November 5, 2026

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT FRAUD. STOP THE CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD. IT IS FRAUD:  James Talarico got more ‘votes’ than any Democrat candidate has EVER gotten in Texas history. He got 500,000 more ‘votes’ than Kamala Harris got two years ago in a Presidential election year. The demographics of Texas have not changed significantly in two years. You can talk about gas prices, or Iran, or Trump’s personality until the cows come home, this still seems … odd, to say the least.

Again and again I say to you, no way the left outperformed polls. Have you ever met a lefty that didn’t tell everyone his or her opinion, loudly? At the top of his/her voice? Not believable. I believe in unicorns more.

Posted at 1:22 am by Sarah Hoyt

November 4, 2026

OF COURSE NOT, ONLY ONE PARTY IS CAPABLE OF RACIAL MILESTONES.

Posted at 9:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

They’re lucky if it’s not a “dirty swirly.”

Posted at 9:34 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

EL PERIÓDICO DE REFERENCIA DE MÉXICO:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOODER AND HARDER, LA: Raman ousts Bass as Los Angeles mayor.

Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman (D) is projected to become the next mayor of Los Angeles after ousting embattled Mayor Karen Bass (D) after one term, according to Decision Desk HQ.

The race was called Wednesday evening with Raman leading by about 26,000 votes—roughly 3 percent—out of 784,262 votes cast, per DDHQ.

Raman defeated Bass after the two advanced from the June 2 nonpartisan jungle primary, ousting former reality TV star Spencer Pratt from the race.

In other words, Los Angeles citizens have chosen the socialist who massively inflated their homeless population, rather than the socialist who burned their city down:

Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”

Tweet concludes, “See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness and instead it ballooned on purpose. This is why there was such enormous flip out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign. Once people realize that things can be improved a lot of nonprofits and public union/money dries up. There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam. Mostly the concern I see on the political right over AI is cultural because there’s nothing more that the political left and the Democratic Party wants them to get their claws into AI. Because once an AI is programmed to tell people that boys can become girls it’s the death of truth. Data centers being built isn’t the problem, the data in those data centers is.”

Posted at 9:05 pm by Ed Driscoll

MARK JUDGE: The End of Trump’s Punk Rock Presidency.

In Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer compared Trump and his supporting political movement, the Alt-Right, to punk: “Hillary’s recent speech denouncing the alt-right has raised eyebrows. It was as if in 1976 progressive-rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer had released a double album devoted to excoriating this new band nobody had ever heard of before called the Ramones. If you can remember back four decades, it might strike you that the alt-right phenomenon of 2016 is basically political punk rock: loud, abrasive, hostile, white, back to basics, and fun.”

The fun’s now over. As I explained in a recent piece, in his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, journalist Tim Mohr explores how the postwar communist German Stasi harassed, monitored, censored, and beat punk rockers. It’s notable how many times the word “fun” is used by the punks to explain their outlook. Between 1981 and 1985, one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece that, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.” The Stasi eventually shut them down. The Democrats are the American Stasi. They’re about to shut everything down — except transgender athletes.

There’s a whole lot of people coming to power in January who view The Lives of Others as a how-to guide for governance:

So what is “Trump’s Next Act?” That’s a topic that Glenn explores in his latest Substack column, with an assist from VDH:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:

People say Reddit is a cesspool, and that’s not quite accurate. There are many useful, factual, smart, reasoned subreddits. A lot depends on the moderators. You can tell a moderator has the cliched Reddit mindset when you see a rule like “4. Transwomen are women” and it’s a subreddit devoted to fountain pens.

I was reading about the Paris riots in a subreddit devoted to Lost Architecture. As with 2020, you are sternly discouraged from mourning property destruction, which only shows you are missing the real issue.

Don’t get me wrong, bro, I’m totally on board with burning museums, if they’re the ones that need burning.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE TWILIGHT OF BOOMER REPUBLICANISM:

Foreign policy, particularly as it relates to wars in the Middle East, is the sharpest generational divide in the GOP. The country has been at war in the region for longer than any Republican under the age of 35 has been alive. Young Americans have no idea why this should be the case. Like the national debt, this is simply something that’s been forced on them by older generations.

​But for boomer Republicans, a hawkish foreign policy is a minimum requirement for moral seriousness, just as it was in the days of their youth during the Cold War. It’s not that Iran or even China is the new Soviet Union, although some boomers do think that. Rather, it’s that during the Cold War, anyone who qualified as an adult had to take the foreign threat seriously – and everyone understood that possession of nuclear weapons marked a nation as a great power, if not indeed a superpower on par with the United States and the Soviet Union.

​Who in their right mind would want to allow Iran to become the next superpower? If that status didn’t come automatically with having nuclear weapons, having them would nonetheless be a running leap down the path to becoming a superpower. That was the lesson of history the baby boomers lived.

​Trump may or may not think this way: he’s long viewed Iran as a neighborhood menace that ought to be put down just for insulting America and being bad for regional development. He has reasons for using force against Tehran that go beyond the typical boomer mindset – but he’s surrounded by others who are typical, and the mindset of the older voters who are most active in the Republican party tends to be reflexively hawkish because of the mental world in which boomers grew up.

​There is a strong constituency for war in the Republican party, despite the inroads anti-war conservatives have made (thanks largely to Trump, ironically or not). Trump gave in to this boomer side of his party and of himself.

​The result has been war with Iran and sky-high fuel prices that doomed Republicans across the country on November 3.

Yesterday may also signify the twilight of the Fox News Republican:

Dougherty’s tweet concludes, “The decline of Fox News rendered that form of the GOP unable to organize its responses or make sense of the world anymore. Consequently this form of the party is ending.”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DANA LOESCH: What J.D. Vance Gets Wrong.

I’ve been a fan of J.D. for years, but I don’t like his new direction.

Posted at 7:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YES:

Posted at 5:22 pm by Stephen Green

THIS IS NO TIME TO GO WOBBLY ON DECOUPLING:

Posted at 5:07 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: How Hollywood Helped Fuel Tuesday’s Blue Tsunami.

Bruce Springsteen didn’t tip the Election Day scales for the Democrats.

Nor did Macklemore, Jimmy Kimmel or Mark Ruffalo.

No single progressive artist made a difference in the beating Republicans took Tuesday night. No, the matter is far more complicated, but we can’t ignore the role Hollywood had in the election results.

Call it a collective approach, one that aligned key cultural forces together with one goal above all else.

Progressive power.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

JEN VAN LAAR: Vance’s Explanation for the GOP’s Midterm Disaster Is a Little Too Neat and Tidy. “In Vance’s estimation, the GOP has lost the Senate for six years as a result of this election — which could end up being true, but is a very bold prediction to make today — and blames that on people who supported taking out the mullahs, many of whom are not neocons. There’s a solid core of Gen X conservatives who have wanted the mullahs handled for a very long time, in large part because of how many members of our generation were killed, maimed, or suffer from debilitating PTSD because of Iran’s support of terrorism for the last 47 years.”

Vance’s post read to me like a power play against the Rubio-Hegseth wing of the administration.

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green