July 25, 2026

JEFFREY BLEHAR: The Most Irresponsibly Stupid Column of the Year.

Because in [Nancy Armour of USA Today’s] moral world, the real threat here is not to Caitlin Clark’s right quadricep but rather to the dignity and safety of the black women who play against her. As Armour describes it, if Clark “flops” during a game . . . she’s apparently encouraging her white fans to take justice into their own hands and lynch the hated blacks. I’m not kidding about this, though I wish I were:

It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The irony of the WNBA’s All-Star Game is that it’s happening this weekend in Chicago, the hometown of Emmett Till, who became an icon of the civil rights movement after his tragic murder. The local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the broader implications of her actions being weaponized.

First off, marvel at that rhetorical stretch. Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi by Jim Crow racists in the Fifties, which is just like Caitlin Clark complaining after being fouled at next week’s All-Star Game . . . and it’s all connected because Chicago. (This one fact alone meant I had to write this. Somehow it’s always MAGA country’s fault.) Then step back further and gaze with disbelief upon the neo-Stalinist moral logic: because others might react badly to her public disapproval at being abused, she must remain silent (and take more abuse). It is howlingly, outrageously wrong — a complete inversion of all accepted principle.

Related: We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Barack Obama is a voice of sanity:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

I INVENTED* NIXONMAXXING:

Instead of the Watergate legend raising the moral standing of the media, today deep distrust of the media has cast Watergate in a new light. So has the revelation that Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s key insider source, “Deep Throat,” was a man who aspired to the power once wielded byJ. Edgar Hoover and brought down the president who refused to make him director of the FBI.

Hoover was a man above the Constitution, thanks to his ability to intimidate and blackmail members of the elected government – Congress was afraid to touch him. Mark Felt believed he was entitled to what Hoover enjoyed, and when Nixon defied him, Felt, through Woodward and Bernstein, showed the president who really had the power to destroy whom.

An unelected government within the government ought to be the subject, not the sponsor, of media investigations. The relationship between the media and those parts of government in agreement with the liberal-leaning news industry’s own biases is a scandal unto itself. Nixon’s reputational recovery is the flipside of the media’s dwindling authority. Rising esteem for Nixon is reciprocal with the plummeting of newspaper circulations.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance told an audience at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in June. Yet the Nixon saga isn’t ancient history: “If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” the Vice President argued.

Nixon was a tragic figure – almost an American Macbeth. His story is human in a way that moves the young right, who have been subjected all their lives to stories that are mere ideological morality tales. It’s not Nixon’s ideology they admire; they admire him for not being easily reduced to inhuman “principles.”

* Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg, and/or the NBC executives who likely told him that it might be a bit off-putting to ‘80s TV viewers if Alex P. Keaton was seen worshipping Ronald Reagan on a weekly basis might like a word here:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRUMP FINALLY GETS HIS WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER SPEECH: “Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?”

And here’s the joke I thought was the best: “Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they’re now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She’s a wonderful woman.”

Heh, indeed.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AWKWARD:

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

BRIAN WANG: SpaceX Starship Flight 13 Had a Miracle. “SpaceX Starship flight 13 had a miracle happen. The landing of Starship was so soft that the fires did not cause an explosion. Starship stayed intact. It did not explode. Every prior Starship was destroyed and exploded when they went into the ocean. The wealth of information from an intact 18000 tile heat shield and the pattern and amount of damage is going to help SpaceX learn a lot. This massively increases the likelihood that flight 14 will be completely successful for catching both the booster AND the Starship. Certainly flight 15 or 16 will be completely successful and we will enter an age of fully and rapidly reusable Starship by the end 2026.”

Posted at 11:38 am by Glenn Reynolds

LET’S HOPE: SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM IS THE ANGEL OF DEATH FOR CANCEL CULTURE. The subtext was clear to her aspirant cancelers: I hear you, I see you, and I don’t care. This is 2026, not 2016.

Related:

Posted at 9:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

ICYMI: NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

ENSHITTIFICATION IS REAL:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

WHEN I WROTE FOR USA TODAY THEY PRIDED THEMSELVES ON FAIRNESS AND FACT-CHECKING. Of course they gave up on both, which is why I left.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

July 24, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“THE POLICE WANT IT, THEREFORE WE SAY NO.”

Posted at 8:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SETH MANDEL: AOC’s Latest Dual-Loyalty Hoax Is a Doozy.

“This amendment is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” declared Ocasio-Cortez.

How did we get here? The lie seemed to get off the ground in late May thanks to folks at the Quincy Institute, the isolationist activist forum, though it didn’t at first use the term “merge” but rather “integrate.” That word is important, because it also appeared in one of the sentences in the defense bill. Of course, the bill doesn’t say the militaries will be integrated, but conspiracy theorists decided it was one of the few straws they had in reach, so they’re grasping it.

A second conspiracy theory around the bill, pushed by the folks at Dropsite, the podcasters who were last seen trying to bully Ro Khanna into approving of October 7, is that a letter sent by Benjamin Netanyahu claims the bill was his idea.

In fact, Netanyahu sent a letter to a congressman who had written up a resolution that just said the two countries would move toward cooperation instead of the old aid model and called for a new Memorandum of Understanding. Netanyahu has been pushing this change for years, and he wrote that he was happy the two allies would now move in that direction.

So when you combine the two lies, you have: Israel is dictating U.S. laws, and the council of the Elders of Zion—Sorry, the Jewish state—now runs our military. Oh, and everyone who supported the U.S. defense bill is a traitor.

Tucker goes full Judgement at Nuremberg about that last idea:

Why would Tucker be in favor of the Nuremberg Trials Mark II, when he thinks the Germans were the good guys in WWII, and the millions of people they murdered were a tragic accident instead of a deliberately planned slaughter? As Steve asked in September of 2024: Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong With Tucker Carlson?

Carlson’s interview on Tuesday with alleged historian Darryl Cooper — like his interview in April with Reverend Munther Isaac, referenced in today’s flashbacks — was so much worse than merely glib or incurious.

Carlson chose to interview Cooper, whom he endorsed as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” to learn exactly how World War II didn’t happen. According to Cooper — and Carlson nodded along the entire time — Winston Churchill was perhaps “the chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

It’s true that Hitler did not want or expect Britain to fight. He wanted Britain to acquiesce to German dominance of Europe from the Urals to Gibraltar and subsume the UK to Nazi interests. This is all a matter of historical record. Britain could fight or submit — that was Hitler’s choice, not Churchill’s.

FLASHBACK: Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a priest who neither lives nor works in Israel and who uses the loaded phrase “Occupied Palestine” as his location on his Twitter/X profile. He is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority.

As for the Holocaust — brace yourself — Hitler was just being merciful, according to Cooper. “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentally created more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with. “And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”

Vance really needs to have his Sister Souljah moment with Tucker, sooner, rather than later:

Flashback: The Last Temptation of JD Vance.

Posted at 8:17 pm by Ed Driscoll