August 29, 2026

HE’S A DEMOCRAT, ULTIMATELY.

Posted at 12:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE LEFT DEFENDS ITS OWN. RUTHLESSLY.

Posted at 12:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TO BE FAIR, THEY’VE GOT QUITE LEGACY TO LIVE UP TO: Terrible Terrorist Tabloid: Rolling Stone Anoints Hasan Piker a Top ‘Influencer’ For 2026.

Piker infamously said, “America deserved 9/11.” Rolling Stone staffers apparently thought that America deserved the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing as well, based on the cover image they ran of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, making him look like he’s the next Jim Morrison:

But then, some things never change at Rolling Stone:

As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”

Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”

* * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.

Flashback: Sticky Fingers: A New Biography Explores the Seedier Side of Jann Wenner.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHEN COMMIES AREN’T ACTUALLY MURDERERS, THEY’RE HAPPY TO EXCUSE OR JUSTIFY MURDERERS:

Fascinating history, and new to me.

Posted at 11:14 am by Stephen Green

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Ali G Movie Backlash Intensifies in the U.K. as Campaigners Try to Get Film Pulled From Cinemas.

Ali G’s grand return has not exactly been met with widespread celebration.

That’s at least the case from various corners of his home soil in the U.K., where the first big screen outing for Sacha Baron Cohen‘s famed faux rude boy in more than two decades has been hit with a campaign aimed stopping it from reaching cinema screens.

Following the release earlier this week of the trailer for Amazon MGM‘s “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” a new mockumentary following the satirical character and due for release on Oct. 23, backlash against the film has steadily intensified. Many have taken to social media to accuse Ali G, who in clips is seen wearing fake dreadlocks and a Rastafarian hat and discussing his desire to be an “absent” father, of being an “outdated” and “racist” caricature.

On Wednesday, NewsCord — a news comparison and media monitoring platform — started a campaign urging cinemas around the world to refuse to screen the film, emailing major chains with the request on behalf of those who register. As of Friday, it claims to have been instructed to send more than 36,000 emails.

The campaign accuses Cohen of using satire as a “cover for enforcing racist stereotypes,” citing a newspaper report from 2000, just two years after Ali G first landed on British TV screens, in which Black British comedians claimed the character was an “alibi for racism.”

Of course, as Christian Toto adds, the “Ali G Controversy Comes at Perfect Time for Sacha Baron Cohen:”

Cohen ditched his edgy comic persona a while back, preferring to embrace the Left’s comic narratives. He built his “Borat” sequel around taking down President Trump, for example. He also picked up the woke Left’s censorship cudgel, demanding President Trump be banned from major social media platforms following the Jan. 6 riots.

Now, he could be the one facing a censorship campaign. It’s not right, but Cohen should have been speaking up for free speech all along.

Then again, this is exactly the kind of publicity Cohen needs at the moment. It’ll get more attention to “Ali G: Who Iz I?” and beef up his street cred long after he squandered it.

He couldn’t have written a better PR campaign.

I wonder what his cousin, Simon Baron-Cohen, who championed Jason Arday at Cambridge, thinks of the backlash/PR campaign:

 

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

FASTER, PLEASE:

Because, “Après moi, le déluge:” 

Tweet concludes, “Christians seem to always have a plan to keep Christianity from further influencing our nation by discipling people into political apathy (“we don’t get political”) or political ambiguity (“Jesus isn’t a Republican or Democrat, neither Right nor Left” = primary application of gospel to culture) ^^^this has had very predictable results for the last few decades.”

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

COLORADO DEMS:

Full post:

From Douglas County Campaign Watch:

“This is unacceptable.

“Democrat Christian Schilder is asking voters to elect him to the Colorado House while video from the middle of his campaign shows him restrained in the back of a police transport vehicle following his arrest.

“This isn’t an old mistake from years ago. This happened during the campaign he is running right now.

“Candidates for public office should be held to a higher standard. Douglas County voters deserve better than excuses, spin, or a campaign pretending this never happened.

“Democrat Christian Schilder should withdraw from the race for HD39.

“The campaign photo may be polished.

“The video tells a very different story.”

The arrest video is from May, and judging by the wrap and the helmet, he was quite a handful.

Posted at 9:55 am by Stephen Green

HAHAHA: Shot:

Chaser:

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:28 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

Posted at 8:44 am by Glenn Reynolds

RACIST? TERRORISM? THESE ARE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE RESISTING SETTLER COLONIALISM:

Translated: “A mob of racists is blowing up and burning the migrants’ cabins in Ceuta. Far-right terrorism live.”

UPDATE: Heh.

Posted at 8:41 am by Glenn Reynolds

I LIKE THIS:

Plans are already being drawn up:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● Shot: Is short-form video rotting our brains?

When I read that a new scientific study had shown impacts on the brains of those watching short form videos I was delighted. As someone who doesn’t have a television, doesn’t let my daughter use any screens and refuses to watch videos – I always ask friends, “is there a transcript you can send me?” – I felt vindicated. Perhaps now I could gloat I told you so, videos are bad to everyone I know.

Participants were shown short videos they liked they “exhibited significant deactivation” in parts of their brains responsible for “cognitive control” – demonstrating a mechanism which might mean that short-video consumption makes people prefer instant gratification and lowers their self-control.

Is this backed up by other studies? Almost all of the research on short videos and “short video addiction” (SVA) has been published since 2020. This, of course, is because short form video is a very new thing. The modern TikTok app has only existed since 2018, with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts arriving a couple of years later. It also means that a substantial portion of the research into the emotional and mental impacts of short-video usage took place during the pandemic, a time which I’m sure we all agree was abnormal. Another limitation of the research is that the majority of it seems to have been conducted with Chinese university students.

—David Shipley, The Spectator, yesterday.

● Chaser: The Moms of TikTok Have Gone Insane.

Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder.

This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage. Part of this comes from how Clancy’s case has been understood: Her defense argues that she was in the grips of postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, and has pointed to the many medications prescribed by different doctors to treat her depression symptoms in the months leading up to the killings. To the moms of TikTok, an overwhelmed and overmedicated mom practically begging for help is something, maybe an extreme version, of what they see in the mirror. Which is why Clancy has been claimed as a martyr, rather than a monster who acts as a cautionary tale.

—Kara Kennedy, The Free Press, Sunday.

● Hangover: TikTok May Be A Chinese Superweapon.

As troublesome as TikTok’s trends are, the app’s greatest danger lies not in any specific content but in its general addictive nature. Studies on long term TikTok addiction don’t yet exist for obvious reasons, but, based on what we know of internet addiction generally, we can extrapolate its eventual effects on habitual TikTokers.

Research shows an association between smartphone addiction, abnormalities in brain gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse-control (the last of which increases the addiction).

These are problems associated with internet addiction generally. But there’s something about TikTok that makes it uniquely dangerous.

In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive experience of all major platforms.

If it’s the noninteractivity of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most noninteractive social media platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.” If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what TikTok addiction will have done to young developing brains a decade from now.

TikTok’s potential to stupefy people, both acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior, and chronically by atrophying the brain, should prompt consideration of its possible use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks to neutralize enemies not by inflicting pain but pleasure.

—The Prism, January 21st, 2023.

Related:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

OUT ON A LIMB: Fare Gates Can Stop Transit Crime.

Transit officials report that serious crimes are committed overwhelmingly by people who evade fares. In the Los Angeles Metro system, 97 percent of people who committed a violent crime didn’t pay. In Washington, D.C., 99.5 percent of those who committed a “Part 1” crime (homicide, rape, robbery, arson, or motor vehicle theft) had dodged the fare. In New York, MTA CEO Janno Lieber says that “virtually all” crimes are committed by fare evaders.

These crimes are possible because legacy fare gates fail to prevent people from entering the system if they haven’t paid. That’s because older, full-height fare gates, like the revolving doors in New York, have substantially lower capacity—they can process fewer people per minute, which can cause crowding if a train drops off lots of people at once. Modern designs fix that problem. Cities that have installed new, full-height fare gates have seen crime and disorder plummet. San Francisco’s BART found that systemwide crime fell 41 percent after new gates were installed. Even more impressively, across the ten stations with the most corrective maintenance needs, staff time spent on in-system maintenance fell 96 percent, which suggests that fare evaders also cause most unreported crime, like littering, vandalism, and graffiti.

Other systems report similar findings. Washington, D.C.’s WMATA found that, following its own modernized fare-gate installation, fare evasion fell by 82 percent and crime by nearly 40 percent. L.A. Metro reports that a pilot program for modernized fare gates reduced passenger reports of security concerns, uncleanliness, and vandalism and graffiti by 69 percent at affected stations.

Flashback to last month: Viral Video Shows Woman Learning the Hard Way That BART’s New Fare Gates Are a Real Pain in the Butt.

Who would have thunk?

Well, actually, the folks who came up with the “Broken Windows” theory, which asserts that overlooking small crimes inevitably leads to lawlessness. The concept was used successfully to tackle crime in New York City in the 1990s under then-Police Commissioner William Bratton, who served under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but California lawmakers have found it to be too big a pain in the butt to apply in the Golden State.

Although this lady’s plans may have gotten rear-ended, she also just proved that San Francisco may just be making sense for once.

To boldly go where Rudy Giuliani went in the mid-1990s:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE — AND, ER, WHATEVER THE HELL ELSE THIS IS: Teacher accused of ‘Scream’ mask orgies with students finally gets divorced. “Brittany Fortinberry, 33 — who was hit with nearly 50 charges in the disturbing underage group sex case — and her husband, Nicholas Fortinberry, finalized their divorce Monday, according to TMZ. . . . Fortinberry is accused of plying students as young as 13 with alcohol and magic mushrooms before having sex with them, according to prosecutors. In at least one incident, she allegedly had the boys wear masks from the “Scream” movie franchise, according to police.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Glenn Reynolds