February 19, 2026

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 5:57 pm by Stephen Green

STARMER LIES:

Posted at 5:36 pm by Stephen Green

ACE OF SPADES: The Atlantic Publishes a Viral “Report” Account of a Boy Dying of Measles Because His Parents Didn’t Vaccinate Him. One Small Problem: The “Report” Is Actually Fiction, a “Hypothetical” Morality Play But The Atlantic Presented It As Actual Truth.

I repeat: It is fiction. I don’t mean it’s biased, I mean the Fake Christian lefty just made the story up — based on real reports and real science, she says — to serve as a harrowing morality play about vaccine hesitancy.

And The Atlantic, looking to get some viral advertising, presented it as fact until other reporters started asking about it.

The story — the fiction — was originally published as a 100% true factual “journalistic” account, with no warning or disclaimer to alert readers to the contrary.

At least, not until The Atlantic’s foray into Imaginary Journalism began provoking a reaction from journalists who like to pretend they don’t do this same thing every single day.

When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.

And that’s this journalist’s only concern — not that falsehood is being presented as fact, but just that this story, once revealed to be fiction, would fail to serve its purpose as pro-vaccine propaganda.

“My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.”

Yes, we wouldn’t want readers brushing off a fictitious story as fiction, would we?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

LET’S GET BACK THERE BEFORE IT’S GONE: The Moon Is Definitely Shrinking, Newly Found Geological Features Confirm. “No other world in the solar system has tectonic plates and quakes like Earth, but it doesn’t mean that their ground doesn’t shake. Since the Apollo era, we have known there are moonquakes, and for about a decade and a half, we have known that the Moon is shrinking, losing 50 meters (165 feet) in its radius over the past 200 million years. Now, new evidence strengthens those findings.”

165 feet in 200 million years? I guess we’ve got some time left.

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

FISH DON’T KNOW THEY’RE WET: America’s future looks vulgar.

The latest Super Bowl offers the most recent opportunity to reflect on the terminal state of our national culture, held together chiefly by a distractive and unhealthy mania for commercial sports and perfectly exemplified by the infantile yet aggressively transgressive nihilism of a brainless showoff calling himself Bad Bunny and dressed all in white, suggestive perhaps of an anti-Easter Bunny. Why, one wonders, has no political theorist from Hobbes forward posited the ideal human community as one which would combine political democracy with cultural and intellectual aristocracy – as, indeed, America at the time of her founding and for several generations thereafter did? Such an arrangement might satisfy critics of democratic society on the anti-egalitarian right, such as T.S. Eliot, and those on the egalitarian left, like John Rawls, for whom democracy can never be inclusive and participatory enough.

* * * * * * * * *

Other dissenters (in America especially) from the new world in formation attempted to revive the old agrarian tradition, the most famous being the Southern Agrarians in the American South in the 1920s and 1930s whose members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle and Robert Penn Warren. But Agrarianism failed to survive World War Two, while subsequent and more inclusive and popular attempts at resurrecting and promoting the old  agricultural values and ways of life – the “back-to-the-land movement” in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and Wendell Berry’s protest against industrial agriculture and what he calls “the unsettling of America” – were as quixotic in practical terms as they were productive in literary ones.

The tragic fact is that the recreation of any sort of high culture as something more than a footnote to the mass culture represented by Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, the Kardashians, Billie Eilish, et al. is as impossible as the reestablishment of anything like civil and political peace in the United States – and elsewhere – is. The western world, it seems, is doomed to a future of a vulgar and transgressive popular culture, maintained in the context of angry political division and social chaos.

The earliest halftime performers during the first few years of the Super Bowl included Al Hirt, Carol Channing, the Grambling State University marching band, Doc Severinsen, Lionel Hampton, and Ella Fitzgerald. They would have looked askance at the halftime performers of the last quarter century, which included Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Tom Petty, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. From the perspective of the jazz-infused performers of the Super Bowl’s early years, the Super Bowl has been quite vulgar indeed since the 1990s.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEWS YOU CAN USE? How To Be The Stig — Ben Collins Reveals Trade Secrets (Video):

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CORBYNIZATION AND GASLIGHTING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD NAME: X-68A LongShot Air-To-Air Missile-Carrying Drone Moves Closer To F-15 Launch. “General Atomics’ air-launched LongShot drone has made new progress toward its first flight with the completion of various tests on the ground, including a demonstration of its weapons release capabilities. LongShot, now also designated the X-68A, is set to be carried aloft first by an F-15 fighter. The goal of the program has been to explore how an uncrewed aircraft capable of firing air-to-air missiles could extend the reach and reduce the vulnerability of the launch platform, among other benefits.”

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW: How Clavicular’s ‘looksmaxxing’ took over New York Fashion Week.

Elena Velez’s F/W 2026-27 New York Fashion Week show centered on “looksmaxxing”: the internet-inspired pursuit of physical perfection at any cost. The runway presentation examined a generation raised under fluorescent ring lights and the judgment of the social-media algorithm. And she capped the night off with a feature from Clavicular, one of the X algorithm’s current favorite characters.

Velez, still in her early thirties, stands out as one of the few designers fluent in the language of the internet. The cultural current is dominated by self-optimization taken to its logical extreme. Faces are flattened into grids, bodies are dissected by comment sections, desirability is quantified in followers, likes and engagement rate. Looks run the show, now more than ever. For the average person, physical appearance now carries the same weight as in the fashion world, shaping how we are judged and valued every day.

Velez also courts controversy, by gathering right-wing personalities and liberal fashion journalists in the same room, such as in her 2023 Longhouse-themed show and her 2024 Gone with the Wind-themed salon (I modeled in both). This creates tension and gives her shows a transgressive charge.

Speaking of tension and transgressions:

Earlier: Clavicular’s cult of ‘looksmaxxing’ speaks to the narcissism of our age.

So why then has this face launched a thousand thinkpieces? Largely because, Clavicular is seen as a player in the Very Online right. Indeed, an evening he spent at a Florida club with Groyper princeling Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, where they bopped along to Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’, became headline news. Clavicular also runs with an assortment of unsavory characters – anti-Semites, Christian nationalists, ‘redpilled’ acolytes of the manosphere.

But looksmaxxing itself is not an ideology. It is an absence of ideology, a vacuum filled by insecurity. Clavicular is best understood not as a right-wing thought leader, but as a kind of male-to-male transgender influencer. He, like Fuentes, the Tates and all the rest, are caricatures of masculinity.

The ghost of Hermann Goering smiles.

(Classical – and NSFW – reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST DONNY: Can the Gaslighting Get Even More Brazen?

For some reason, the Democrats are arguing that they have never called President Trump a Nazi or a racist, and Pravda is doing their best to back them up.

Perhaps Pravda figures want to deny that they themselves slander Trump all the time. There must be polling showing that their most ridiculous accusations are not helping their cause and are hurting their credibility with all but the most insane folks out there.

 

Flashback: Who is calling who a Nazi?

The use of Nazi imagery has become so ubiquitous among Democrats that it almost precludes notice. But Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s parallels between U.S. President Donald Trump’s political agenda and the rise of Nazi Germany during his “State of the State” budget address on Feb. 19 hit a new low.

Veering from his speech, Pritzker, who is Jewish, referred to Nazis no less than six times during his criticism of Trump and his policies. In a glaring warning to Illinois citizens, he compared the rise of the Nazis to the Republican Party leader in the White House.

After castigating the president’s policies, including the deportation of violent illegal criminals, Pritzker said: “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.”

Such deceitful criticism of Trump reeks of partisan animosity of the basest kind. The governor’s confusing use of Nazi imagery is targeting the wrong culprit and, in the process, exonerating the real perpetrators.

Pritzker’s comments lend fuel to the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protestors who have regularly used Nazi euphemisms against the Jews, libeling them as “genocide” perpetrators in Gaza and calling for the “final solution” for Jews all over the world. His comments ignore the reality of a president who was praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

—Sara Lehmann, Jewish News Syndicate, February 21st, 2025.

In addition to Pritzker’s amnesia, it’s amazing how the previous Democrat candidate for the presidency has been tossed down the memory hole. Here’s the late Jeff Dunetz in October of 2024: Kamala Says Trump’s Like Hitler. Is He? Or Is Kamala An Idiot?

Yesterday, V.P. Harris compared President Trump to Hitler,  “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution. He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.”

The V.P.’s comment comparing Trump to Hitler indicates she doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust or she is an imbecile incapable of understanding.

Her comments were based on a story in the leftist magazine The Atlantic reporting that Trump’s former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, called Trump a “fascist” and recalled his admiration for Nazi generals. Kelly also raised concerns about Trump’s recent threats to use the military against “the enemy from within.”

Similarly, another Kamala-supporting ex-general, who, like FDR before him, believes that “fascism” means shrinking government and the welfare state:

As Kurt Schlichter asks at Townhall today: What Do the Dems Do After They’ve Done Their Worst and It Flops?

Where do you go next when you say the worst things imaginable about someone, and it doesn’t matter?

That’s where we are now, and it should be no surprise to anybody who has ever heard about the boy who cried “Wolf.” Maybe the left doesn’t like that fable because they’re assuming the gender of the brat who fakes alarms over dreaded predators and finally gets gobbled up when the dreaded predator arrives, and nobody believes him, her, or them. Regardless, they’re not paying attention to the moral of the story.

Nobody who doesn’t already believe the Democrats believes them now. We’ve had ten years of Trump, and by extension, we patriots, being bombarded with the worst possible accusations and…nothing? Calling somebody “Hitler” should mean something. Hitler was bad, really bad, and to equate somebody with Hitler should be something that one takes seriously because no serious person would casually equate another with Hitler, unless the accused had done something positively Hitlerean. But that’s not the case today. It doesn’t mean anything because everything they say, every lie, epithet and slander, is meaningless. They call Trump “Hitler.” Everybody knows he’s not Hitler. So, no one cares that he gets called “Hitler,” least of all the guy who’s supposed to be Hitler 2.0.

To be fair, we’re here because Democrats have been calling Republican presidents and presidential candidates Hitler since 1944. As with predicting the end of the world since 1970 from global cooling/global warming/global climate chaos, eventually, the hoariest of slurs loses its sting. Perhaps that’s why the latest talking point apparently went out:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THERE’S A LOT OF THAT: ‘Violence Interruptor’ Programs Are Blue State Wishful Thinking, Not Crime Reduction.

After Pritzker touted his meetings with “community violence interventionists” and state-funded “peacekeepers,” praising these “trusted messengers” whose “genuine relationships with the community are crucial to mitigating violence,” some uncomfortable information emerged. As first described by CWB Chicago, one of the “peacekeepers” Pritzker was photographed one-on-one with was apparently wanted on outstanding criminal warrants in four states; worse still, six days after the photo-op, the man was allegedly involved in a high-value commercial burglary culminating in a car crash that killed an innocent motorist.

The awkward photo showing Pritzker grinning alongside the “peacekeeper” has now been removed from the governor’s website. Seeking transparency on how (or even whether) the participants in taxpayer-funded violence intervention programs are vetted, the activist group Judicial Watch initiated a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information from the governor’s office on vetting, background or other checks, and selection criteria both generally and specifically with respect to the “peacekeeper” in the photo-op, including knowledge of his criminal history and warrants. Judicial Watch claims the governor’s office has all but ignored the request, leading to a lawsuit being brought this month seeking to compel disclosure.

There’s clearly no shortage of poor judgment when it comes to these questionable violence interruption programs, even at the nation’s capital.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green