October 6, 2026

REPORTS ABOUT TAKING OUT LOS ANGELES AND SAN DIEGO ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED.

It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling hole. In theory, anyway. Trump has been rallying through red states – Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas – to try and secure existing Senate seats. But today’s Democratic pile-on concerns a throwaway comment he made last night in Nebraska. Mid-weave, of course.

The President said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city… ‘let ’em, let ’em take Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego, that’s…’ this is a very small price to pay… and it’s gonna be over with very soon, it’s essentially almost over with.”

Now anybody who has followed Donald Trump, even passingly, in the last ten years, should be able to discern what he was getting at here.

He was acknowledging the cost of the Iran war, and attempting to justify his decision to start the now seven-month-long conflict.

The clips now going viral on X paraphrase Trump differently. “Trump on Iran: Let ’em take out Los Angeles and San Diego, it’s a small price to pay,” reads the caption of a tweet from “Headquarters,” an account that was previously “@KamalaHQ,” run by the Harris campaign’s rapid response team. The ensuing reaction from the media, and Trump’s opponents, is just as disingenuous. “Trump suggests letting Iran ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego at campaign rally,” reads the Los Angeles Times headline. “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” tweeted Governor Gavin Newsom last night. “He is deranged and dangerous.”

Wait, isn’t Karen Bass doing a good enough job of nuking LA already, without bringing in the Iranians?

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: ‘Cornell 7’ frat boy leaves America for ‘Beverly Hills of Dubai,’ neighbor claims… as details of his international life of privilege and shock phone call with alleged gang-rape victim emerge.

One of the ‘Cornell 7‘ fraternity brothers hit with explosive sexual assault allegations stemming from an alleged gang rape at the Ivy League school is believed to have retreated to Dubai, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.

Umar Matthew Ingalls won a coveted place at Cornell University in 2023, but his promising future unraveled after a female former student accused him and six other men of sexually assaulting her during a fraternity party in October 2024.

Ingalls, 21, was later expelled from Cornell following an internal university investigation.

One of Ingalls’ neighbors told the Daily Mail they believe he has returned to the Middle East, where he enjoyed a privileged upbringing and attended an elite private school in Emirates Hills, the wealthy enclave often dubbed the ‘Beverly Hills of Dubai.’

Related: Kathy Hochul continues to put the band back together:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS PARIS BURNING? Could the Riots in France Lead to the Election of Conservative Marine Le Pen?

President Emmanuel Macron and his supposed “centrists” can scream “Nazi!” all they want about Le Pen and National Rally. That’s been their electoral strategy since Le Pen’s father was running for president in the 1970s. But the colossal failure of Macron’s left-wing policies and those who preceded him, along with the rise of populists in France, has created a genuine opening for the right that Le Pen will almost certainly exploit.

The fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is trying to start a revolution will make Le Pen’s job a lot easier.

UnHerd:

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, levelling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

“Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a ‘Sixth Republic’ — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and ‘a New France,'” writes UnHerd’s Andrew Hussey. “Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants.”

This kind of overreach by Mélenchon is already leading to a significant backlash against the left.

“Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the ‘Old France’ — which still makes up the majority of French people,” Hussey continues. “With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s.”

It’s not hard for “Old France” to decide which side they should be supporting.

And it’s not hard to notice, as John Daniel Davidson writes at the Federalist, that “The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.”

UPDATE: The Parisian Newspaper of Record reports:

Posted at 7:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HUGE, IF TRUE:

Posted at 5:56 pm by Stephen Green

ALEX, I’LL TAKE “DAVID LEAN’S WORST MOVIE” FOR $500, PLEASE: Fox Butterfield of Arabia.

Fox Butterfield is famous for his repeated inability to tell cause from effect in stories like the one headlined “Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.”

We now have the Arab-Israeli conflict version of Fox Butterfield, thanks to a piece in Foreign Affairs authored by Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler. This time the punchline isn’t the headline. Instead, it’s more like a recurring joke throughout the article.

Titled “Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution,” it’s a rare optimistic essay on the conflict. The authors review Palestinian opinion surveys over time and show a clear trend toward a willingness to negotiate. That, by itself, is a positive development, though limited because those polled don’t live in a democracy and therefore their leader, who has already rejected the framework, must still be convinced of the value of peace. A real test will be whether there is any public pressure from Palestinians on their government to reverse its position and to discard the “resistance” culture built into Palestinian cultural and education institutions.

But assuming this desire for a negotiated solution is accurate, what inspired it? Here we have our Fox Butterfield moment:

“Gazans, despite having borne the brunt of destruction over the past three years, tend to be the most pragmatic: an even greater proportion of them are open to a two-state solution than are Palestinians living in the West Bank.”

Gazans, having seen their invasion of Israel ultimately fail, are indeed being pragmatic by expressing their openness to a different strategy. The authors appear to believe that pragmatism fell from the sky like fairy dust. But in fact what’s being described here is quite simple: The Palestinians started and then lost a war, and now they are open to a negotiated end to hostilities.

History has numerous reminders of when happens when the side that started a war loses it:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

YEP, WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES:

Make the Ottoman Hejaz Great Again?

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Barack Obama to campaign with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

The Oct. 24 event will feature Obama, as well as El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson, who is seeking the governorship, the Michigan Democratic Party announced on Monday.

Obama has generally stayed out of the spotlight since leaving the White House, though he has ocassionally appeared on the campaign trail for other Democratic candidates.

The Michigan race is expected to be one of the most competitive of the cycle and a pivotal contest in the battle for control of the upper chamber.

The trick, of course, is trying to figure out which one is actually to the left of the other.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

THE STANDARDIZED TEST WAR HEATS UP AGAIN. Between the sudden reemergence of woke thought policing, campus sexual assault being on the front pages again, and a plague arising from the East, it seems like everything old is new again.

Posted at 3:10 pm by Robert Shibley

NEEDS AT LEAST TWO MORE ZEROES, BUT POINT TAKEN:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT, THEY RAN OUT OF KANGAROOS FOR THEIR COURT?

Posted at 2:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds