Read it.

As you all know by now, late last month a new migration crisis exploded in Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves in North Africa. Tens of thousands of African migrants (possibly as many as 72,000) swam around or broke through the barriers designed to keep them out of Spanish territory, and rampaged through the city. Most of them have supposedly returned home, but thousands remain. The local Spanish population is on edge, and women are terrified, since the New Spaniards have a well-known propensity to rape unprotected white women.

According rumors that have spread via social media, another mass invasion of Ceuta from Morocco is being planned for this Saturday, August 15. In response, the Ceuta military command has ordered the cancellation of leave for all soldiers stationed in the city.

Read it.

There is a madness peculiar to the over-educated, chronically online progressive—a psychosis of over-correction, not always malice, though the post-Widdicombe-Kirk strain is real and includes those capable of more than mere cruelty. It is the fever of a machine built to measure injustice, running so hot it melts its own circuitry.

Thankfully, we are hearing its death rattle. But death rattles can be undignified, and pockets remain—university towns, Twitter-addled London boroughs, humanities faculties, underfunded Labour fiefdoms—where the disease still festers.

The Telegraph (UK).

The queue of migrants watched in bemusement as volunteer clowns attempted to lift their spirits.

But Laurence Quetel, 67, and her dungaree-clad troupe’s juggling performance barely elicited a smile from the crowds waiting to be served lunch.

It was an incongruous performance in the squalid camp of Loon-Plage on the outskirts of Calais where 2,500 people were awaiting passage to the UK.

Everybody knows why they’re there, everybody knows that they’re intending to break the law, and nobody is doing a damned thing about it.

The Telegraph (UK).

Moving asylum seekers to middle-class areas will cost taxpayers more, Downing Street has admitted.

Andy Burnham will push ahead with his plan to send asylum seekers to more expensive postcodes as a “point of principle”, despite acknowledging the greater costs.

The principle being that progressives are never happy unless they are pissing in someone else’s soup.

There’s No Vaccine for Stupid (Andrew Egger/The Bulwark)  True enough. Which side is the stupid side is, of course, up for debate.

Trump’s Vaccine Order Puts Parents In a Bind (Lisa Jarvis/Bloomberg)  No, it doesn’t. It puts Wokeratchiks in a bind, but that’s different.

Trump signals openness to unconstitutional plot to take over elections (Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket)  No, he didn’t.

Human rights groups sue Trump administration over International Criminal Court sanctions (Sammy Westfall/Washington Post)

WHO defends childhood immunization schedules after Trump reduction order (Sarah Davis/The Hill)  Anything Trump does must be bad, by definition.

CNN Likens Trump Administration To Hitler, ‘Himmler, Goring, and Goebbels’  As they do. Surprised they didn’t include Albert Speer.

Maddow, O’Donnell Giddy About Iranian Assassination Plot Against Trump

Trump Used Air Force One Passengers As Decoys, Saved Himself (Margaret Hartmann/New York Magazine)  If Trump does it, it MUST be bad.

Trump’s Airplane Switch Follows a Familiar Presidential Playbook (Maya Davis/Wall Street Journal)  The playbook being the one that requires Narrative Media ‘journalists’ to criticize Republicans in general and Trump specifically no matter what happens.

FACT FOCUS: Trump makes false claims as he signs order urging revisions around childhood vaccines (Associated Press)

Trump Has His Own Communist Manifesto (Keith Johnson/Foreign Policy)  You can’t make this shit up.

Democrats want answers about 18-karat gold ring given to Trump (MS NOW)

Dem Senators Question Diamond Ring Gift Before Tariff Break

Morning Joe Outraged by Trump Calling Dem Candidates ‘Jihadists’  Even though they are.

We need the truth about Trump’s alleged ‘ballroom’ (Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer)  Will Bunch loses his shit.

With Trump Secretly Evacuated, Imperiled Air Force One Became a Flying Decoy (Peter Baker/New York Times)  No, it became a flying target, because everybody thought Trump was still on board. These people have tofu for brains.

Trump’s Air Force One deception faces scrutiny over ‘decoy’ passengers (The Guardian)  Come and get yer Narrative, right here.

Why the elaborate ruse Trump used in Turkey isn’t like other secret presidential trips (Will Weissert/Associated Press)  Because anything Trump does is BY DEFINITION bad.

See How Trump’s Secret Air Force One Swap Unfolded (New York Times)  Full frontal Narrative. (Reporter breaks 26-year silence on briefing that preceded Clinton’s plane swap (Scott Nover/Washington Post)

Transcript: Trump Blurts Out Vile Plot to Rig Midterms as GOP Unnerved (New Republic)  “Rig the midterms” means “keeping the Democrats from stealing elections.”.

The Five Scandals Within the “Air Force One” Scandal (Garrett Graff/Doomsday Scenario)  How much hot air can they blow into this fantasy?

Trump uses reporters as human shield, gets feted as guest of honor (Liz Dye/Public Notice)  Their finest hour.

Anderson Looks Forward to Trump Being in Hell, Calls Escape From Turkey ‘Dumb’

Hold Republicans Responsible for the Iran Disaster (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Jennifer Rubin loses her shit.

Samuel Alito’s Oil Money Reveals the Worthlessness of the Supreme Court Ethics Code (Madiba K. Dennie/Balls and Strikes)  No, it just reveals the worthlessness of proglodyte hypocrisy. Perhaps they ought to take a look at Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

O’Donnell: Trump Is a ‘Deeply Cowardly Man’ for Not Personally Killing Assassins

MS NOW’s Hillyard Makes Plane Switch Story About Trump Health ‘Transparency’  Maybe you can make some sense out of that—I must confess I can’t follow that twisty trail.

We Finally See the Trump Administration’s Sweeping Census Power Grab Emerge (John Light/Talking Points Memo)  God forbid we should avoid counting illegal aliens.

Trump’s cost-of-living crunch (Politico)  He PERSONALLY came and jacked up your prices.

Former CNN Pentagon Reporter Wonders How Trump Plane Deception Was Legal  Not the sharpest knife in the drawer….

US press groups sue Donald Trump over fast access to Truth Social posts (Financial Times)

How to Survive a Republican Scandal: Imitate Trump (Will Saletan/The Bulwark)  Will Saletan loses his shit.

Newsbusters.

Academics from four major universities have combined on a study designed to brand niceness a strategy for advancing White privilege, in the latest effort by progressive professors to manufacture a new form of racism to condemn.

The paper, titled “Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers’ Perceptions of Student Arrest,” interprets interviews with school resource officers (SROs) in ways that enable them to provide “evidence” that niceness advantages White people. The study was produced by Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Research Fellow Abigail Beneke, Professors Benjamin Fisher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), F. Chris Curran (U. Florida), and Samantha Viano (George Mason).

Niceness, they conclude, is an “enduring component of Whiteness” that “allows predominantly White people to elide how their own actions contribute to inequality by maintaining a sense of their own benevolence.”

Really, you can’t make this shit up.

Newsbusters.

Cheat early and often?

Tuesday’s New York Times featured “Inside the Left’s Playbook for Scoring Election Wins,” by Kellen Browning, Tim Balk, and Dan Simmons, which whitewashed the radical postures of the new crop of hard-left, socialist candidates who’ve won some Democratic Party primaries, threatening to push the party’s center of gravity further leftward.

Read it.

Is it time—or already past time—to consider something that was once called distributism as an alternative to what has long been called capitalism, or what is still being called socialism? Distributism was the name given to this alternative better than a century ago. The idea was to get property and some measure of economic independence distributed into the hands of as many people as possible.

Here we are in 2026, and long-discredited ideas of socialism are making a comeback. Suddenly forgotten are its past failures, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s great line that the trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. Nonetheless it’s still being sold, and sold as the next logical, even inevitable, step taken in accordance with something called the arc of history.

Also forgotten are the long-ago efforts of Democrats like Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey to separate socialists, fellow travelers, “no enemies to the left” popular fronters, and yes, even communists from their party. And today? Today those very same forces are being welcomed into today’s version of a “big tent” Democratic party.

Read it.

California’s high-speed rail boondoggle may finally be running out of money. It’s bad news for Gov. Gavin Newsom, possibly good news for the people of California.

I’ve been opining about why the California bullet train will never succeed since I wrote my very first column as a young college pup. But even my accurate (though not difficult) prediction about its certain failure didn’t quite capture the sheer depth of the wasteful insanity this project has achieved.

There now may be a glimmer of hope, though a faint one, that the “project”—a word I use loosely in this case—may mercifully starve to death after fattening itself on taxpayer cash for nearly two decades.

Read it.

Information provided to Paxton’s office shows that Gabriel was diagnosed at 20 weeks’ gestation. The intended parents, who reside in California and are using a surrogate mother from Alaska, requested that Gabriel be terminated. Following their request, the surrogate traveled to Texas to seek protection and ensure that Gabriel could receive the lifesaving surgery he needed to survive.

The intended parents have refused to consent to the surgery upon birth and may attempt to transport Gabriel out of Texas to prevent him from receiving the procedure, according to Paxton’s office.

After learning of the situation, Paxton filed an intervention in the case and asked a district court to prohibit Gabriel from being removed from the state.

On Tuesday afternoon, Paxton announced that a Dallas County judge had entered an emergency temporary order preventing Gabriel from being removed from Texas.

Babylon Bee.

Oh, the humanity!

Read it.

Dozens of migrants who entered the Spanish territory of Ceuta during last month’s massive border surge have reportedly reached mainland Spain, contradicting the socialist government’s insistence that none had left the North African enclave.

Newsbusters.

With about three months remaining in the midterm campaign, it’s become time for the most desperate partisan gamesmanship, as our socialist-friendly media engage in helping the Democrats win.

Do not recognize the “independent media” and the “independent fact-checkers” as the referees of this campaign. These elitists should be identified as uniformed players for the Democrat team, since the following are their apparent rules of campaign communication:

Read it.

We’re next, if the Democrats have their way.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

For more than a century, Delaware enjoyed something close to an automatic presumption in American corporate law: If you were building a major company or preparing to go public, you incorporated in Delaware.

That presumption no longer exists.

On Tuesday, DoorDash, a major online delivery service, informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that the controlling stockholders approved reincorporating the company in Nevada, following unanimous approval from DoorDash’s board.

What makes the decision particularly significant is the rationale.

DoorDash pointed to what it sees as surprising outcomes in Delaware courts and an increasingly litigious corporate environment.

Nevada, by contrast, offers a more statute-focused system that the company believes can provide greater predictability.

Read it.

Following his Michigan Senate primary win, Republicans launched attack ads against Abdul El-Sayed. The ad opens with a narrator branding him “the most radical Senate candidate in America,” shows him standing alongside left-wing streamer Hasan Piker – who once said Americans deserved 9/11 – and cuts to El-Sayed declaring himself “pretty damn dangerous.” But Democrats and the liberal media are focusing on the fact that the ad uses his full name, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” and accusing the ad of being Islamophobic.

Apparently they’re afraid that using his full name makes it obvious that he’s a radical Muslim asshole.

CNN’s Pamela Brown Not Happy as Marc Short Calls El-Sayed Anti-Semitic

Oh, and that too.

Victor Davis Hanson.

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome—lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster—helped give birth to the socialists.

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the “system.” Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

Read it.

If you don’t act like a New Yorker, you might be a racist….

We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education.

Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in the expressions, images, or entire fields. Even time itself has been declared racist.

Now, however, academics have found another undiscovered continent of white privilege: niceness.

Newsbusters.

On August 5, Vice President J.D. Vance announced – at a roundtable meeting – that the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force had uncovered and halted billions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on fraudulent spending.

The amount of money saved was jaw-dropping.

Given the size and scope of the fraud uncovered and the fact that the VP detailed it in an op-ed in a paper of record for the elitist media, surely the legacy broadcast networks would cover the whopping totals.

So how much time did ABC, CBS, NBC devote to this big win for the Trump administration and the American taxpayer?

Zero seconds.

The Foundry.

Government schools depend on Federal giveaways, and those depend on how many students schools can sign up for the programs, even if they have to lie about qualifications.

“The total fertility rate in California has dropped from 2.21 children per woman in 2007 to 1.48 in 2023, well below the replacement level of 2.1 necessary to keep a population from declining.”

Migration has also played a role. Nearly 10 million Californians have moved to other states since 2010, and California currently has the nation’s largest net domestic outflow.

The implications extend beyond California schools facing potential downsizing. A shrinking younger population could eventually mean fewer workers supporting a growing older population, potentially straining the state’s economy and contributing to labor shortages.

If California’s population continues to lag behind growth in other states, Lafortune said, the state could eventually lose congressional representation.

And Lafortune does not expect the trend to reverse anytime soon.

Read it.

The evening news showed a segment of a skeptical reporter and doctor reporting on the new childhood vaccine changes. These changes affect children’s vaccine requirements before going back to school, and show a reduction or spaced injections. The changes require the usual vaccines against, measles, mumps, and other diseases as well as the modern day protections. I suspect he is following Robert Kennedy’s format, who is a specialist in this field. His extensive background in childhood vaccines and other treatments goes back a long time. The reporter and doctor kept saying “Let’s look at the science”.

However, Kennedy has been looking at the science for some time. He has also spanned a long career looking to environmental and other causes for poor health and disease, and has been an advocate for change to improve these conditions, with children being his main concern. Many of his common sense approaches are already mandatory in Europe, including push for less toxicity in our food, air and water, and less processed foods.

Kennedy is not against any vaccination program. He however, began looking into increases in not only autism in our country, but possible links to the many shots that are given to children and babies all at once. This I believe, is why President Trump is recommending spacing out the vaccine program for children. The reporter and doctor’s poor assessment that parents will have to make more than one doctor visit to complete the vaccines is ridiculous. There are common sense reasons for not loading a child’s immune system with shots that contain multiple vaxxes, anymore than it makes sense to combine, flu, Covid and other vaccines into one shot for adults.

If there is an allergic reaction to one vaccine, how do they determine which, if injected with several, in a one-stop shop vaccine? In my youth, I had to get a TB shot, and one for polio, and other diseases for school. I had a scar on my arm for one, and had to drink a pink concoction from a small cup for another. Today, babies and children receive up to 72 plus vaccines from birth to age 18.

Read it.

Because why not marry a Chinese national? It’s not like they’re loyal to our largest adversary on the planet or anything!

Read it.

A reminder that Muslims are Muslims first, last, and always.

Michigan, think long and hard about who you’re about to elect to the Senate.

Abdul El-Sayed is running to be Michigan’s next Democratic senator and it seems like every quote from this guy is more radical than the last.

Worse on Purpose.

Right up top, I must admit that I am a huge car guy. I love old cars. I want to feel connected to the machine. I miss rowing through the gears on a manual transmission. In that sense, modern cars are unequivocally worse than their older counterparts.

So I went into this expecting to write an article bashing the industry about the myriad ways that cars themselves had gotten worse. I figured I’d find that components had gotten flimsier. That vehicles now don’t last as long as they used to. But after looking at the data, that just simply isn’t true. By almost every measure, the new car in your driveway is better than any equivalent in history.

A lot did get worse. Just not the car itself.

Real Clear Defense.

Today, CENTCOM and the White House are at a flexion point. It is not clear that they will be able to bomb the fanatical Iranian regime into submission, while abandoning the effort to open the Straits of Hormuz is not a politically viable option. It does appear to the mathematically oriented that bombing combined with the blockade of Iranian ports cannot fail to collapse the already failing Iranian economy. The trouble is, that hasn’t happened, yet. The White House and CENTCOM need a stratagem that will rock Tehran and cause them to, “Drink from the Chalice of Poison,” and submit to Washington’s demands.

Some of us at The Dupuy Institute (TDI) believe that shove to the chalice might come in the form of taking several islands in the Persian Gulf. In 1987-88, the Iranians had several surveillance platforms that were highly problematic to U.S. Navy efforts to safely convoy neutral oil tankers out of the Gulf. Eventually, several were destroyed, but the Iranian islands were not touched – undoubtedly to maintain the idea that U.S. forces were neutral and would get involved only when U.S., or U.S.-protected assets were attacked. These small Iranian islands continued to be a thorn in the side of U.S. and its Gulf allies.

Today, these islands continue to serve as intelligence outposts to monitor Gulf shipping. Specifically, Abu Musa, Siri, and Greater and Lesser Tunb Islands have small or no garrisons and could be relatively easy to seize from Iran and put an end to this surveillance. Tehran and its IRGC would be partially blinded, and it would reduce their situational awareness in the Gulf, making it more difficult for them to target commercial shipping moving into the Strait of Hormuz.

You’re welcome.

Don’t forget to drink a cup of very cold water first thing after you get up, before you do anything else. You’ll be glad you did.

Patriot Games open with dodgeball, lots of MAGA caps and even more questions (Noah White/Washington Post)  Mainly who the fuck cares. (MAGA is the Noo Jooz.)

Cassidy blasts vaccine order, saying Trump has no ‘expertise to make these changes’ (Rebecca Beitsch/The Hill)  Trump’s ‘expertise’ is not important. He doesn’t make these changes without inputs from Real Doctors, who haven’t given up their profession for politics.

A record Trump shouldn’t want to beat (Politico)  According to the Narrative, that is.

How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed (Michael S. Schmidt/New York Times)  Because there are no “Trump’s Russia Ties”, which was always a made-up Deep State op.

Trump fumes over latest Iran demands (Eli Okun/Politico)  Fumes! You can see the fumes from here!

Trump Stokes Islamophobia by Calling Democratic Candidates ‘Jihadists’ (Zolan Kanno-Youngs/New York Times)  Which they are. We need more Islamophobia if the nation is to survive.

Trump Wants to Move On From the Middle East. It’s Not Letting Him. (Anton Troianovski/New York Times)  The mind-readers at the New York Times are eager to tell you what Trump is thinking, feeling, and planning … if you’re willing to believe them.

American Academy of Pediatrics calls Trump vaccine order ‘dangerous’ (Max Rego/The Hill)  Dangerous to their pocketbooks.

Trump Said to Have Secretly Used Military Jet to Leave Turkey Amid Threats (New York Times)  So what?

Fact-Checking the Trump Administration’s Claims About Vaccines (New York Times)  Who will fact-check the fact-checkers? (Come get yer Narrative, right here.)

Trump didn’t board AF1 in Turkey due to an assassination threat and wokies are losing their minds  They had high hopes that some Muslim would succeed where Domestic proglodytes have failed.

One Year After Trump Sent National Guard to DC, Homicides Plunge 41%, Overall Crime Stats Mixed

Trump is searching for the Supreme Court’s breaking point on birthright citizenship (Ian Millhiser/Vox)  Which is why he was elected.

In Colombia, PBS Wary of ‘Hard Right’ Trumper Defeating ‘Human Rights Advocate’  Man, those Trump Cooties are everywhere.

Dr. Phil and a Texas Oil Firm Go to Greenland With a Suspicious Agenda. Signs Point to Trump’s Imperialist Visions. (Nicole LaFond/Talking Points Memo)  They say that like it was a bad thing.

Newsbusters.

It’s summer, which means it is time for actor Anthony Anderson to guest host ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! and call Republicans racists. On Monday, Anderson welcomed Rep. Jasmine Crockett to the show to help him continue his ignoble tradition.

Anderson introduced Crockett by playing a montage of what he considered to be her greatest hits, “Our next guest continues to distinguish herself as one of the most outspoken and plainspoken members of the U.S. Congress.”

Yet Another Crooked Ugly Racist Black Female Democrat Politician.

Read it.

Poor iddle special snowflakes.

Next, I suppose, is that every freshman gets a Participation Trophy.

Read it.

Outrage is boiling in North Texas after the McKinney City Council voted 7-0 to greenlight a major new Islamic center complex, brushing aside hours of public testimony that included a direct warning from an Iranian Christian who fled Sharia law.

Citizens packed City Hall for a marathon session that stretched past midnight. More than 150 people signed up to speak. The approved site plan covers roughly 5.5 acres at Virginia Parkway and Crutcher Crossing. It includes a 15,000-square-foot sanctuary, a 10,000-square-foot classroom building, and a 7,000-square-foot gym for the McKinney Islamic Association, which says its existing facility has been outgrown.

City staff insisted the revised plan met every zoning requirement with no variances, leaving the council little legal room to deny it. Council members framed the vote as purely procedural. Residents who showed up in force saw something far larger at stake.

Muslims have flooded into North Texas for H-1B tech jobs, and immediately started segregating themselves in enclaves. As they do. Islam isn’t just a private matter but an entire way of life, that intrudes on the public sphere wherever it can get away with it.

Read it.

Well, I bet that the social justice warriors in Portland got really quiet about this one.

A dead body was discovered near an ICE facility in Portland, prompting speculation from the anti-ICE crowd that ICE agents, for no reason whatsoever, executed the man and left his body outside on the street.

Read it.

Tell me you’re a conquered country without telling me you’re a conquered country.

Babylon Bee.

The Democratic Party announced on Tuesday that U.S. citizens were not allowed to remember all those things the party said and did just a few years ago.

Watch it.

Tim Pool pulls it all together.

Looks that way to me.

Read it.

Former Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organizer Jake Altman argues that over the past 10-15 years, the organization has transformed from a relatively pragmatic working-class social-democratic group into a much more radical movement driven by younger activists and open to more extreme ideas.

Newsbusters.

Hey, it’s not as of CNN is a news organization….

It’s becoming more and more apparent, that as we get closer and closer to the November elections, the left-wing media is, if you can believe it, getting even bolder when it come to displaying, promoting and protecting their various leftist narratives. Sunday on CNN’s NewsRoom, Anchor Omar Jimenez repeatedly defended Hasan Piker and would not allow South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace to finish a thought on elected Muslim officials.

Jimenez, best remembered as the guy pushing “largely peaceful” takes on Kenosha rioting while fires burned behind him, previously pushed back on Scott Jennings objecting to Zohran Mamdani’s stated plans to single out rich white people for higher taxes.

In this case, Mace posted about Muslim politicians, and Jimenez interrupted her 13 times in nearly five minutes on the topic. Mace took the unflinching position that each and every Muslim official is a threat.

As indeed they are. Only Democrats and other morons think they are not.

Read it.

Feel the burn….

In the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of Broadway and West 43rd Street, a massive new billboard is sending a provocative message to New York leadership: “Thanks for the jobs!”

As America faces what business leaders call a historic choice between free enterprise and expanding government control, Florida is taking the ideological fight directly to the doorstep of Democratic socialism.

Armed with a $1.8 trillion economy and record-breaking wealth migration, the Florida Chamber of Commerce has officially launched a Times Square campaign naming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani Florida’s “Economic Developer of the Year” — a reminder, according to the Chamber, of how progressive taxes and socialist policies are driving wealth, businesses and families to the Sunshine State.

“We wanted to thank him for the jobs, the companies, the people that they’re pushing out of New York — and a lot of them are coming to Florida,” Chamber CEO Mark Wilson first told Fox News Digital on Monday.

The American Thinker.

One of the great ironies of American politics is that every movement swears it’s against censorship—right up until it has enough power to do some censoring of its own. It’s almost adorable.

For years, conservatives rightly criticized Big Tech, universities, corporate America, and legacy media for suppressing dissenting viewpoints. We argued that free speech wasn’t merely a constitutional protection; it was a moral principle. We insisted that bad ideas should be defeated in the marketplace of ideas rather than buried beneath bureaucratic decrees or algorithmic exile.

I agreed then. I still do. Which is why I’m beginning to ask a question that makes some people on my own side a little uncomfortable.

What happens when conservatives become just as tempted to use institutional power to silence people they don’t like? As a Black conservative, I’ve learned that free speech is one of those principles everybody loves until somebody they can’t stand starts talking. Then suddenly the Constitution comes with an asterisk.

Quillette.

Amnesty’s approach in the Rowling affair followed the familiar NGO playbook that has allowed human-rights organisations to survive crises for decades to preserve their moral authority and avoid meaningful accountability. First, downplay the incident by framing it as a regrettable breakdown in an otherwise scrupulous system; second, promise an investigation; third, wait for the news cycle to move on. But maybe that won’t work this time. Is it too much to hope that Rowling’s stand-off with Amnesty will finally produce a reckoning for an increasingly unaccountable sector?

A realist might well conclude that there is almost no chance of that. Organisations like Amnesty International—which command budgets that run into hundreds of millions, and even billions, of US dollars—have spent decades surviving controversies and evading scrutiny, even though they exert enormous political and cultural influence. An optimist, on the other hand, might point out that history has a habit of stripping moral halos from individuals and institutions (like the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America) that were once thought beyond reproach. The wheels of accountability may turn slowly, but turn they do.

The Telegraph (UK).

France’s lifeboat service has warned there is “no limit” to the number of migrants people smugglers will put on a boat to Britain.

And of course the French aren’t doing a damned thing about it.

The French national sea rescue service (SNSM), equivalent to the RNLI, warned it was seeing “more and more” large boats ferrying hundreds of migrants across the Channel.

On Monday morning, a record 230 asylum seekers arrived in Britain after travelling on a single 15-metre-long (49ft) vessel from near Berck-sur-Mer, Normandy.

This is essentially an act of war. Why is Britain not holding France to account for this?

The War Zone.

Last week, the U.S. Navy announced that future stretched Virginia class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSN) fitted with Virginia Payload Modules (VPM) will be recategorized as guided missile types (SSGN). In doing so, the service disclosed that two Block V Virginia class boats will lack a VPM, and the four large vertical launch tubes contained therein, rather than just one as had been previously understood. Now, the Navy has confirmed to TWZ directly that the second VPM-less Block V will have a one-of-a-kind seabed warfare configuration. This will allow it to conduct espionage missions on the seafloor, a role currently filled by the USS Jimmy Carter, a one-off subvariant of the Seawolf class attack submarine.

In its August 3 press release, the Navy said it planned to acquire 19 VPM-equipped Virginia class SSGNs across the Block V and Block VI subclasses. As TWZ noted at the time, this created a discrepancy of one submarine based on publicly stated procurement plans. It was already known that the first of the 12 Block Vs, the future USS Oklahoma, would lack a VPM, but the expectation had been that the other 11 would have this feature. The Block VI production run is currently set to consist of nine more submarines, all with VPMs. We correctly posited last week that the outlier could be the seabed warfare submarine, the basic plans for which emerged some years ago now.

Read it.

The King is dead; Long live the King!

Or so the media declare as Britain faces up to its seventh Prime minister in a decade. The seemingly ritualistic axing of our head of government has been accompanied by all the usual rites. The choir of voices declaring “The grownups are back in charge”, the scuttling of MPs as they preach the virtues of their latest leader with the new gospel in their hands and hopes of promotion on their mind; and the insistence by all that this will herald a new age of politics. That this time things will be different!

But in and among these rantings and ravings is the same essential diagnosis. Britain doesn’t work. Its institutions are out of date; its practices out of step and its state model out of time. And aren’t they right? Isn’t it true that in place of efficient execution we’ve had unparalleled chaos at every level of government, with most ministers lucky to last two years at the head of their departments? That instead of a state that builds, we’ve got a state that consults, one that spent fifteen years planning a railway to Manchester before abandoning it, having sunk £2.3bn on a stretch of the railway that got cancelled. A railway which, in the stretch we are still building, will cost more than Britain’s entire nuclear deterrent.

I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.

Read it.

But according to one researcher, clear patterns emerge when you look at why women decide to freeze their eggs. And no, it’s not because they are all trying to “girl boss” their way to the corner office and don’t want to risk the distraction of babies.

Yale University professor Marcia Inhorn, who focuses on anthropology and international affairs, conducted a study of 114 women who chose to freeze their eggs for her 2023 book “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs.”

Of those 114 women, exactly one did it “specifically for career-planning purposes,” writes Inhorn.

Instead, “[d]espair, or the loss and absence of hope, is a running theme in many women’s egg freezing stories.” Women who choose to freeze their eggs are largely not doing it because their first choice is to have kids later in life.

Inhorn writes that “heterosexual relationship troubles” are the driving force behind egg freezing, and that the “vast majority of women I interviewed found themselves in their late thirties without partners.”

These women spent their lives becoming the men they were looking for, none of whom wanted to marry a quasi-man, and so in their thirties they hit the wall … and their biological clock kept tick tick ticking away.

Of course, as with all such articles, It’s All The Men’s Fault:

Obviously, many women want kids, but life isn’t working out as they hoped it would. Rather than focusing on egg freezing, we’d be better served by creating a culture that encourages men to become great husbands and dads and embrace raising families.

No, what we need are women who aren’t focused on being a professional Boss Babe and are willing to become the sort of women men are willing to marry. “Where are all the good men?” they cry; to which the answer is “Back in your twenties where you left them.” Men who want marriage and children aren’t going to be interested in starting that process with a woman in her thirties, much less her forties.

Melania’s Shockingly Light Workload Is Exposed in Audit (Tomas Thor/The Daily Beast)  They are actually serious. Unbelievable.

Inside school investigations frozen under Trump: Racial slurs, sexual harassment and more (Laura Meckler/Washington Post)  Shame on Trump for not pursuing the Wokerati witch-hunts, I guess.

Trump Turns National Parks into Piggybank (Scott MacFarlane Reports)

Mullin faces MAGA backlash at Homeland Security (Brittany Gibson/Axios)  There’s that MAGA guy again. (MAGE is the Noo Jooz.)

Trump can’t lie his way out of a missile shortage (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)  Nor is he trying to—except in the fantasyland of the Narrative Media.

Trump’s Reflecting Pool Fiasco Is About to Get Even Worse for Him (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  He hopes, he hopes, he hopes…. (Greg Sargent loses his shit.)

Trump posted touched-up version of his golf photo to look younger and slimmer (Rhian Lubin/The Independent)  I’m happy they don’t have anything more important to write about.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Newsbusters.

The choice of which parent to go live with following the divorce of NBC and MS NOW said a lot about the journalist who made it. While he would more routinely appear on NBC News programs, former Chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander chose to go with the more-openly partisan cable news channel. Moreover, despite promising his viewers “the facts” with this new daytime program State of Play, Alexander opened on Monday with a lie.

 

Read it.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is threatening to pursue assault and battery charges against WNBA players over hard fouls, escalating the political battle surrounding the league and its policies on transgender athletes, The Hill reported Monday.

It was pretty blatant and obviously deliberate.

Uthmeier, a Republican, made the comments after Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham was on the receiving end of a hard foul during Saturday’s game against the Chicago Sky.

Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington was ejected following the play. Carrington later posted on social media suggesting race played a role in the officiating decision.

Responding to a video of the incident, Uthmeier warned the WNBA that players could face criminal charges if similar incidents occur in Florida.

“The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida, because I’ll be charging people with assault,” Uthmeier wrote on X.

Cue NAACP calling on all Africans to boycott games in Florida.

Read it.

And has at least for the last twenty years.

A longtime Democrat congressman says that Abdul El-Sayed’s Democrat primary victory for Michigan proves that the Left has “normalized” hate “in plain sight,” adding that this is “scary” for all Americans.

In an op-ed for the Free Press, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., wrote that his party is “being hijacked by socialists” and is “overrun by antisemitism.”

Throughout the Michigan primary campaign, El-Sayed refused to condemn the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because it could “upset” some of his voters. He also justified a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack against Temple Israel Synagogue and Pre-School in Michigan.

El-Sayed also appeared alongside leftist influencer Hasan Piker, who, Gottheimer wrote, previously “praised Hamas, referred to Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred,’ and blamed America for 9/11.”