July 17, 2026

THE NEW REPUBLIC DEESCALATES: Scott Bessent: A Deranged Leftist Attempted to Assassinate Me Shortly After I Became Secretary of the Treasury. The New Republic: Don’t You Understand You’re Forcing Us Lefties to Murder You?

I’m not at all happy to see TNR writing that a Trump official had his assassination attempt coming to him, but it is a step down for the far left publication, which in 2013, suggested that Obama shell the entire GOP congress:

When Russia faced a constitutional crisis in 1993, President Boris Yeltsin did what any good dictator would do — he had the military surround the White House and had tanks shell the upper floors as a demonstration of force, announcing to the press that “Fascist-communist armed rebellion in Moscow shall be suppressed within the shortest period.”

It’s an efficient way to show who’s boss, and the folks at The New Republic seem like they’re warming up to the idea.

Back then, Jim Geraghty tweeted, “The New Republic: Your first choice for violent, authoritarian, eliminationist rhetoric!” Little has changed at the post-Marty Peretz TNR.

Related: Rubio Confronts an Epidemic of Left-Wing Violence and Extortion.

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll

I talk with Karol Markowicz about my book:

You can see the book here.

Posted at 5:40 pm by Helen Smith

THE MOLOTOV–RIBBENTROP PACT IS BACK, JACK! DSA member says she has no problem supporting ‘secret Nazis’ under one condition:

Far-left podcaster Emma Vigeland raised eyebrows this month with her reaction to Maine oysterman Graham Platner’s political collapse.

Vigeland, a former Young Turks correspondent who now co-hosts The Majority Report With Sam Seder podcast, said on a separate Vox podcast that she doesn’t care if a progressive or socialist candidate has “Nazi” skeletons in their closet.

“I am wary of over-focusing on an individual’s personal character over their platform. You know, I’ve said this before. I don’t really care if say like Bernie Sanders or AOC go home and they’re a secret Nazi, but they go out and they vote for the right things. Like we’re talking about politicians…” the Democratic Socialists of America member said during the podcast, which published earlier in July.

I’m so old, I can remember when “punch a nazi” was an endlessly recurring phrase on the far left during Trump’s first term.

Posted at 5:27 pm by Ed Driscoll

BEEGE: Maine Dems Dump Rape-y Nazi and Get a Freak Parade.

I thought, since I love you all so much, I would set you up for the weekend first thing with a big old helping of the steaming Carnival Side Show tryout mess the Democratic Party of Maine held last night, cleverly disguised as the Maine Democrat U.S. Senate Debate.

Oh, the little dickens – they almost had us fooled. ALMOST.

And then these stellar individuals, like, opened their mouths, and poof! All of a sudden, a hairy, rapey, fake oystering Nazi MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

Oh, gosh, I can’t wait for you to meet them.

There were two back-to-back debates of a slate of four at a time, and some were just so darn memorable.

One of the sterling individuals on the stage was Shenna Bellows, Maine’s infamous Secretary of State. I say ‘infamous’ because you might remember her attempt to keep Trump off the Maine GOP primary ballot over the insurrection clause until crushed like a bug by SCOTUS.

So much more at the link.

Meanwhile:

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

OLIVE GARDEN NOW MORE SECURE THAN ELECTIONS:

Posted at 4:38 pm by Stephen Green

CCP IS ASSHOE — AND SO ARE CERTAIN AMERICANS:

Posted at 3:36 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Recreational Vehicle Is Not an Escape Vehicle. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn the wrong car for a quick getaway, how to piss off your local deputy, and what the Wyoming Tourism Board doesn’t want you to see.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

YES: Pay for your own master’s degree in puppetry. “If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers.”

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

YEAH, HOW ABOUT THAT:

Posted at 2:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW NOBUNAGA, YOU SHOULD:

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Burnham sets out 1970s vision for Britain.

Andy Burnham has revealed a 1970s-style vision for Britain, saying his appointment as Labour leader was “the most significant change” in politics in the past 40 years.

In a speech on Friday, Mr Burnham said the country had taken “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s”, adding that he wanted “more power to reindustrialise”, and the public ownership of utilities and council houses.

* * * * * * * *

Mr Burnham promised to end the post-Thatcher consensus on privatisation and central government control, arguing that while politicians had called for the public to “take back control… they were the ones who gave it away in the first place”.

He said: “We must recognise that this generation of politicians – myself included – have failed to challenge a political culture and an economic model that simply doesn’t work well enough for ordinary people.

“Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party, nor to the communities across the UK in rural and coastal areas. So we pledge today to them to be better.”

Drawing on his experience defending Hillsborough disaster victims, he said political power had been used “viciously against them to protect vested interests”, while “economic power [was] cruelly stripped with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s”.

His pitch was also an implicit rejection of the New Labour years, when Mr Burnham made his early political career in the Cabinets of Sir Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

What could go wrong?

The past may be, as L. P. Hartley wrote, another country, but it’s rarely as foreign as Britain in the 1970s. Viewed from the United Kingdom of 2005, the day before yesterday is a banana republic without the weather. Inflation was up over 25 percent, marginal tax rates were up over 90 percent, and the only thing heading in the other direction was the pound, which nosedived so suddenly in 1976 that the chancellor of the exchequer, en route to an International Monetary Fund meeting, was summoned back from the departure lounge at Heathrow to try to talk his currency back up to sub-basement level. Her Majesty’s government had itself applied for a $4 billion loan from the IMF. Were the Britain of thirty years ago to re-emerge Brigadoon-like from the mists, it would be one of those basket cases that Bono hectors Bush about debt forgiveness for.

Such great Britons as the era could muster—Roger Moore, Michael Caine—had decamped to Switzerland and Beverly Hills. As if to underline the national decline, every flailing industry flew the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Leyland. They were all owned by the state—even the last, which was the national automobile manufacturer. The government had taken all the famous British car marques—Austin, Morris, Rover, Jaguar, Triumph—and merged them into one. That’s right: the government made your car. Or, rather, a man called Red Robbo did, when he was in the mood, which wasn’t terribly often. He was the local union man at the Leyland plant in Birmingham, though he seemed to spend more time outside the gate, picketing. In Britain union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. In the seventies if you opened The Times (when the print unions weren’t on strike) or watched the BBC news (when the miners weren’t on strike and the government hadn’t ordered the TV to close down mid-evening to conserve electricity), it was a parade of eminences from strange, unlovely acronyms such as ASLEF and SOGAT and NATSOPA and NACODS being received by the prime minister as if they were heads of state, which in a sense they were. Britain’s system of government in the seventies was summed up in the phrase “beer and sandwiches at Number Ten”—which meant the union leaders showing up at Downing Street to discuss what it would take to persuade them not to go on strike, and being plied with the aforementioned refreshments by a prime minister reduced to the proprietor of a seedy pub, with the cabinet as his barmaids. The beer and sandwiches went only so far, and would usually be followed a day or two later by chaotic scenes on the evening news of big, burly blokes striking for their right to continue enjoying the soft, pampering workweek of the more effete Ottoman sultans.

The man who presided over the death throes of this ramshackle realm was James Callaghan, prime minister from 1976 to 1979, and an instructive study for all those obituarists of President Ronald Reagan who were so anxious last June to attribute his success to a genial disposition, sense of humor, charming smile, tilt of the head, etc. If you want to know what Reaganesque affability without political will or philosophy boils down to, look at Callaghan. He was famously avuncular; he was known as Sunny Jim. But by the time he and his Labour government left office, the sunniness had decayed into torpid complacency. His most famous words were “Crisis? What crisis?”—which he never actually said, but were put in his mouth by an enterprising headline writer from Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun. And they fit so well that they stuck.

— “The Chap on Duty: James Callaghan (1912-2005).” Mark Steyn in – a very different and much more lively iteration of – the Atlantic, June 1st 2005.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

LATE BUT WELCOME: US Air Force turns to cheaper cruise missiles it can buy by the thousands. “The deals fall under the U.S. Air Force’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles program, or FAMM. The Defense Department said it reached agreements with Anduril for its Barracuda-500, CoAspire for its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile and Zone 5 Technologies for its Rusty Dagger.”

You can’t help but notice that none of the old, established defense contractors are on that list.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green