August 17, 2026

I WENT TO AN ANTI-ISRAEL DINNER PARTY. IT DID NOT GO AS PLANNED. They described it as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” What they really wanted was an Israeli who would sit quietly and confess:

“Hysterical? I am the calmest person here. I am merely no longer cushioning the information for people who consider contradiction a hate crime.”

“You are proving every stereotype about pro-Israel people,” Nadia said.

“You mean Jews? Which stereotype? That we eventually lose patience after being lectured by people who discovered the Middle East six months ago?”

“You’re impossible.”

“No. I’m inconvenient. There is a difference.”

I picked up my jacket. The room watched me with the shocked resentment of aristocrats who had just discovered the footman could read. At the door, Oliver made one final attempt at magnanimity: “I’m sorry you didn’t feel heard.”

“I was heard perfectly well. That is why everyone is upset.”

“We may simply have to agree to disagree.”

“No. You may have to agree to read.”

He folded his arms. “Do you genuinely believe you’re the only person here who understands the issue?”

“No,” I said. “I believe I’m the only person here who has made the vulgar effort.”

Beatrice opened the door. The conversation, she said, had become unsafe. I thanked her for the meal.

Outside, the night air was cool and gloriously free of moral vocabulary. I walked home reflecting on the strange burden of being “pro-Israel” in polite society. One is expected to arrive with evidence, history, nuance, empathy, military expertise, legal precision, and a detailed alternative strategy for every available course of action. The other side need only arrive with adjectives: colonial, genocidal, apartheid, brutal.

“Hannah Arendt had it right,” Patrick Moynihan once said. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

“WELL, YEAH,” SAY AMERICAN LEFTIES:

Posted at 12:24 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA Administrator ‘extremely confident’ in Artemis 3 mission in 2027. “The Artemis 3 mission will begin with the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which will send a test version of its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into low Earth orbit. That will be followed days later by the launch of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which will rendezvous and dock with Blue Origin’s vehicle.”

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

FROM THE ONGOING “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TUCKER?” CHRONICLES:

It helps to remember that Greenwald is a commie and Carlson is… whatever the hell he is now.

Posted at 11:22 am by Stephen Green

POP YOUR CORN: It’s Billionaire vs. Billionaire for the Future of California. “Disagreements between a couple of Google billionaires over how to best fight California’s so-called billionaire tax might just help the ballot initiative become law in November, according to a New York Post report this weekend — but there’s so much more to it than that.”

Posted at 11:09 am by Stephen Green

AND THIS IS AT BERKELEY: I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math.

I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

TO BE FAIR…:

…reality is offense to people living in denial of it.

Posted at 10:20 am by Stephen Green

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Recall Petition Filed Against Seattle’s Far Left Mayor Katie Wilson. “Certainly the current crop of far-left ‘Democratic Socialists’ mayors ruining American cities are not the sharpest knives in the drawer (though Zohran Mamdani seems to display the sort of unprincipled cunning exhibited by many confidence artists), but Seattle’s Katie Wilson, someone who was still being financially supported by her parents at age 43 when running for mayor, strikes one as possibly the very dullest in the lot. From refusing to investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers to encouraging capital flight from Seattle via a proposed ‘billionaire’s tax’ (‘I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye!’), Wilson seems a particularly obtuse example of the breed. Now two Seattle citizens have filed a recall petition against her.”

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

THE BIDEN CABAL HANGOVER WILL LAST FOR YEARS:

Posted at 9:20 am by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

Posted at 8:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPENCER PRATT: Bombs, Burnt Beef, and the Big $20 Burrito Battle.

At some point, we will have to reckon with the fact that we shut down the world’s largest economy over the flu. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Not for global wars, not for nuclear holocaust, you never ever shut down your economy. Despite what decades of communist propaganda may have you believe, concern over the economy isn’t just vanity, it’s not greed…the economy is the proxy for our collective lives. Shutting down the economy means people die from missed cancer screenings, business owners kill themselves because their legacy family restaurant shuts down for good, people can’t afford basic human needs. We crippled the global economy and attempted to backfill the void by printing more money than had ever been printed in the history of human civilization and doled it out with alacrity. This grand experiment in universal basic income led to hyperinflation on a level that we only see in collapsing communist countries. The factories went dormant while the money printer went “brrrrrrrr”, so with too many dollars chasing too few goods, there was only one predictable outcome; prices go to the moon.

It will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash flooding into our economy. In 2015 in Mexico, eight straight days of torrential rainfall on Cozumel flooded the coast with freshwater. This temporary disruption of the salinity in the marine ecosystem was devastating for aquatic life, and it took years for the system to stabilize and recover from that singular shock. Similarly, it will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash that flooded into our economy during the government’s irrational shutdowns.

Unfortunately, this reckoning with our past mistakes is unavoidable. We can’t legislate nor print our way out of the most colossal fuck-up in the history of economic policy. No government program can unring that bell. The $20 burrito is a teachable moment: NEVER SHUT DOWN YOUR ECONOMY. EVER. The problem is, we have short memories, so nobody is going to connect the expensive burrito to the bad choices of yesteryear.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

BECAUSE OF COURSE: DSA Praises Fidel Castro in 100th Birthday Tribute, Denounces Marco Rubio as ‘Genocidal.’

The Democratic Socialists of America website called deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while denouncing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as genocidal.

In a tribute to Castro on what would have been his 100th birthday Thursday, the DSA website commemorated the “historic significance of both this day and the man.”

The fast-growing socialist organization that’s made strong inroads in Democratic Party primary elections over the past year, said that they have “a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination.”

Any solidarity with their hunger, crushing poverty, or desire for American liberty?

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

THE COUNTRY’S MOVING IN A DIRECTION WHERE ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER WILL BE PUTTING PEOPLE IN CAMPS:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS JUST IN: Active deployment frequently causes soldiers and sailors to lose weight — and Ro Khanna is on it! 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

THE LEGAL PROFESSION HAS A DIVERSITY PROBLEM:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

JULIE BURCHILL: The True Tragedy of the Death of Jason Arday.

This wild merry-go-round of fantasy came to a screeching halt last month when the American academic Nathan Cofnas, who had been sacked from Cambridge due to his unpalatable views on race, accused Arday of plagiarism. The thread was pulled, the lies unravelled, and Arday soon resigned from his post, unable to withstand “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.” This week, he committed suicide.

We live in an age of Magical Thinking. Men identify as women and annoying people identify as neuro-divergent; what’s not to say that both Arday and those white saviours who hired him — while all of them knowing the reality — felt that feelings trump facts every time and that if he identified as a person of super-human talents and achievements, that was who he should be accepted as?

The trouble with this way of thinking is that eventually the facts catch up with the feelings, and there can only be one winner. So what started as a “Silly Season” story has ended as a true tragedy. It’s also the prompt for yet another round of the Culture Wars, with the left blaming the press for interrogating him and the right blaming academia for believing him. Meanwhile, the family of Jason Arday — the persons who knew him and loved him for what he was, not what he pretended to be — mourn him and prepare to bury him. So in the end, no one won.

Noam Blum of Tablet tweets, “Academics are big mad that the media wrote a bunch of true things about someone they were too conformist to spot as a fraud. Their anger is just a manifestation of shame and projection.”

As for British journalists, well:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll