August 15, 2026

IT RARELY ENDS WELL FOR A MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED: “The real [Arday] story is of an elite academic world that was so excited by a compelling narrative that they rushed a clearly mentally unbalanced man with no real qualifications to the heights of academia because he ticked so many useful boxes.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

CHATGPT PASSES SCRIPTURE TEST: With all the discussion and debate about AI products coloring responses with ideologically biased analyses, I thought it might be interesting to test the ChatGTP’s scriptural knowledge. Sure enough, as I report on HillFaith this morning, the response to my five questions was amazing.

Posted at 7:20 am by Mark Tapscott

THIS IS TRUE, OF COURSE:

Related:

Except that Mike Adams was lynched for telling the truth, not disgraced by lying.

More:

“Though he is responsible for his deceit, I feel the greatest blame lies with the University that advanced him beyond anything that made sense.”

Posted at 7:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPRINGTIME FOR PLATNER: Graham Platner Rolls Out Like the Panzers in the Ardennes, and Dems Are Not Happy.

Graham Platner is the rash that won’t go away. He was finally forced out of the Maine Senate race after he was exposed for having a graphic social media history, a Nazi tattoo, domestic abuse claims, and a credible allegation of rape. There’s damaged goods, and then there was whatever Platner was — many echelons above that. He was a disaster.

And is he going away? Oh, no, he’s headlining some local Labor Day rally in Maine, and one local Democrat had a brutal take on the event (via Bangor Daily News) [emphasis mine]:

Democrats expressed confusion and frustration after activists in Hancock County announced a Labor Day rally featuring former U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner with many in the party looking to leave him behind after a rape allegation ended his campaign.

Sources said the announcement caught the campaign of the new nominee, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, by surprise. The mix-up lands at a pivotal moment for him as he races to build a national operation against five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

Republicans have spent weeks trying to tie Jackson to Platner even as Jackson has opened a slim lead over Collins in early polling. Any fresh attention on the former nominee threatens to undercut that effort just as national Democrats rally behind him.

“I don’t know what they were thinking,” former Maine Democratic Party Vice Chair Peggy Schaffer said. “He’s not an elected official, not a union member, and he’s an accused rapist.”

The Oystergruppenfuhrer has entered into the Flensburg phase of his political career.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

GUESS THE ISSUE THAT GIVES GOP 46 POINT LEAD: When Republicans demand an end to tax-funded Obamacare premium subsidies going direct to insurers’ bottom lines, voters give GOP candidates a 46-point advantage over Democrats. Are Senate Republicans listening?

Posted at 7:13 am by Mark Tapscott

I AGREE: Let the IDF Win. “Without exception, the soldiers I spoke with also criticized what they see as overly restrictive rules of engagement that unnecessarily endanger their lives. In their view, these policies stem either from concerns about international political pressure-particularly from the United States-or from placing excessive emphasis on the welfare of enemy civilians at the expense of Israel’s own troops, who are not a far-removed army, but everyone’s husband, fathers and sons.”

Their guidance should be Curtis LeMay, Arthur Harris, and William Tecumseh Sherman.

Posted at 7:11 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPACE LAW:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

August 14, 2026

LEFTISTS ARE ALWAYS COOKING THE BOOKS:

Posted at 10:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO 9/11:

Tweet concludes, “One student, Zacarias Moussaoui, keeps asking how to fly a plane, but insists that he doesn’t need to know how to take off and land. Moussaoui is arrested.”

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, “With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on 9/11, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier:”

Ms Bryant is an official with the US department of agriculture in Florida, and the late Mr Atta had gone to see her about getting a $650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Mr Atta refused to deal with Ms Bryant because she was “but a woman”. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly.

When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Mr Atta threatened to cut Ms Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon, etc – and asked, “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Fortunately, Ms Bryant had been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”

“Better dead than rude,” to coin a phrase.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMOCRATS’ ‘WOKE 1’ HANGOVER:

As the “vibe shift” takes hold, Democrats who enthusiastically partook in the most extreme “Woke 1” rhetoric find themselves in a bind. Their old statements now seem unhinged. They can admit they were wrong, perhaps with a nod and a wink to how crazy we all went during lockdown. Or they can dig in their heels and stand by their old positions. Neither option is particularly attractive.

If you try to distance yourself from 2020-era statements, you come off as intellectually spineless and willing to go along with whatever’s popular, either because you have no ideas of your own, or because you’re too cowardly to break ranks. Your convenient conversion might also not be believed. As Ms. Hong found, no one buys that a 37-year-old ought not be judged by the beliefs she held as a 31-year-old. Refusing to capitulate feels good, but doesn’t solve the core problem that voters perceive you as an extremist crank.

So what is a plucky, progressive Democrat suffering from a nasty 2020 hangover to do? If it were me, I’d start by deleting my tweets.

Good luck with that — presumably, the craziest stuff from those running in the midterms and (especially) the Dems’ 2028 presidential candidates have all been screencapped by now by opposition researchers.

And for those on the left who reject the word “woke” to describe 2020 and/or their current worldview:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll