MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: What if AIs set out to conquer the world . . . with love?
February 11, 2026
BLUE STATE BLUES: California’s Wealth Streams For The Exits. “Add Facebook/meta head Mark Zuckerberg to the list of billionaires fleeing ahead of enactment of the state’s wealth tax.”
OH, NO… ANYWAY: Bill Maher: Jimmy Kimmel Ended Our Friendship Over Politics.
LIBERAL AMNESIA IS A SUPERPOWER:
We are all familiar with the liberal tap dance whenever we point out that some awful thing, such as chopping the genitals off of children, is happening.
It’s commonly described as a four-step process:
Step 1: It is not happening.
Step 2: Yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal
Step 3: It’s a good thing, actually,
Step 4: People freaking out about it are the real problem.
But actually, it is a five-step process, culminating with the claim that liberals never supported it in the first place. We are approaching that stage among center-left people regarding alphabet ideology, and we are well into step five in the COVID saga. I know many people now arguing that nobody wanted to keep kids out of school, nobody was forced to take the jab, and that nobody was censored for disagreeing with The Science™.
Never happened.
For some reason, I have run across several posts recently arguing that the “fat acceptance” movement was fringe, with nobody in the mainstream fronting for the idea that people could be “healthy at any size,” or that “fatphobia” was the real problem people suffering from obesity faced.
UCLA Medical School literally taught that "obesity is a slur" and that weight loss was "a hopeless endeavor" as of 2024. @DavidStrom wrote about it at the time:https://t.co/uL9LPKdGPT https://t.co/nxX0iSkIsK
— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) February 10, 2026
I think if ever a proper accounting of the first 25 years of the 21st century is performed, it will indeed look like this. The Lefties will adamantly deny any of it ever happened. Not the suspension of personal liberties during Covid Panic. Not the transing of the kids; the HRT… https://t.co/HZlyfT2CwK
— Brad R. Torgersen (@BradRTorgersen) February 10, 2026
As Daniel Hannan wrote in 2014, “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact:”
To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.
Back in the early 2000s, a similar pivot could be seen on the left’s 180-degree turn on the removal of Saddam Hussain. (George Clooney starred in a 1999 movie excoriating Bush #41 for failing to oust Saddam from power):
After (P)resident Biden set a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head and after months of “No Kings” protests, the left once again pivoted on a dime over his ouster, including members of the (p)resident’s own administration: Kamala Harris Humiliates Herself Condemning Capture of Maduro.
High school students barricaded classroom doors with tables and chairs for at least two hours while a shooter — described as a “gunperson” in a “dress” — left nine dead and 25 injured during Canada’s deadliest school shooting in nearly 40 years.
Darian Quist, a 12th-grader, was in his mechanics class Tuesday afternoon when Tumbler Ridge Secondary School students in remote northeastern British Columbia were plunged into lockdown.
“For a while, I didn’t think anything was going on,” he told CBC. “I thought it was just like maybe a ‘Secure and hold’ but once everything starts circulating, we kind of realized something was wrong.”
Quist, his classmates and his teacher were all in the classroom — where they stayed for between two and two and a half hours — before being escorted out by cops. He did not hear the shooter go about their rampage.
Here’s the suspected “gunperson:”
Journalism is meant to clarify reality, not reshape it. The deceased suspect in one of Canada’s worst mass shootings is 18-year-old Jesse Strang, a biological male who ID's as transgender. Yet all legacy press describes the killer as “female.”
Facts should come before ideology pic.twitter.com/mxp6bs5lSn— Gerald Posner (@geraldposner) February 11, 2026
Exit questions:
How long do you expect the Canadian media and public to refer to the Tumbler Ridge trans mass sh—ter as a “woman”? Canada has had so few mass school sh—tings in its entire history that this will be hard for the media to memory hole and move away from.
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 11, 2026
So uh we're done justifying and administering hormones to preteens right? Like collectively we're all ready to admit we got that one wrong and it was a bad idea, right?
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 11, 2026
COLORADO: Vacancy tax gimmick won’t make housing ‘affordable.’
Leave it to government to try to improve quality of life by proposing a law that would actually degrade it. Democrats don’t have a monopoly on this sort of legislation, but their philosophy of scarcity, especially artificial scarcity, makes them especially susceptible to its charms.
Rep. Brianna Titone (D-Arvada) and Rep. Elizabeth Velasco (D-New Castle) are seeking to extract money from out-of-town property owners to subsidize “affordable” housing with House Bill 26-1036. The bill would allow municipalities to tax residential properties that they define as vacant, based on the number of days of physical occupancy by their owners. Short-term rentals would be excluded.
The bill would also allow local governments to band together to form special taxing districts for this purpose, even if they were in different counties, as long as they had shared or contiguous boundaries.
How awful is this bill? Let us count the ways.
First, it’s an assault on property rights. Yes, according to the US Census, a couple of Colorado counties – Summit and Eagle – have a substantial number of vacant dwellings. But this isn’t the Soviet Union during Dr. Zhivago. You can’t simply tell people that their houses are nice, but they could be used for so many more people.
I dunno about that because you can’t tell a Colorado Democrat anything.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: FCC Chair to Newsom: Hey, Where’d the $450 Million Go?
360° Rotating Toenail Clippers. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPROVEMENT UPDATE: These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling.
Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the country in recovery from pandemic losses in reading, while Alabama ranks No. 1 in math recovery.
The state with the lowest chronic absenteeism in schools is Alabama, according to a tracker with data from 40 states.
Once an educational laughingstock, Mississippi now ranks ninth in the country in fourth-grade reading levels — and after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks No. 1, while Louisiana ranks No. 2, according to calculations by the Urban Institute. Using the same demographic adjustment, Mississippi also ranks No. 1 in America in both fourth-grade and eighth-grade math.
Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).
How is this possible when southern states are governed by racist Republicans, and Massachusetts is run by enlightened progressives?
MAKE CONQUISTADORS GREAT AGAIN:
Spanish is not a language of resistance.
It's literally the language of your European colonizers who colonized you so hard you forgot what you were speaking before them.
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) February 10, 2026
Who am I kidding? Conquistadors were always great.
HOW ARE THOSE MATH SCORES COMING ALONG? Los Angeles Teachers’ Union Caught Implementing Anti-ICE ‘Resistance.’
AT AMAZON: Shop 3 hour delivery. #CommissionEarned
JAPAN VS BRITAIN: A Japanese Lesson for Troubled Britain.
The contrast between America’s great island allies on opposite ends of the world couldn’t be more drastic.
Japan has just given its commonsense conservative prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, a two-thirds supermajority in the national legislature’s Lower House; her Liberal Democratic Party took the highest proportion of seats of any party since World War II.
It’s an enormous vote of confidence not only in Takaichi’s economic agenda but also for her willingness to get tough with China.
Beijing’s mouthpieces have called Takaichi an “evil witch,” with China’s consul general in Osaka threatening, “the dirty neck that sticks itself in must be cut off” in response to Takaichi’s indication Japan would aid Taiwan against an invasion.
Such incendiary language didn’t intimidate Takaichi — nor, it turns out, Japan’s voters.
Yet even as Japan was rallying to its courageous prime minister, China was inflicting humiliation on America’s closest European ally.
Read the whole thing.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Find Someone Who Looks at You the Way Dems Look at Violent Criminals. “As we head towards the all-important midterm elections, the Democrats are putting all of their efforts into being the champions of murderers, rapists, and thieves who are in this country illegally. OK, that’s not fair — they are also doing what they can to help out violent criminals who are U.S. citizens.”
FOR THE CHILDREN™:
They’re intentionally housing these migrants close to schools. https://t.co/a1ILNv95Bb pic.twitter.com/a9LJdYed0T
— Amelia (@AmeliajakSolana) February 11, 2026
DON’T FAIRFAX THE REST OF VIRGINIA: A Virginia Commonwealth University professor warns the state’s Democrats that they are headed down a seriously wrong path on the redistricting issue. The X post is from the Fairfax GOP, but Professor Alex Keena is not a Republican activist.
When I lived in Northern Virginia during the Reagan/Bush 1 era, you often saw bumper stickers in surrounding counties warning “Don’t Fairfax _____ County.” Now the whole state is being Fairfaxed.
DID ANCIENT CHINESE ASTRONOMERS KNOW OF JESUS? Yes, that’s an unexpected question, but the answer is yes, they did indeed, though not by the same name known in the West, according to a Catholic research and advocacy group.
The evidence comes from close readings in the archives of the pre-polytheistic era dynasties of Chinese history when the Far Eastern giant followed a monotheistic religion very much analogous to what we today call Christianity. I’m cautiously fascinated. What do you think?
IT ISN’T JUST THE KIDS GETTING PARTICIPATION TROPHIES: I won ‘Teacher of the Year’ for enthusiasm, but kids weren’t learning.
Luke Morin won “teacher of the year” when he was a young, energetic, engaging — and ineffective — teacher, he writes on Holly Korbey’s BellRinger. He got flowers from the superintendent and his picture in the paper. But his sixth-grade English students weren’t learning very much.
Years later, after visiting effective schools and studying what make them work, he was “the highest-performing teacher in Colorado.” Nobody noticed.
In her “Learning from Greatness newsletter, Korbey asked why school leaders don’t investigate and emulate what’s working elsewhere. Why is there so little curiosity about success?
Maybe because there’s little interest in promoting it.
ACADEMIC ‘FREEDOM’ ON LEFT CAMPUS: Powerline’s John Hinderaker points to a special ed teacher in a California school who lost her job after expressing support for the deportation of illegal aliens. And asks the next logical questions:
“How did we get to this pass? And what is the path forward? Honestly, I think it is hard to see how those of us who support the rule of law can continue to share a country with those who do not–a group that now numbers close to half of our population. What possible basis for a common citizenship is there, between us and them? I don’t think there is one.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Vance vs. Rubio.
#JOURNALISM: Laid-off WaPo journos shocked to be locked out of employer’s accounts. The replies are brutal.
