July 21, 2026

IT ISN’T THE PEARL-CLUTCHING THAT’S WORRISOME — IT’S THE ENABLING: The Great American Demographic Shift. “Import the third world’s populations without assimilation, and you import the third world’s problems along with them. Nobody should clutch his or her pearls over this.”

Posted at 5:22 pm by Stephen Green

YES: Doug Burgum to Newsmax: ‘Geopolitics of Energy Have Changed Forever.’

“President Trump, when we take a look at the global factors that are going on here, and whether it’s the conflict in the Middle East, whether it’s diplomatically, we’ve got alignment now with Arab countries that for forever were our adversaries,” he said.

Burgum said that will turn into new markets and business partners for the U.S.

“Now, they’re aligned, moving ahead with Abraham Accords, other things that are there. Great partnerships,” he said.

“Countries like Saudi Arabia and UAE [United Arab Emirates] … UAE has taken over 3,000 attacks from the Iranians,” Burgum continued.

“So the diplomacy in the Middle East has changed forever. The geopolitics of energy have changed forever,” he said.

American energy dominance plays a huge role, too, freeing up policy options that were previously unthinkable.

Turns out, we could drill our way out of several problems.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

NOT THE END OF THE WORLD — THE SUEZ WAS COMPLETELY CLOSED FROM 1967-1975:

Alternate take:

More: “It isn’t closed and those claiming it’s closed are retarded.”

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green

WELL:

All things considered, I think I’d rather keep that genie in the bottle where it’s been since 1945.

Posted at 4:05 pm by Stephen Green

EVERYONE NEEDS A HOBBY: Conservative think tank wants Supreme Court to legalize home whiskey distilleries.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled recently that the federal ban against home whiskey distilleries is unconstitutional. However, the 6th Circuit upheld the federal ban.

The federal government said the law is constitutional because it was enacted to prevent tax evasion and that it would be easier for a distiller working out of their home to conceal the business and therefore avoid paying taxes.

On Monday, the Buckeye Institute filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to decide between the two conflicting appeals-court rulings.

“Two courts of appeals considered the same provisions, against the same constitutional challenge, on mater-ally identical facts, within 11 days of each other, and issued opposite judgments,” Buckeye’s Monday petition to the Supreme Court states.

Legalized home-brewing revolutionized the beer industry, and could do the same for distilled spirits.

Besides, who the hell is Washington to tell us what legal products we can make in our own homes?

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

THE SYSTEM THEY DO SUPPORT WAS RIGGED TO RIP THEM OFF:

Posted at 3:34 pm by Stephen Green

THE LEFT LOOKS AFTER ITS OWN:

Posted at 3:03 pm by Stephen Green

SETH MANDEL: The Normalizing of Mamdani’s Creepy Bibi Obsession.

Mamdani should say that, were he an official of an ICC member country’s national government, he would support arresting a foreign politician he disagrees with. But as he’s the mayor of a city in a non-ICC country, he is about several dimensions removed from being able to make this threat without coming off like someone more deserving of a restraining order.

As so often happens, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman had the right response, which was to mock the mayor as a fake “tough guy” who is all talk. The key to this discussion, as far as I’m concerned, is to resist the temptation to pamper Mamdani’s fragile ego by pretending there is a real-world debate over arresting Netanyahu.

The serious question at hand isn’t whether Mamdani will arrest Netanyahu but whether we should be concerned by the insanity of the mayor’s behavior. Do foreign officials need police protection from the mayor of New York City? Does Mamdani have a list of global politicians he openly fantasizes about assaulting? Or is it just the guy governing the world’s only Jewish state?

We should be concerned about the baleful effects of normalizing this kind of nuttiness.

“The goal is always to denormalize normal things, and normalize abnormal things,” as Glenn just noted yesterday in a different context.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

IT ISN’T LIKE THAT, IT’S EXACTLY THAT:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Will – and Can – Trump Target Pickaxe Mountain Next?

Undoubtedly, the IRGC wants to find an untouchable facility for their (not so) secret work on nuclear weapons. However, if they waited until after Operation Midnight Hammer to move centrifuges and critical tasks, they may be prepping Pickaxe more as a place from which to start from square one. The Iranians did not get the chance to move material from Isfahan and Natanz before they provoked the Israelis into the Twelve Day War, and they wouldn’t have moved anything out of Fordow at all. The Iranian regime fully believed Fordow to be as impregnable as Pickaxe seems to be now, right up until Trump ordered a series of bunker-buster bombs dropped into its vents and demolished operations there. Afterward, the US has kept a very close eye on activity at all three sites, and Trump has himself shared the operating analysis that the Midnight Hammer bombing runs buried all of the material at those sites, including Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

The timeline suggests that the IRGC decided to create a second Fordow, as it were, rather than a replacement for it. That’s worrisome in itself, but they have had only six years to move what remained from the damaged centrifuges in the 2020 incident while operating their main development sites in parallel. The rapid increase in activity during the Twelve Day War and after Operation Midnight Hammer would likely be a reaction to losing the advanced operations entirely at the other locations, and an attempt to set up a new site where those could be rebuilt rather than just a relocation of those activities with full capacity. That’s still a bad development, although hardly unexpected from this regime.

So can we take Pickaxe off the board too? Last week, Trump told Hugh Hewitt that it’s already made the target list[.]

Faster, please.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE’S DOING GREAT!

Steve’s Second Law of Holes states that when your opponent is busy digging himself into one, hand him a bigger and nicer shovel.

Posted at 2:01 pm by Stephen Green

DIFFERENT TAKES:

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DAVID STROM: How’s It Going in Hungary? “They are coming down like a ton of bricks on Orbán and his political party, following the now-familiar EU plan to subvert elections by canceling them if their candidates aren’t likely to win, banning political parties, disqualifying candidates, and rigging the rules.”

Posted at 1:56 pm by Glenn Reynolds