September 28, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A FINGERNAIL: BBC gets crushed over woke article claiming new fingernail trend is white supremacist ‘erasure.’

The woke intelligentsia has identified yet another seemingly innocuous instrument of white supremacist oppression that literally emanates from your fingertips.

A bizarre article published by the BBC claims that a trending practice in which women’s nails are left unpainted is actually a racist plot against minorities.

‘When I do get a manicure now, it’s no polish. Why? Because I’m old and tired. Not because I joined the KKK.’

The article cites Kristina Rodulfo, a beauty journalist, who links the bare-nail trend to racism.

“That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities,” she said.

“They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty,” Rodulfo added.

The article goes on to enumerate far less extremist reasons for the trend.

“It’s just really chic. And I love less is more, I love minimalism … less consumerism and just self-care things that you could probably do at home,” said one woman who chose the unpolished look.

Ladies, whatever you do, don’t actually chose the color white as a nail polish choice: Columbia professor wins award for book on ‘white paint’ being racist.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SURE, FREDO: COVID Fraud Chris Cuomo Says Scott Jennings ‘Has a Lot to Answer for When He Flees MAGA.’

To be fair, if anybody gets to pass judgement, it’s someone who experienced his own personal resurrection. Flashback: ‘It’s Good TV:’ CNN’s High-Drama Coverage of the Pandemic Hits Close to Home: “But another current CNN employee who spoke with THR criticized Cuomo’s appearances, particularly the dramatic moment last Monday when he was filmed leaving the basement where he was quarantined to reunite with his family, as ‘reality TV.’ ‘Him coming out of the quarantine with the cameras there, that’s all Jeff Zucker reality TV, and that screams Zucker,’ the person says, referring to the network president who brought The Apprentice to NBC and helped make Trump a star.”

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS THE WAY: AG Todd Blanche Schools ABC’s Martha Raddatz on the WH Press Ban.

Throughout the past week, the top story among the Elitist Media was the Elitist Media. Specifically, the Trump administration’s revocation of White House Access to three specific outlets: CNN, MS NOW and Politico. ABC’s Martha Raddatz challenged Attorney General Todd Blanche on the merits of the ban, and got schooled for her troubles.

Watch as Blanche catches Raddatz trying to manufacture a quote:

MARTHA RADDATZ:  The judge — the judge decided this was not based on national security. So what do you think?

TODD BLANCHE:  The judge issued a temporary — the judge issued a temporary order. It’s not final. The litigation is ongoing, and I’m not going to talk about the specifics of what the judge said. That wouldn’t be right.What I’m talking about is the government’s position and what the Department of Justice said in court, which is the same thing that President Trump has said repeatedly, which is at some point, at some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue, and it’s not right for the people of the United States have to put up.

RADDATZ:  So, are you saying you’re going to screen people before they get on — on a flight coming —

(CROSSTALK)

BLANCHE:  I did not say that. No, no, I did not say that.

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ:  But you said the president gets to decide —

BLANCHE:  You don’t get to put words into my mouth.

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ:  I’m not.

BLANCHE:  That’s not the way it works.

RADDATZ:  The president —

BLANCHE:  Yes, you just said, are you saying? I didn’t say that.

RADDATZ:  Fine. You have a right to defend yourself there. But are you saying —

BLANCHE:  I’m not defending myself.

RADDATZ:  — that in the future —

BLANCHE:  You said I said something that I didn’t say.

RADDATZ:  That’s fine. That’s fine. We can go on.

The “so you’re saying…” reductio ad absurdum argument where an argument is distilled down into a ridiculous talking point is a favorite of the Elitist Media. Blanche caught it in real time, shut it down, and then rebutted Raddatz’ self-defense framing.

Raddatz inadvertently made Blanche’s case here, inasmuch as Democrats are never the beneficiaries of the Elite Media’s reduction ad absurdum distortions. As our own Tim Graham notes, Democrats don’t often have to tell an anchor “you don’t get to put words in my mouth.” That’s because the media are more than happy to let them say their own, unchallenged.

It’s a brilliant technique by Blanche, and I suspect if others start to employ it, most on-air personalities such as Cathy Newman, who singlehandedly made Jordan Peterson a global superstar in 2018 via an interview absolutely filled with “so you’re saying” attempted gotchas, would quickly be out of a job.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU WENT FULL WEIMAR, MAN. NEVER GO FULL WEIMAR: Guess Who New York Magazine Featured in Its Men’s Style Issue.

The Left has spent years erasing women in the name of trans ideology. From relabeling women as “egg producers” or “womb owners” or “birthing persons” to featuring men cosplaying as women on the covers of magazines and in awards, it’s been a problem for some time. Now the Left is doing the same thing to men in New York Magazine’s Men’s Style issue, by featuring Elliot Page shirtless in the spread.

 

Exit quote: “This is some next-level sarcasm. But it speaks to a larger truth about the message it sends to young, impressionable girls. Page is not a man. She is a woman, and even if New York Magazine pretends otherwise, that reality does not change.”

As Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Me Decade,” published in 1976, in a very different iteration of New York magazine:

The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.

As farsighted as Wolfe could be, I doubt even he could imagine the craziness to come in the 21st century.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHY IS CORNELL A CESSPIT OF RAPE?

Posted at 7:40 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHAT HAPPENED:

Starship has a lot of engines, which both increases the likelihood of one failing and the ability to deal with failure if it happens. That said, the Raptors, while great engines, probably need a bit more refinement to increase reliability. No doubt that will happen.

Related:

Posted at 6:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OKAY, THIS IS MORE LIKE A PLOT FOR A NOVEL THAN A SERIOUS THEORY. But imagine that elements within the British security apparatus — perhaps suborned by Iran, perhaps following an agenda of their own — set this up. Perhaps they wanted an excuse to crack down, perhaps an excuse to tell the US to leave. Then they were busted by some random farmer who called local police who didn’t know not to arrest the terrorists. Now they need to make this go away lest the real agenda leak out, so they let them out on bail and they’ll never be heard from again.

Probably not.

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:42 pm by Glenn Reynolds

VICTORIA TAFT: The Pressure on Lindsay Clancy Holdout Juror Is About to Go Nuclear. “Besides being left in shock over Reddington’s stunning move to ask the judge to investigate the juror who has been in hiding since the death threats began following Clancy’s mistrial, he wants juror Michael Desronvil to turn over his phone for technical exploitation.”

“Conform or else,” they explained.

Posted at 4:19 pm by Stephen Green

SAD: Teach for America veered left and lost its way: Can it refocus on achievement?

Teach for America, founded 35 years ago, “lost its way” completely “in the last 8-10 years,” tweets Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion. “For years TFA brought smart motivated people into schools and focused them on student achievement in areas of high need. [T]hey traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve … It’s been a long time since they cared more about student achievement than say trying to ‘teach young people to interrogate systems of power’.”

Teach for America produced achievement gains for students, and a huge group of alumni who’ve shaped education reform, writes Dale Chu, a former TFA teacher and now an education consultant. But he thinks Lemov, “hardly a TFA hater,” is right.

When Chu joined the corps in 1997, Teach For America focused on teaching, not politics, he writes. “Equity” meant holding “all students to high expectations, especially those living in marginalized communities.”

Applications for TFA slots peaked in 2013, then began a long slide as mission creep set in, he writes. The size of the teaching corps declined. And, Chu writes, TFA’s “public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity.”

Went Woke, going broke.

See also Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green