VIDEO: ‘Mass Female TikTok Psychosis’: The Lindsay Clancy Cult. “Here is a unique brain frying happening over on Tik Tok. And it has caused probably the greatest gender divide I have ever seen on any culture war topic ever. It’s one of the very few times I’ve genuinely been taken aback by something on the internet. And if you know me, that should worry you.”

Trump should have shut down TikTok.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, THAT IS A TAKE:

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Why the AfD Wins.

For the past several months, in the course of the Sachsen-Anhalt election, accusations of fascism have been brandished against a candidate who not only wasn’t born when Nazis held power but wasn’t even born when the Berlin Wall came down almost half a century later.

Without a direct emotional link to its darkest days, Germany’s version of democracy—in which certain political parties are constitutionally entitled to encourage a court to ban others—has become too bizarre to maintain. Harald Martenstein, a conservative columnist for Welt and hardly an AfD backer, took part in a debate in Hamburg last winter over whether to ban the AfD, and shocked the audience by contemptuously throwing the question back at his mostly progressive audience. “You know that you are not trying to prevent the Fourth Reich, but only to eliminate your political competition,” Martenstein said. “It would be child’s play to keep the AfD down. All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems.”

As Melissa Chen tweets, “This is the inevitable result of the mainstream media stretching the label ‘far-right’ until it covered any opinion to the right of Lenin. Once a term is used on sensible opinions on border control, energy policy, crime statistics and school admissions, it just becomes noise and people start resenting the attempts at manipulation. Gay race communism became the only position that was ok to hold.”

To be fair, this isn’t your grandfather’s “far right” party: Why do so many gay men support the AfD?

A LOT OF US HAVE NOTICED:

BIG CHANGES COMING — OR ELSE: AfD and the Most Dangerous Man in Germany.

UPDATE:

“MIGRANTS”:

Or is this guy a refugee? It’s so hard to tell.

IT ISN’T JUST US:

Meanwhile, Axios spins AfD’s win as upstarts for Germany’s elites to squash, not as a legitimate expression of popular will: Far-right win in state election tests Germany’s political firewall.

IT ISN’T ABOUT THE MONEY: Despite Record Education Funding Michigan Students Are Not Getting Smarter.

The numbers are particularly troubling when viewed over several years.

Third-grade ELA proficiency has now fallen for three consecutive years, dropping from 40.89% in 2023 to 39.64% in 2024, 38.87% in 2025 and just 38.17% in 2026.

Fourth grade has followed essentially the same path, falling from 44.35% in 2023 to 43.25% in 2024, 42.43% in 2025 and 41.28% in 2026.

At the same time, Michigan has repeatedly increased education spending under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, including record per-pupil funding and hundreds of millions of dollars directed toward literacy, tutoring, teacher training, early childhood education and other programs.

You can be sure the adminstrators are doing quite well.

HAPPY LABOR DAY, COURTESY OF CAPITALISTS:

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Broken feet, ripped-out hair and now a death sentence: the fate of twin sisters jailed over Iran protests.

After four months of desperately seeking news from hospitals and state institutions, their mother, Marzieh Nourmohammadi, finally learned their fate. Taraneh and Romina Rahimi had been seized over their decision to join millions on the streets of Iranian cities during the January protests against the regime. The twins were unrecognisable by the time of their mother’s prison visit in May.

The women’s scalps were patchy from being dragged around by their hair, and their faces were bruised, according to their US-based cousin. It is claimed that Taraneh, who dreams of running her own horse stable one day, had been told the prison guards would rape Romina in front of her unless a confession was signed.

The visit by their mother to Dowlatabad prison, in Isfahan, the main city in central Iran, was five months ago. It has now emerged from the Iranian courts that Taraneh has been sentenced to death for her participation in the January protests, and that Romina has been given a 25-year prison sentence. Neither of the women have been seen by their family since the sentencing.

Read the whole thing, provided you can stomach it.