February 12, 2026

ANGSTY JOURNALISTS SAID THE WAPO SPORTS SECTION WAS INDISPENSABLE. THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS OTHERWISE:

ESPN reporter Jenna Laine wrote that the layoffs were “so troubling” because they signaled that “the appetite for real sports reporting has died” as the industry continued “its slow, inevitable burn.” New York Times reporter Ben Mullin wrote a eulogy for “one of the last bastions of great sports writing.” More importantly, he explained, the Post was a “champion of diversity” and a “leader in women’s sports coverage.”

A Washington Free Beacon analysis of the Post‘s sports-related output in recent weeks did not find sufficient evidence to support these claims of journalistic greatness. Amid numerous offerings of gambling advice, the Post also published eight feature-length articles since Jan. 29 that—while technically sports-related—few normal American sports fans would describe as engaging content that must be published even if it means losing $100 million per year.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN NOLTE: Rigged Immigration Report Proves Bari Weiss Is Lying About CBS News Reforms.

On Monday, far-left CBS News released anti-ICE/pro-Democrat Party talking points that prove that, despite her promises, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has no intention of reforming the disgraced CBS News.

In fact, Bari Weiss is lying about reforming CBS News in the hopes of suckering Normal People to once again trust, watch, and deliver clicks to this joke of a news outlet.

In previous articles I mentioned that if CBS was to truly reform we would see the reforms when and where they matter, not as window dressing, like asking far-left 60 Minutes for a little extra reporting on an anti-Trump segment.

No, a truly reformed member of the corporate media will openly defy and even shoot down the current media narrative. For example, a reformed CBS News would have questioned Anthony Fauci’s stupid COVID rules; a reformed CBS News would’ve dug into whether or not Kamala Harris really worked at McDonald’s; a reformed CBS News would’ve lambasted a health institution that said going to the beach will kill millions but rioting for George Floyd is healthy… Those are just past examples. Bari Weiss was not running CBS News then. Well, she is now, and rather than use the truth to puncture the prevailing (and dishonest) anti-ICE narrative, she’s using lies of omission to aid and abet this fraud.

Not impressive, to say the very least.

But there’s also this: CBS Evening News Producer Reportedly Quits in Fiery Note — Calls Out ‘Shifting Set of Ideological Expectations’ at Bari Weiss-Led Outlet.

Weiss had — still might have? I dunno — a chance to drag CBS News closer to the center, albeit kicking and screaming. But aside from a couple of cosmetic changes, we have yet to see much.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

HAVING A PHOTO ID TO VOTE — IT’S SO SIMPLE, EVEN A CONGRESSMAN CAN DO IT:

Why do Democrats want to allow Trump and MAGA to cheat at election time?

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

“EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’VE BEEN CHEATED?” Noam Chomsky, Apologist for Pol Pot, Called Jeffrey Epstein His ‘Best Friend.’

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten famously asked at the end of the final Sex Pistols concert during their late-1970s run.

Noam Chomsky might as well have asked the American Left the same question as the curtain falls on his life.

His emails to Jeffrey Epstein, in which he laments “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and the public” and notes the “torture and distress” of the ordeal endured by Epstein, certainly overturn the public perception that the MIT professor cultivated in such essays as “The Responsibility of the Intellectuals.”

To be fair, in 2001, those hard-hitting journalists at – checking notes – VH1 assured me that Epstein was all about empowering education and intellectual pursuits:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

A LOT: ‘Snow White’ Lost [GULP] How Much Money? “Let me ask one vital question that nobody at Disney seems to have asked themselves or one another: How is it even possible to lose that much money on a picture that could have been shot for probably $100 million, with another $50 million in marketing costs?”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

ENGLAND AS IT REALLY IS: US visitors may be in for an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.

The American sees that the glorious metropolis of the English, London, is no longer particularly English. We see it because we walk its streets and witness the newcomers, visibly alien, who dominate some of its neighbourhoods and much of its politics. Both the authors of this piece had an eminent British academic tell us, weeks ago, that in our pessimism over his country we missed positive developments, like the fact that London is now majority non-English for the first time in well over one thousand years.

This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do. It isn’t just London of course: the change has descended upon so much of the country now.

We are Americans and so this does not immediately strike us as evidence of crisis — we are especially accustomed to the alien and the newcomer alike — until we learn that the social mechanisms of assimilation that we take for granted are simply not in evidence in the United Kingdom. The realm is not one people. The things English society used to cheer for and applaud — for slavery abolition, perhaps, or the relief of Mafeking or the Monarchy — are slowly replaced by the things the successor society cheers for and applauds. For example: jihad or the slaughter of the Jews. Football at least remains something of a commonality.

The American sees that the Vice President of the United States was not entirely joking when he referred to Britain as an Islamic power with nuclear weapons. We also see that the rise of Islam in England is a symptom, not a cause; a consequence of a prior loss of confidence and vigor, a result of every major institution utterly failing to conserve the nation. The Church of England, bearer of a proud tradition, relinquishes its hold, not just upon the minds and souls of the nation, but upon its own inheritance.

The British Army, heir to a mighty and unparalleled tradition with victories and valour from Goose Green to the Imjin to Arnhem to the Somme, is reduced to a shadow of its former self. The Royal Navy, shield of freedom for both Britain and America — although the Americans don’t acknowledge it nearly enough — is for the first time in centuries incapable of securing the home seas.

The Parliament that mothered all the others, the crucible of a particular sort of liberty in which we Americans yet repose, is now an arena for the advancement of petty interventions and a sort of bland managerial tyranny. We could blame Starmerism, but like Islamism, he too is a symptom.

The American sees all this, and we see something else besides: we see us. We see the essential tragedy of the plight of England, our ancestral mother, as incepted in no small part by an American spirit. We see the decline of England in the world, the abandonment of its mission, as conceived and imposed in no small part by ourselves. We sided with a squalid tyranny at Suez against our own faithful wartime ally and bade the United Kingdom tie itself to us. We demanded Britain follow us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It did, and we mismanaged the one and lost the other. We nearly even betrayed Britain entirely over the Falklands in 1982, although thank the God who watches over nations that we were spared that dishonour.

Most fatefully, we have watched the government of the United Kingdom, across the past generation, reform itself along explicitly American lines. America has states, and so too does Britain now have devolution. America has a Supreme Court, and now so too does Britain. America has a constitutional separation of powers, and now so too does Britain — haphazard and scattered to the quango sector as it is. America has a pretence to the universal rights of man, and now so too does Britain. America has an aspiration to an egalitarian society, and now so does Britain, and there is nothing that the SW1 won’t do to the House of Lords, or to fox hunting, to achieve it.

As Peter Hitchens wrote in the 2000 edition of The Abolition of Britain about England during WWII:

Because so few people knew the unpleasant facts, and because Churchill was such a superb propagandist, there were two completely different versions of 1940, one circulating among the rulers and one accepted by the ruled. Out of this was born a new division between the élite and the mass of the people—the élite knowing how close we had come to extinction, the people refusing to believe that such a thing could have happened.

But the masses were to have their own awakening not long afterwards. When American servicemen began arriving in Britain in 1942, much of the United Kingdom fell under a bizarre and unique form of military occupation. The occupiers were officially friends, often because they were ordered to be, and definitely allies. They spoke the same language but brought with them a completely different culture, different morals, different habits of courtship and even different tastes in food and drink, music and entertainment. Because many of them came from immigrant stock whose children had learned to be Americans more quickly than their parents, they showed less respect for old age and had a distinctive ‘youth’ culture quite unlike Britain’s. They were richer, bigger, better fed, better dressed and better educated than their hosts, and they were subject to a different legal system; because their country was so rich and powerful Britain had no choice but to accept this rather colonial arrangement, which she had once imposed upon the Chinese in Shanghai. They even broke the iron monopoly of the BBC, insisting on their own separate network of radio stations. In all ways but one, they behaved like a reasonably well-disciplined army of occupation, and many British people, including George Orwell, frankly viewed them as occupiers as well as saviours.

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Hitchens also wrote, “We seem to be in the sort of demoralized period that often ends in revolution or collapse.” A quarter century later, we’re certainly witnessing that collapse in real time, along with much of the rest of Europe:

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

#HERTOO?

Once again, the torpedoes the left fired to take out Trump are circling around on them again. Fortunately for Plaskett, the DNC-MSM has the motto of no enemies to the left, so it won’t become “the biggest story in America.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S AS IF THE ANTI-MUSK “SENTIMENT” IS REALLY JUST A BUBBLE PHENOMENON:

Posted at 12:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds