types of gains are we talking about here for the Republican Party? Well, let’s compare it to this point during their first Trump administration, all the way back in 2017.

Look at this: Republican Party gains in party registration compared to this point back in 2017, during the Trump first administration. Arizona, you got a Republican gain of three points. How about Nevada? Up the hill we go, even though we’re sticking in the southwest, again, a six-point gain. How about again we come to the East Coast, North Carolina, a gain of eight points for the Republicans. And then the Keystone State in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, again we’re talking about a gain of eight points.

My goodness gracious, for Republicans, they are converting old former Democrats to their side of the ledger, as well as picking up new voters, registering new voters, and it absolutely paid off for them back in that 2024 election.

Don’t get cocky, because Democrat energy has them outperforming their numbers in off-year elections.

ICYMI: Dank Gavin Just Declared Victory Over Cracker Barrel. “It seems like only earlier this week [it was only earlier this week, Steve —Editor] that I had to apologize for breaking last week’s promise not to write about California Gov. Gavin Newsom until he stopped with his pathetic attempts at faux-Trump attention-whoring on the Social Media App Formerly Known as Twitter (SMAFKAT). In the immortal words of Whitesnake: Here I go again.”

YES: US states should be vigilant about preventing Chinese land purchases close to military installations.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is preparing for conflict with the United States and learning from ongoing wars that are redefining how future battles may unfold. A critical lesson emerging from today’s conflicts is that assets positioned behind enemy lines in peacetime can be activated with devastating effect in wartime.

Israel’s Operation Rising Lion succeeded in decimating Iranian military infrastructure and eliminating senior military leaders not only through superior platforms, munitions, and intelligence, but also through low-cost, unmanned systems launched from within Iran itself. Similarly, in Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine struck at the heart of Russian airpower using covertly deployed UAVs pre-positioned in Russia, damaging or destroying at least 20 strategic aircraft across five oblasts.

China is undoubtedly studying these operations, recognizing that the ability to operate from within US borders through surveillance, sabotage, or pre-placed systems could prove decisive in a future conflict. These examples should serve as a wake-up call for American policymakers: the Chinese Communist Party’s acquisition of US farmland, including near sensitive military installations, is not merely an economic concern but a strategic threat.

What was it Lenin said about capitalists selling him rope?

YOUNG HERO: Boy Says Friend Saved Him During School Shooting.