September 22, 2026

IS STILL GRAFT AND FEEDS THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:  “Honest” graft.

Posted at 1:30 am by Sarah Hoyt

September 21, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTION ASKED: What’s next for Jayden Daniels, Washington Commanders after elbow injury? “Commanders coach Dan Quinn said Daniels will visit specialists Tuesday and Wednesday to determine the best course of action. It’s the same injury Daniels sustained in Week 9 last season; he returned in Week 14, but after reinjuring the elbow in that contest, the Commanders shut him down for the final four games of the campaign.”

In sharp contrast to Tom Brady, who dropped an S-bomb on air during the shot of Daniels’ dislocated elbow, Daniels’ teammates seem rather non-plussed about his injury:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Hard Bigotry of Progressives.

This is just a refusal to acknowledge disparities not only in race and income, but in parental expectations, discipline, and an education system meant to fail children forward. It’s not segregation, money, teachers, or all the other people Jones has decided to blame that are holding black children in New York City back. It is the failure of parents to demand more from their children, and the failure of the teachers’ union and government to fail children forward. Black children in Mississippi don’t have universal school choice, a voucher program, or anywhere near the kind of money spent on black students in New York City, $52,349 in the case of Jones’s daughter’s school vs. $12,324 for the average school in Mississippi. Yet, the latter outperforms New York City students in testing.

Neither Jones nor her daughter can admit the hard truth that these black students didn’t have less when it came to school spending. In fact, because of New York City’s Fair Student Funding rule, she and her classmates actually had more.

In the comment section of the article, Jones said her daughter doesn’t believe she’s being hard enough on herself, and there’s a lot of truth to that. How did she knowingly put her child in an unsafe, failing school without supplemental tutoring? Why did she wait till the fourth grade to realize that none of her work was being graded? For someone who claims to be an education expert, Jones was constantly surprised. Still, aside from running to the principal or emailing the teacher, she didn’t do personalized follow-up to make sure her daughter met her standards. It’s question after question on a slow-moving train wreck that’s supposed to conclude with the thought that at least she was honest. But is that enough? Because if she had her way, her daughter would still be on track for a much harder life, where she failed to meet the basic needs of a college freshman. So she would have been left behind, and it would have been nearly impossible ever to catch up.

Jones worries that in fighting for all children and standing true to her values, she let her child down, but she’s asking the wrong question entirely. It’s not that raising your children with values rooted in your ideological framework is a bad decision; it’s the choice most parents make, whether that be based on religion, culture, or politics. The problem is that Jones’ ideology is inherently poisonous.

All of her answers to the problems were because of whiteness, structural racism, funding, poor teachers, or understaffing; on deeper examination, all of those explanations fall apart. Jones is so profoundly inept at analyzing cause and effect that at this point it’s a moral failing.

Metaphor alert:

Still though, Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

So as the proverbial liberal who’s been mugged by reality, welcome onboard, NHJ!

UPDATE: Great moments in hubris:

Posted at 9:05 pm by Ed Driscoll

AI AIRBRUSH ALERT: Stanford Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising.

Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises recently used AI to change the races of the students it included in its advertisements. AI was also used to noticeably slim down and alter students’ faces.

On his journey to campus, Stanford student Billy Ramirez ’27 was sent an image he recalled a Stanford photographer taking. Upon closer examination, he noticed that he had been removed from the photo and replaced by a AI-generated black woman.

The Review spoke to Ramirez, who stated, “I was driving to school from my hometown when my friend sent me the images comparing the banner to the original photos, and I was immediately baffled. At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender. But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.”

Not only were Ramirez’s race and gender changed, but the two students to Ramirez’s right were distorted, making them appear visibly thinner.

I’m so old, I can remember when “body positivity” was all the rage on the left:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE’RE PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER! Germany’s AfD partners with radical Italian ‘sister party.’

German and Italian radical Right-wing parties formally joined forces in the central Italian city of Orvieto, calling for wider unification of Europe’s nationalist factions.

Roberto Vannacci, leader of Future Nazionale, which is to the Right of Giorgia Meloni‘s governing coalition, introduced the German AfD’s Marc Jongen at a rally on Sunday.

Mr Vannacci said: “‘Alarm! Alarming!’ they all said, but as you can see he doesn’t have a shaved head or tattoos… He is a distinguished professor of philosophy with a great career.”

It marks the first time senior figures from Italy and Germany’s farthest-Right parties have appeared together openly since Alternative for Germany won a historic regional election victory in Saxony-Anhalt.

The rally came just before election exit polls in northern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern showed the AfD party on its way to winning another regional election.

Their joint-appearance also took place only two weeks after Italian and German Right-wing youth leaders traded visits.

Meanwhile, a successor to the Grand Mufti is invited back to Berlin: ‘Berlin’s Mamdani’ hosted Hamas supporter at election party.

The hard-Left leader pushing to become the mayor of Berlin has become engulfed in an anti-Semitism row, which could block her path to power.

Elif Eralp’s Die Linke (The Left) party, which traces its roots to the former East German communist party, won with 25 per cent of the vote on Sunday, putting it in pole position to form a coalition.

However, her largest potential coalition partner, the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD) party, has now suggested it does not wish to work with her after Ibrahim Ibrahim, a Hamas supporter, attended Die Linke’s election celebrations on Sunday night.

“It’s very difficult to work with a party that is largely anti-Semitic,” Bärbel Bas, the SPD’s co-leader said on Monday, alluding to the presence of the controversial guest at the party.

The row could prevent Ms Eralp – who has been compared to Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, over their shared focus on affordable housing, cost-of-living issues and grassroots campaigning – from taking the top job.

According to Tagesspiegel, a German news outlet, Mr Ibrahim once described Yahya Sinwar, the slain Hamas mastermind of the Oct 7 2023 attacks on Israel, as a “martyr hero”.

She really is Berlin’s Mamdani.

Found via:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GRAUNIAD MAD, OVERSIGHT BAD: Plan for editorial oversight board at CNN and CBS News draws skepticism: ‘Utter garbage.’

Critics of the mega-merger had expressed concerns about CNN being taken over by the Ellison family, which has well-documented connections to the Trump administration. David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, have reportedly spoken with the White House about potential changes they might make at CNN, which could ultimately generate more positive coverage of the Trump administration, a prospect that has worried journalists at the cable news network.

On Monday afternoon, there was already some skepticism within the media industry – including from current and former employees at the companies involved in the deal – about whether the editorial oversight board would actually protect CNN’s editorial integrity.

“There is no way that is going to work,” former CNN anchor Jim Acosta said. “They will start to fire anchors and certain folks to send a message, and the rest will either have to fall in line or leave. This was a colossal mistake.”

One concerned CBS News staffer said that it “sounds like utter garbage”.

“I’m happy to hear more about this, but how a board works day to day is tough to wrap my head around,” said a CNN producer who was not authorized to comment.

Jessica J González, the co-chief executive of the advocacy organization Free Press, expressed doubts about the effectiveness of an oversight board.

“As we learned from the failed and widely panned Facebook oversight board, a fake bipartisan oversight committee won’t save CNN,” she said in a statement on Monday. “We have all the evidence we need from the Ellisons’ destruction of CBS about what they do to warp journalism at Donald Trump’s request.”

Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who now teaches journalism at George Washington University, said the effectiveness of the oversight board will depend entirely on how it works.

The best way to make it work is to say, “of course the oversight board will ensure CNN will remain a liberal TV network” — and then make sure the board is working off the traditional definition of the L-Word before it was stolen by 1920s-era “Progressives” attempting to distance themselves from the horrors of the Wilson administration.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL:

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“PROFESSOR,” LOL:

Don’t take the black pill. Vote.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When I see stuff like this I assume it comes from CCP operatives or Democratic Party operatives, to the extent there’s a difference.

Posted at 5:57 pm by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTEDLY: Mamdani: Quality of Life, Efficiency, Rooting Out Fraud Have “Somehow Come To Be Seen as Somehow a Right-Wing Concern:”

Like I said, unexpectedly:

Tweet continues:

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.

In May during L.A.’s Spencer Pratt boomlet, Christopher Rufo tweeted:

Spencer Pratt grew up in a California that delivered all of the public services in the background without much fuss, and consequently, one could live out the California archetypes of the surfer, the burnout, or the party animal, and it was more or less as depicted in the movies…Pratt has a better understanding of the California Dream than a rigid, humorless apparatchik like Nithya Raman, who views the state as raw material for an ideological formula.

In contrast, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2024 of Chicago’s Mayor Daley:

Daley was a real New Deal-style liberal, but he would have no use for Shorism or Lakoff-ism. He barely spoke American. He once declared he was proud to welcome the “poet lariat” of Chicago. He complained of his enemies, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” He famously defended the Chicago police (which, we should concede did some indefensible things) by saying “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But he knew how to get snow cleared.

Again, I’m not trying to romanticize Daley, but I guarantee you a great many current residents of Chicago (or New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) would be far, far, happier to pay taxes for Daley-style government than to pay for what they have now—even if you convinced people that taxes are really just membership fees.

Democrats in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York would similarly accept a lot of corruption in their local government — if it still delivered basic services, such as fighting crime, putting out fires and repairing roads:

As Democrats continually move back and to the left, back and to the left, they continue to cede a massive amount of ideological ground to the right:

Screenshot

Not to mention, the English language itself. When even Van Jones notices how crazy the lefty lexicon has gotten over the past decade, and how off-putting it feels to those not in the cult, it may be too difficult to temporarily reel the smugness back in: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Bowling Alone. 

The New Hotness? Get outside, do things with the guys:

 

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ATTACK DOG WITH A SMILE:

Related:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green

DENMARK TOOK IN 321 PALESTINIAN REFUGEES IN 1992. DECADES LATER, 61% HAD BEEN CONVICTED OF CRIMES:

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PERSPECTIVE:

Posted at 4:03 pm by Stephen Green