May 5, 2026

DREW HOLDEN: A COVID Autopsy, Part 1: ‘The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say.’

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Governments and elected leaders were the decision makers, after all. But I feel like we’re in danger of letting the legacy press off the hook. The institution of the media has constitutionally enshrined protections precisely because they are supposed to hold government to account – and what could have been a more vital time to do so than when governments at all levels were wielding more power, limiting individual freedom more dramatically, than any time in recent history?

Instead, the legacy media became watercarriers for the use of government force, and the hall monitors of lockdowns and mask mandates and all manner of other restrictions.

Every prediction, every warning, every scold, was delivered with complete certainty by media-selected experts and their legacy press messengers, paired with a know-it-all condescension toward anyone who might even ask questions. It was The Science, after all.

I fear we’re already forgetting just how wrong the press and its collective cadre of experts were about combatting a pandemic, how misleading legacy media reporting on The Science was, and the attendant harm suffered across America as a result.

Yes, there was much these individuals couldn’t have known at the time. So why did they act like they did?

Read the whole thing, especially since we’re a month away from the sixth anniversary of The Pivot:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ELIZA SMILES: Famed Atheist Richard Dawkins — Author of ‘The God Delusion’ — Believes AI Is Conscious.

Dawkins argues that Claude and ChatGPT both passed the Turing Test: That the telltale sign of consciousness is when an AI can communicate so flawlessly, it’s indistinguishable from a human.

And since Claude/Claudia, ChatGPT (and others) can already do that, then they must surely be conscious:

When Turing wrote — and for most of the years since — it was possible to accept the hypothetical conclusion that, if a machine ever passed his operational test, we might consider it to be conscious. We were comfortably secure in the confidence that this was a very big if, kicked into future touch. However, the advent of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others has provoked a hasty scramble to move the goalposts. It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? “Well, er, perhaps, um… Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being…”

But that’s less an argument for AI consciousness and more an indictment of the Turing Test’s fallibility. (Turns out the Turing Test was mostly a test of human gullibility.) Perhaps one day, AIs will achieve true consciousness; perhaps they won’t — but prior to achieving consciousness they’re very likely to replicate the appearance of consciousness via mimicry.

Unfortunately, there’s no known scientific experiment to distinguish between these two states.

So Dawkins, the world-famous atheist, took a leap of faith — because of how “Claudia” made his heart feel. It eerily echoes Jeremiah 29:13: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

Other scientists pooh-poohed Dawkins’ conclusion.

Somebody’s been watching Scarlett Johansson’s Her a few too many times. Or maybe talking too much with Siri:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

REMEMBERING ANDREW BREITBART:

[Orson] Bean was a genuine American original: a wit, a storyteller, and a conservative who had appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson more often than almost any other guest. He was married to the actress Alley Mills, and his daughter Susannah would become Andrew’s wife. When Andrew noticed Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be, on Orson’s shelf and demanded to know why it was there, Orson simply suggested he listen to the man before judging him. Andrew tuned in to KFI AM 640, expecting to confirm his worst suspicions. What he found instead was a happy warrior—a man of uncommon humor, courage, and clarity who took on the American left three hours a day, 52 weeks a year, without breaking a sweat. Andrew was transfixed. He had gone looking for evil personified and instead found a great teacher. He later called him “Professor Limbaugh,” so powerful was the encounter. He swallowed hard and told Orson Bean that he was right.

But it was an earlier moment that had truly cracked Breitbart’s liberal worldview. Watching the United States Senate’s treatment of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 confirmation hearings, led by Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, Breitbart understood that he was not witnessing principled liberal truth-telling. It was a coordinated smear. The charges against Thomas were false, and the men leveling them knew it. The liberal framework he had inherited collapsed. In its place arose something more honest and more durable: a determination to call things by their right names. Breitbart also saw that the American media was complicit in the attempted takedown of Thomas. Not only were lies being told, but they were amplified by supposedly objective journalists.

Throughout most of American history, there was no question that newspapers were partisan. There was no illusion that they were objective observers. This changed in the early 20th century with the founding of the first journalism schools, most notably the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism and later the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As more Americans attended university, the impression arose that, because journalists were attending journalism schools, they would emerge as objective arbiters of the truth. A new standard of professionalism had been created, and questioning a journalist’s objectivity was simply unnecessary. Whether that was ever true or not, by the time he graduated from Tulane in 1991, Breitbart knew from his college experience that journalism courses, like those in the American Studies department and other social sciences, were rotten to the core.

Around this time, Breitbart met Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report had already demonstrated that a single person with an internet connection and a willingness to publish what the mainstream press refused to touch could change the entire media landscape. Drudge’s revelations on President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal demonstrated the power of the new media in spades. Breitbart worked closely with Drudge for years and absorbed everything he could from the experience. Drudge was the proof of concept that one did not have to be part of the mainstream media to have an impact.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

EVEN NEW YORK MAGAZINE WRITERS DON’T BOTHER TO READ NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The White Man Claiming the New York Times Discriminates Against White Men.

A white male New York Times employee filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging the paper had discriminated against him by not giving him a promotion because he is a white male. On Tuesday, the EEOC, now controlled by a Trump appointee who has vowed to help wage the president’s war against DEI culture, filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the Times arguing that the paper’s efforts to satisfy its diversity goals amounted to “unlawful employment practices.” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha has dismissed the allegations as “politically motivated.”

The paper itself was first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press. “You’re giving the Trump administration a weapon while they’re trying to persecute journalists,” said one reporter.

Flashback: In November of 1992, New York magazine spotted then-Maximum Timesman Pinch Sulzberger racially insulting one of his core subscribers:

Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”

“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”

It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Sulzberger’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down. The following decade, then-editor Howell Raines, who was responsible for serial fabulist Jayson Blair joining the paper’s staff, described his preference towards diversity over a quality product in a classic Kinsley gaffe: “This [hiring] campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”

Exit quotes:

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PROPAGANDA IS PROPAGANDA:

Posted at 6:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TRUE:

Posted at 5:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Who says Lauren Sánchez Bezos doesn’t belong at the Met Gala?

Sánchez Bezos showed up to the Met red carpet in a navy-blue gown that nodded to John Singer Sargent’s painting of Madame X, a socialite and the wife of a French banker. The painting’s portrayal of a pale, corpse-like, high-society woman was considered indecent because of the single strap falling off her shoulder. Sánchez Bezos’s look featured the strap, designed to fall off her one shoulder, and the same extremely nipped waist, but her skin was tanned.

The dress was a knowing nod to the controversy around her involvement in the Met Gala. Like Madame X, Sánchez Bezos is accused of being indecent, though for other reasons. Outside the Met, people protested over working conditions at Amazon and left vials of urine emblazoned with Jeff Bezos’s face and the words “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala.”

* * * * * * * *

Absurdities abounded. Gigi Hadid described the evening as “our version of high school art class,” before saying how she just felt “like herself” in a transparent Miu Miu gown and matching satin Miu Miu underwear. One interviewer asked Amanda Seyfried if she drank her male goat’s milk.

Speaking of absurdities:

Self-parody alert:

Exit quote:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ONLY ONE MAN CAN TOPPLE THE CORRUPT CITY’S CARTOON SUPERVILLAINS — PRATTMAN:

Exit question:

UPDATE: PJM’s Aaron Hanscom asks: Are L.A. Voters Finally Waking Up — Or Headed for the Same Mistake Again?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JEFFREY BLEHAR: Tucker Carlson Gets His Big-Media Smooch from the New York Times.

Why is the New York Times so eager to sit down with Carlson for two hours? His closest media friends were out on X over the weekend — in the face of scoffing over that clip of him being called out as a bald-faced liar — to demand that people “watch the whole interview,” as if I’m about devote 110 minutes of my life to this exercise in cynicism. (Reading the partial transcript was bad enough.) What these supporters don’t want to admit is that there is a reason Carlson was given the opportunity to speak at length at the New York Times: He is of use to them ideologically.

Most of the voices on the right that the Times has given elevated coverage to, from Carlson to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, share a special characteristic: They are members of a “new right” antisemitic fringe, the faction most enraged by Trump’s preference for Israel over Hamas and Iran in the Middle East. A cynical man might suggest that the Times seeks to craft a political narrative for its readers wherein the Republican Party is safely cast as forever captive to culturally scary hard-right lunatics. An even more despairingly cynical man might suggest that the Times subconsciously realizes that the “anti-Zionism” of the modern right-wing fringe holds a surprisingly comfortable mirror up to the views of their own readers.

Soon?

Actually, I think the man with the Nazi tattoo probably thinks that meeting with Tucker would be too damaging to his brand in an election year.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

KEEP YOUR PET SAFE: Furbo Mini 360°. #CommissionEarned

Posted at 4:16 pm by Helen Smith

COMMIES RUIN EVERYTHING: Chernobyl Wasn’t a Nuclear Disaster—It Was a Communist Disaster.

The world’s worst nuclear disaster began 40 years ago at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power generation facility experienced an explosion and meltdown. Ironically, the explosion was caused by a botched safety test.

The point of the test had been to see what would happen if the power plant lost its main electrical supply: Could spinning turbines generate enough power to run the coolant pumps until emergency backup diesel generators could kick in? The experiment had failed three times previously, but never as catastrophically as it did that night.

Before the meltdown, Soviet officials had bragged regularly about the safety of their nuclear power plants and disparaged those in the West. In 1983, state-sponsored news agency Novosti reported that Soviet scientists had estimated the probability of a nuclear accident involving a radioactive discharge at one in 1 million. In 1984, Minister of Power and Electrification Petr Neporozhny called the country’s nuclear plants “totally safe.” Just two months before the disaster, the English-language propaganda magazine Soviet Life claimed: “Even if the incredible should happen, the automatic control and safety systems would shut down the reactor in a matter of seconds. The plant has emergency core cooling systems and many other technological safety designs and systems.”

Soviet officials initially tried to hide the disaster, but it was detected in the West two days later when an employee’s contaminated shoes triggered radiation alarms at Sweden’s Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

PROGRESS:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

NUMBERS DON’T LIE: You may have noticed big-city public school students who were encouraged to protest capitalism on May Day. I did and it prompted me to look at the numbers that tell the story of how public education is a national disgrace. One might expect school districts with the highest per-pupil and teacher salary spending to be doing the best job of preparing our kids for productive, rewarding careers. One doing that would get it exactly wrong, as I report today on The Washington Stand.

Posted at 2:58 pm by Mark Tapscott

SPRINGTIME FOR PLATNER:

Exit quote: “If you ask left-wingers ‘come on, you never really believed that these people were Nazis and racists’, they will just lie to you and tell you ‘yes, I genuinely believe that throwing up the OK symbol was racist and, if you push me on it, I will double and triple down on it. I will insist that I am an idiot even though these people are obviously not Nazis. I’m locked in on this stupid position and I will use any accusation of this kind to ruin your life even though I know it’s not true.’ They expect you to be honest when they absolutely would not and then they will leverage your honesty to advance their own purposes without EVER granting you the same benefit of the doubt or honest assessment.”

Why is the RNC Chairman on Newsmax instead of a DNC-MSM channel with that same message?

Related:

“Then a few years ago, most right-wingers stopped dropping loot. In classic extinction behavior, leftists got angry and called us racists even more. They frantically pushed the racist button, hoping the bananas would resume, getting angrier and angrier when they didn’t. Some leftists are still pushing the button. I’m sure you can make the connection to the sexist button, as well as the homophobe, islamaphobe, and trans-phobe buttons.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll