May 22, 2026

THE LEFT PROTECTS ITS OWN, ALWAYS:

Posted at 7:51 am by Stephen Green

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY; THEY SELL COLA DIFFERENTLY THERE:

This was the last gasp of a shared culture and a mass media, which only two years earlier had gone all-in on removing Richard Nixon from power. As I wrote on July 4th, 2020, in-between Walter Cronkite droning on about the impending eco-disasters of a new ice age and overpopulation to viewers of the CBS Evening News, and episodes of M*A*S*H as a thinly-disguised Vietnam War commentary full of moral equivalence between the US, North Korea and Communist China, CBS could still muster up some of its biggest stars to host “Bicentennial Minutes” on the important events that led up to the nation’s founding. Today, the network would likely draft Stephen Colbert and Colin Kaepernick [hey, remember them, 2026 readers?] to opine on how the nation was born in Original Sin. Perhaps it was the lack of a 24-hour cable news cycle, or the increasingly left-leaning network remembering that it still needed to serve a wide swatch of viewers. In any case, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Bicentennial proved that as late as 1976, the Democratic Party-dominated overculture still offered room for all, decades before today’s “no escapism” mentality on the elite left.

XXX

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

ED MORRISSEY: DNC Autopsy ‘Paints Dismal Picture’ While Burying the Biden Cover-Up and Harris’ Incompetence.

What about the report itself? People can directly access the 192-page report, but it’s not easy to parse, thanks to the lack of effort in finishing the product. It’s unfinished in another sense, too: there is apparently no mention of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline or the effort to cover it up in the autopsy. The words “cognitive,” “dementia,” “senile,” and “mental” make no appearance in this document. The June 2024 debate barely gets a mention at all, and the report completely ignores its impact and what it revealed about Democrats’ attempts to sell a sick old man as “Sharp As A Tack™”:

Before the candidate switch, the pollsters never reviewed ad copy or content – and commented how they did not see ads until after they were airing, in some instances reading about the ads in the media. They also reported they had little insight into the data provided to leadership from the analytics team.

As the June 2024 debate neared, there were discussions about polling around the debate and after the convention. The polling team was informed the plan was for them to poll three times during the general election, and the post-convention polling would count as one of those three polling waves. They attributed this minimalist approach to research to members of the media team not believing polling data was essential to decision making.

The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped.

Whoever wrote this passage must have majored in Passive Voice Deflection while attending Progressive U. “The debate obviously changed many things,” the author(s) write, without ever explaining what changed or why, even though the necessity of that switch was the single biggest problem Democrats faced.

The autopsy never addresses the “candidate switch” in detail either, choosing to ignore the back-room “switch” that took place and the option Democrats had in using the convention to choose their nominee by a representative vote. This literally never gets discussed in the report, despite it being the single biggest DNC process issue in the 2024 cycle.

If the first step is admitting you have a problem, for the DNC the second step is going back to ignoring it.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

NOVEMBER PREVIEW:

Almost left unsaid: Don’t get cocky.

Posted at 7:20 am by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: “What is a Woman?”

The New Hotness: What is a Women’s Museum?

Posted at 7:16 am by Ed Driscoll

THIS GUY IS SUCH A TWO-FACED JERK:

Posted at 7:09 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE (CONT’D): Trust the Experts. “Some Experts™ are worse than others, because they not only believe they know everything, but they work assiduously to destroy those who actually have good ideas about the way things work in the real world. They aren’t bad engineers; they are cult leaders who think they know everything. Such was the case with the economists who campaigned to destroy Javier Milei and prevent him from becoming President of Argentina. Milei was a dangerous crank, they said, and would destroy the already sputtering economy of Argentina. What the country needed wasn’t more capitalism, but more socialism.”

Economists endorsing socialism is like chemists endorsing Phlogiston.

Related:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

MAYBE MORE WILL FOLLOW:  Waking Up To Reality.

I’ll note the make work people aren’t all women. Men in these positions are even more poisonous. OTOH we are at great need for companies to concentrate on doing the thing and not the poisonous politics of the serraglio.

Posted at 5:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS BETTER VET IMMIGRANTS AND NOT HAND OUT CITIZENSHIPS LIKE CANDY:  Excluded!

Posted at 4:25 am by Sarah Hoyt