May 18, 2026

WHEN NARRATIVES FAIL:

Posted at 6:46 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: How Disney ruined Star Wars.

If [The Mandalorian and Grogu] does underperform – “flop” is a bit strong – then questions will be asked of Filoni’s judgement. Whether next summer’s Ryan Gosling-starring Star Wars: Starfighter is similarly doomed – and if audiences are weary of a series that has been systematically exploited and therefore ruined for years. With the more than honorable exception of the excellent Andor – which, if rumors are to be believed, Filoni was bewildered by – there hasn’t been anything any good in the Star Wars universe since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney for $4 billion back in 2012.

It isn’t hard to see why not. Regardless of whether you are an especially big fan of Star Wars or not, there is no denying the way that the first film completely reshaped the American cinematic landscape when it emerged in 1977. Becoming an even bigger hit than Spielberg’s Jaws two years before and laying the groundwork for virtually every big-budget science-fiction fantasy that followed ever since. Its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, is justifiably believed to be one of the seminal films ever made, introducing elements of moral ambiguity and genuine wit into the series.

Yet when Disney paid the big bucks for Lucasfilm, they were not thinking about moral ambiguity or wit, but instead as to how they could monetize the franchise for all that it was worth.

And then Kathleen Kennedy alienated the male half of the entire original fanbase. This is the point in a Critical Drinker video where he pastes in the obligatory clip of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark saying, “Not a good plan:”

Tweet continues, “So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

“PREASE ACCEPT OUR APOROGY:”

Readers: we’re sorry. On May 13, 2026, we covered the story of Eileen Wang, the California mayor who confessed to working as a Chinese foreign agent, and in doing so, we made a grave error — we failed to acknowledge that accurately reporting on CCP spies running entire American towns was, in fact… racist. You see, NBC News published an article last week explaining the real problem with the Chinese spy mayor story was that it has “reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination,” which totally doesn’t read like a Norm Macdonald joke come to life, and definitely serves as a helpful reminder that words, even accurate ones about bombshell espionage scandals, can carry violence. The next time an American mayor is caught working for the PRC? We urge you to sit your racist ass down and instead reflect upon what you can do to Stop Asian Hate.

Evergreen:

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW IT’S DONE:

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JOANNE JACOBS: Zombifying the universities.

AI use on college campuses “threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons,” writes Owen Yingling, a University of Chicago philosophy major, in The Great Zombification. “It will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training,” he argues in The New Critic.

Elite universities are spending millions of dollars to figure out how to “integrate” AI in the classroom, Yingling writes. What it really means is substituting AI “for learning, teaching, and conversing.”

Some will wait for the university system to crumble, hoping to build something new from the ashes, he writes. The ivied halls “will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent.”

Harsh, but fair.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

THIS:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

Posted at 4:25 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: NASA’s Psyche spacecraft just got an assist from Mars on the way to its asteroid namesake. “Scientists think that Psyche, the largest known metallic asteroid in our solar system, could be part of the iron-rich core of a planetesimal. That’s the solid building block of a planet formed in the early days of the solar system. As such, it could offer us insight into the core of our own planet and show us how it formed.”

And it appears to be a treasure trove of raw materials that aren’t stuck in Earth’s gravity well.

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES:

Posted at 3:34 pm by Stephen Green

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: UK Censoring Reform UK Videos as Hate Speech. “Zia Yousef is Reform UK’s Shadow Home Secretary, and the video that TikTok yanked at the request of the British government was there to lay out Reform’s agenda if and when they win Parliamentary elections. Labour doesn’t want the British people to hear Reform UK’s case, so…they silenced it.”

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

ROBERT SPENCER: A Cautionary Tale That No One Will Heed. “What would make someone switch sides and join America’s enemies? It’s easy to envision an America-hating leftist doing such a thing, but it’s much harder to understand when the defector in question was, to all outward appearances anyway, a patriot who was devoted to the service of her country.”

Posted at 2:15 pm by Stephen Green