May 18, 2026

FANG FANG’S SISTER? Turns out, according to the Daily Caller, that California Treasurer/Candidate for Lt. Governor Fiona Ma has a history of meetings with Chinese intelligence

Posted at 9:41 am by Mark Tapscott

TAXES: Europe tried wealth taxes. Most gave up.

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate the Sanders proposal would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. Competing estimates from the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute project significantly lower totals of $3.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion, respectively.

Saez and Zucman’s estimate for Warren’s proposal has more than doubled since the legislation was first introduced in 2021, which the economists attribute largely to the rapid growth in billionaire wealth during that period.

Zucman has estimated that U.S. billionaires pay an effective tax rate of about 23%, though Magness disputed that figure, arguing broader accounting methods place the rate closer to 40%. A 2025 paper by IRS economist David Splinter estimated effective tax rates as high as 45% for top earners.

Wealth taxes have largely disappeared across Europe. Twelve European countries imposed wealth taxes in the 1990s, but only Spain, Norway and Switzerland still maintain them today.

“In practice, these measures have almost never delivered on their promised tax revenue,” Magness told The Center Square.

According to Magness, countries including Austria, France, Sweden, Finland and Denmark repealed their wealth taxes between 1994 and 2018 because of low revenue yields and concerns that high-net-worth residents would move assets or relocate abroad.

We’ll see if California voters figure this stuff out before or after they drive out even more wealthy taxpayers.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

THE ENEMY WITHIN (ITALIAN EDITION):

Posted at 9:20 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s Awesome to Have the Feds Focusing on Real Criminals Again. “In the Democrats’ morality-free, topsy-turvy world, you and I are the bad guys. When the drooling moron Joe Biden was doing his puppet thing in the Oval Office, his handlers tasked various federal law enforcement agencies with going after almost anyone except the actual bad guys. As I wrote on more than one occasion duing that dark time, I didn’t feel like a domestic terrorist, but the government kept insisting that I was one.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

BARBARIAN SAVAGES SHOULD BE PUT DOWN. INSTEAD THE WEST’S RULING ELITES CELEBRATE THEM:

Related:

Posted at 8:53 am by Glenn Reynolds

NICE WORK, FELLAS: Hamas commander who helped plan Oct. 7 attacks has been killed, Israel says.

A long-serving Hamas commander who replaced Mohammed Sinwar and helped plan the October 7 attacks in Israel was killed on Friday, Israeli officials said Saturday.

Izz al-Din al-Haddad was the head of Hamas’ military wing, the Israel Defense Forces said in a news release. The IDF said he “was involved in the holding of many Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity” amid the war in Gaza and “surrounded himself with hostages to prevent his elimination.”

A coward and a war criminal, and now a corpse.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

I BLAME — ER, I MEAN, CREDIT — GLOBAL WARMING: Why Are Bikinis Getting Smaller?

Modern bikinis leave 95% of a woman’s body bare, but men show respect by mostly staring only at the parts that are left covered.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THEY’RE ALWAYS IMPORTANT, BUT YES:

The Left has played this game — particularly with Soros DAs — with impunity long enough.

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES: Review: ‘Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America’ by Noah Rothman.. “This is a book about the assassins, the vandals, the small-cell terrorists, and the lizard-brained mobs that mete out destruction, violence, and death in the name of political causes and in the pursuit of political outcomes.”

This happens because society tolerates it. Society tolerates it because the perpetrators are overwhelmingly children of the elite, or their peers.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

GAS LINES IN AN OIL GIANT:

Posted at 7:47 am by Stephen Green

HELTER STELTER:

Flashback to 2017: Stelter Skips Dan Rather Fiasco in 22-Minute Interview on the History of ’60 Minutes.’

CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter routinely trashes President Trump for sticking to “his safe space” and doing interviews on Fox News. But on his show on Sunday, he provided the safest of spaces to 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. Both on CNN and in his 22-minute podcast, Stelter discussed the history of the CBS magazoine show without once mentioning Dan Rather or his phony-documents fiasco attacking President George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II in 2004.

That’s because for Stelter, Dan Rather became one of CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources.’

Stelter often invokes the importance of truth and facts in his run-up to bringing on Rather, whose reputation was shattered for ignoring those things in the defining episode of his career.

Rather reported on documents in 2004 purporting to show George W. Bush had been derelict in his duties and gone absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s. The documents were almost immediately revealed to be forgeries. CBS and Rather initially stood by the report, but Rather was eventually forced to apologize, and the 60 Minutes producers of the segment were fired. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair in 2005.

However, Rather has long insisted his team was correct and reported the truth about Bush avoiding Vietnam service and shirking his responsibilities with the National Guard. He’s even gotten assistance from Hollywood in what came to be known as “Rathergate.”

A 2015 movie based on producer Mary Mapes’s memoir of the affair, called Truth, starred Robert Redford as Rather, portraying him and Mapes as flawed but heroic in their journalistic pursuits. It was a box office flop and tepidly received by critics, some of whom panned it as didactic, simplistic, and one-sided. The Atlantic called it a “terrible, terrible movie about journalism.”

60 Minutes’ quality control has been uniformly terrible, but as long as it leans hard in Stelter’s direction, all is well in his world.

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Nicholas Kristof and the Collapse of Journalistic Standards.

Kristof himself offers a telling hedge in his column. He writes that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are” – which is an interesting disclaimer in a piece that also calls the assaults “systematic,” “widely practiced,” and “frequent.”

Adding to all of this, the timing of the piece is highly suspect: published the day before the release of a major Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence during the October 7 attack, which, unlike Kristof’s piece, is deeply sourced with documentary evidence. It’s difficult to view Kristof’s column as anything other than an attempt to shift focus and paint a false moral equivalency.

Ultimately, this is not just another case of Hamas propaganda being laundered for the Western masses. It is a striking example of the disintegration in journalistic standards that is eroding trust in the press. I know many who have published opinion pieces in the New York Times, usually representing moderate viewpoints, and they describe a strenuous fact checking process – but it appears to be selectively enforced.

The Times should have applied particular scrutiny to Kristof given his recent ambitions.

Scrutiny in pursuit of accuracy is no way to push the NYT’s preferred narrative, as Walter Duranty showed the paper almost a century ago.

Nothing has changed since.

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

A REMINDER THAT EUROPE’S ELITES ARE COMPLETELY DETACHED FROM EUROPEANS:

Posted at 7:16 am by Stephen Green

THE KIDS AREN’T AS ALRIGHT AS YOU THINK: The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear. It migrated inward.

So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.

The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.

The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.

The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.

That is the trade.

A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.

This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.

The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.

I believe this.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds