February 4, 2026

GOODER AND HARDER: California gas prices expected to jump even higher as Valero closes refinery.

California’s already sky-high gas prices are expected to surge after Valero abruptly shuttered its Benicia oil refinery amid a spiraling “oil crisis,” a new report claims.

The Benicia refinery began shutting down on Saturday, four months earlier than planned, a former Valero manager told the California Globe Tuesday.

Thermal imaging showed the facility went cold as the Crimson Pipeline – which transports crude oil from Southern to Northern California – was also taken offline,

“We are in an unprecedented oil crisis,” oil expert Mike Ariza told the publication..

Valero Energy Corp. announced its plans last spring to pull the plug on its 145,000-barrel-per-day refinery by April, a move that is expected to send fuel prices skyrocketing and hobble the state’s refining capacity.

Californians already pay the second-highest gas price in the nation behind only Hawaii. In January, the average price was $4.23 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association.

Isn’t this all good news from Gavin Newsom’s perspective? Gavin Newsom: Californians Don’t Pay Enough For Gasoline.

Governor Gavin Newsom claims oil companies are price gouging, which is the reason that gasoline prices are almost $2 more than the national average price in his state. Californians are paying almost $5 a gallon for regulated unleaded gasoline, while the nation is averaging $3.25 a gallon. Newsom does not believe that California’s high taxes and endless regulations should make that much of a difference in the gas price, so it must be price gouging. He is also not admitting to the fact that California’s gasoline is a “boutique” fuel that only refineries in California produce and that he and President Biden are paying those refiners incredible subsidies to switch to biofuels, limiting supply. Clearly, economics is not a forte’ of the governor for economics 101 tells you that if you limit supply without reducing demand, prices will go up. It is no wonder that Californians are migrating to Texas and Florida. Gas prices in Florida, for example, average about $3.00 a gallon. And, even though California is all-in on green energy, the air quality is better in Florida and Texas than in California.

That’s from the American Energy Alliance in 2023. In the annus horribilis of 2020, Newsom’s office issued the statement: Governor Newsom Announces California Will Phase Out Gasoline-Powered Cars & Drastically Reduce Demand for Fossil Fuel in California’s Fight Against Climate Change.

And as the Pacific Research Institute noted at the end of 2024: Drivers Beware: California’s Road Diet to Grow Stricter in New Year.

Happy motoring, Golden State!

Posted at 4:38 pm by Ed Driscoll

MARK JUDGE: The Greatest Two-Sentence Rock Review Ever Written.

It’s the greatest rock music review ever written. It was put on paper in 1985 by J.D. Considine, a well-known music critic in America. It’s not Considine’s pan of GTR, the self-titled 1986 album from the supergroup led by members of Yes and Genesis. That review, which appeared in the August 1986 issue of Musician, was only three letters. GTR, announced Considine, was “SHT.” The GTR review is, as Ryan Reed put it, “still funnier and more fully realized than most essay-length critiques.”

Still, SHT is not Considine’s masterpiece. That came in 1985 and his two-sentence assessment of Motley Crue’s cover of “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” Ready?

“They weren’t smokin’ in that boys room. They just went in to take a quick dump.”

More than 40 years later, it still leaves me on the floor. I continue to marvel at its precision. I remember where I was when I first read it in 1985—the bookstore at Catholic University in D.C., where I was perusing a copy of Musician, where it first appeared. The bookstore, the campus, my life receded into the background.

Considine’s masterpiece became a shorthand between my brother and me. We used it as a reference point for years. Whenever we came across a particular cheesy or awful piece of art, lousy TV show, or terrible band, one of us would turn to the other and say it: “They weren’t smokin’ in that boys room.”

Presumably, now that there are AI musical “acts” that are charting, there will be LLM AI-powered critics to debate their wares. Considine would be an excellent choice to program their databanks. Both will be TTL SHT, but the latter might be fun to read.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

ED MORRISSEY: The Penny Drops: WaPo on Life Support As Big Layoffs Start?

Bezos did not accumulate his fortune by dumping his wealth into sinkholes for an extended period of time. He and Lewis have tried to bring the Post back to profitability, or at least something close to a break-even status, while its staff balked over its DEI demands and progressive agendas. Downsizing is the inevitable result, and anyone surprised at the outcome simply refused to pay attention. The only question now is whether downsizing will be enough, and thus far, the signs are not encouraging.

My friend John Ondrasik sums up the problem:

Not to mention, this is a paper that’s been running on a half century worth of fumes:

Rufo’s tweet continues, “Then they foolishly went all-in on hysterical Resistance Lib content, which was no better than free content from Brooklyn Dad Defiant.”

Ace of Spades adds, “It’s not that #Resistance leftist politics don’t have a market. They do. One third of the country are, alas, woke communist psychopathic nihilists. You should be able to sell a paper appealing to this lunatic cohort:”

The trouble is, every media outlet, pretty much, panders to this same lunatic cohort. They’re all reading from the same depraved Marxist prayer book.

Plus, what #Resistance leftists are selling is not at all a difficult product to produce. They’ve shifted from reporting on news, which does take some time and effort, and which is something people will pay for, to just ranting endlessly that Bad Orange Man Is Getting More Orange and More Bad and shrieking the same six propaganda slogans forever.

You don’t need an organization that spends $300 million on salaries and rent to do this. Any deranged leftwing imbecile with a $500 camera can do this from their basement. And they’re almost all doing it — so what does any lefty need the lefty press for?

The religion has just as many preachers as adherents. That’s too many. Some will need to leave the poisonous church of Marxism and find work that’s actually productive.

I can’t imagine what that might end up being, but I’m sure they must be good at something.

Right? Right?

What will they end up being? At NewsBusters, Curtis Houck writes, “by closing the sports section and making widespread eliminations to international and local reporting, The Washington Post will look and feel no different than, say, Politico with an editorial page and op-eds. As such, watch for the paper’s paid readership to continue plummeting. And, for anyone who’s been paying attention to media coverage of the Trump era, The Post’s record of virulent anti-Trump hate will do little to assuage new audiences.”

As Ira Stoll asked two years ago: Who Will Be the Washington Post’s Next Owner?

(And how much of a discount will he be able to buy the paper for when Bezos decides his net worth has bled out enough?)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES: When Even Lefties Discover the Utility and Practicality of Guns, We All Win. “It’s not that liberals have collectively decided that firearms are suddenly fun accessories — it’s that a real event, with real consequences, pierced the comfortable abstraction of ideology. The resulting responses reveal the underlying social psychology of belief revision: when reality bumps up hard against narrative, people recalibrate their mental models of the world.”

Well, they’re supposed to, at least.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Let’s Talk About Left-Wing Quackery.

Right-wing bubbles are a reality, yes, but let’s also take a hard look at the seldom-discussed left-wing echo chambers, where outright lies and fabricated narratives similarly grow and metastasize into larger, more dangerous “truths.”

For all the talk about the right-wing information ecosystem, there’s remarkably little daylight between the communities that inspired the 2016 Comet Ping Pong incident and the communities that encourage lethal resistance to the “trans genocide.” The chief distinction is that left-wing crankery is often justified and defended by the mainstream institutions that are supposed to serve as a sanity check on such things — institutions that would swiftly condemn similar nonsense if it came from the right.

But if you believe the one is dangerous, consistency requires you hold the same for the other.

Let’s speak honestly, then, about the dangers of partisan insularity, starting first with those communities where it became widely accepted as a “fact” that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin inspired the 2011 Tucson, Ariz., mass shooting, in which a mentally disturbed man killed six people and wounded 13 others, including then-Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.).

There is no truth to this claim. There never was. It’s mostly an invention of former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s award-winning brain.

Yet this myth became so normalized within certain ideological circles that the Times casually repeated it in a 2017 editorial. Palin sued the paper for defamation. She lost — it is nearly impossible for a public figure to win such a case in the U.S. — but what the Times published was still clearly false.

Scratch a normie Democrat or radical left-winger, and you’ll likely find a collection of “facts” that are actually urban legends, outright lies, carefully crafted agitprop, or some weird combination of all three.

Read the whole thing.

Incidentally, Krugman doesn’t actually believe what he wrote about Palin back then. Otherwise he would never had said recently: Krugman Tells Businesses to Cut Ties with Trump or ‘You’ll Hang.’

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Behar Equates Don Lemon Storming Church to Press Documenting Nazi Concentration Camps.

When the Americans liberated Dachau, after World War II during the Holocaust – after the Holocaust, Dwight D. Eisenhower said take pictures of these concentration camps because years will go by and people will not believe this happened.

So, this administration does not really like somebody like Don Lemon who has a camera, who a position – like we do in a way – to speak to the people and tell them what really is going on. So, you know, God bless Dwight D. Eisenhower and Don Lemon.

Behar never explained what she thought was happening inside the church that warranted her making that analogy.

Easy mistake to make — doesn’t everyone confuse a church service with liberating a concentration camp?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOT GOOD: The U.S. Is Not Built for War or Peace: America’s Industrial Resilience Gap.

A minor power outage in San Francisco offered a quiet preview of a strategic vulnerability hiding in plain sight. As traffic signals went dark, dozens of autonomous Waymo vehicles stalled, unable to read the roadway. With hazard lights blinking, they gridlocked intersections and slowed large parts of the city to a crawl until tow trucks arrived.

That episode is a stark warning for military logistics. The same cascading failure that paralyzed civilian mobility could halt the movement of forces from fort to port. Friction emerges not from a single event, but from interdependent systems degrading in unison. Yet, American policymakers assume the industrial base is resilient, when it is actually brittle, optimized for just-in-time supply chains and just-enough capacity. When shocks hit (e.g., pandemics, wars, political instability, cyber incidents, or weaponized supply chains), Washington responds with emergency authorities and surge funding, confusing endurance with readiness. A system that merely limps through disruption is optimized for continuity, not crisis.

Over the past decade, resilience has meant restoring services after a shock. While this approach may prevent catastrophe, it does not prepare a country to compete, deter, or fight. The U.S. economy has been engineered for peacetime efficiency and consumption, not sustained production under pressure.

Redundancy might look like an inefficiency, but only until you really need it.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

MY BOOK IS NOW OUT: His Side: Men Speak Out on Dating, Marriage, and Life in America. #CommissionEarned I would appreciate any readers purchasing the book, even just to use as a doorstop. If you are on a budget, ask your library to order it or get the Audiobook if you have Amazon Audible.

UPDATE: Thanks so much to everyone who has ordered the book or mentioned it. I am extremely grateful for your generosity! Instapundit readers are the best.

Posted at 12:17 pm by Helen Smith

SARAH ANDERSON: The Real Reasons Why Latin America Is Moving to the Right. “I’ve seen a lot of you saying this was the work of Donald Trump, but the fact is that this was happening before he was even re-elected. I can’t discount the role he’s played — endorsing and supporting candidates, for example, and, you know, removing a whole dictator from a country overnight with more to come — but, much like our own 2024 elections, the reasons why this big shift is happening are largely domestic.”

Full story at the link.

Posted at 12:13 pm by Stephen Green

#HIMTOO? Newly released files shed new light on Chomsky and Epstein relationship.

The close friendship that Noam Chomsky maintained with Jeffrey Epstein continued being detailed extensively among millions of investigative records pertaining to the late convicted sex offender recently released by the US justice department, including Chomsky “fantasizing about the Caribbean island”.

In Friday’s tranche of documents, which built upon earlier disclosures of their close social ties, there is no specific indication that the famed academic and linguist was referring to his friend’s private Caribbean island where children were sexually abused. But the personal familiarity between the two men in that exchange is palpable, as it is in numerous other emails between Chomsky and Epstein aimed at planning more mundane social gatherings.

There additionally was an exchange in which Chomsky wrote to Steve Bannon, the rightwing chief White House strategist during Donald Trump’s first presidency, requesting an introductory meeting. “Lots to talk about,” Chomsky wrote, adding that he had been provided Bannon’s contact information by Epstein, a former friend of Trump.

Former Epstein girlfriend Karyna Shuliak at one point emailed a third party whose identity was redacted that she and her boyfriend wanted to send Chomsky and his wife two genetic testing kits.

Perhaps most strikingly, in late February 2019, Epstein represented to an associate that he had gotten advice from Chomsky over how to navigate “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public”. That was 11 years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution – and months before he would reportedly die by suicide while in federal custody awaiting sex-trafficking charges.

“The best way to proceed is to ignore it,” Chomsky wrote, according to text signed under his first name that Epstein sent to a lawyer and publicist. “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”

Related: Ben Sixsmith on “The very strange downfall of Noam Chomsky.” “If you’re younger​​ than ​​35, you might have no idea how much of the internet used to be occupied by people arguing about Noam Chomsky. Left-wingers used to fight with liberals and conservatives at insane length over the merits — or lack thereof — of the ageing linguist and anti-war commentator.” As for Chomsky’s numerous enemies on the right, “These poor souls would have had no idea that all their work undermining Chomsky’s political reputation would become unnecessary when, at a grand old age, the man himself formed a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll