May 11, 2026

HOW IT STARTED:

HOW IT’S GOING:

I’m all for free speech an all, but I have zero sympathy for a group that calls for their university to go after a student group, and then gets mad when the university goes after them instead. Just desserts, it seems to me.

Posted at 6:31 pm by David Bernstein

FINALLY: A real WKRP radio comes to Cincinnati, decades after the sitcom about a fictional station.

CINCINNATI (AP) — WKRP isn’t dead — as of Monday, it’s living on the air in Cincinnati.

The call letters from the fictional radio station featured in a CBS sitcom were adopted by a trio of real “adult hits” stations in time for Monday’s morning drive, and co-owner Jeff Ziesmann described listeners as “stoked.”

“Our phones have been mobbed this morning, as I’m sure you can imagine,” Ziesmann said.

Three stations in Cincinnati, northern Kentucky and Dayton, Ohio, simulcast the station’s programming and listeners are now hearing them all identified as WKRP. They will continue to follow the format — music from the ‘60s to the ’80s, with an emphasis on the 1970s — they’ve had under “The Oasis” brand.

The owners obtained the call letters by making a donation to a North Carolina nonprofit whose low-power radio station had them since 2014. Ziesmann said a full-power station like his can use the same call letters because WKRP-LP in Raleigh is considered a separate class of station under federal regulations.

What sorts of promotions will they be running on Thanksgiving?

 

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S NEVER OVER:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Stephen Green

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Arcadia CA mayor Eileen Wang admits acting as foreign agent for China in plea deal.

The mayor of Arcadia admitted to acting as an illegal foreign agent of China in a federal plea deal unsealed on Monday.

Eileen Wang agreed with prosecutors that she worked with the People’s Republic of China to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to Arcadia City Council in November 2022. The city is within LA County.

LA’s top federal prosecutor Bill Essayli said this is not the first time China has been caught trying try to exert its influence in the United states.

“Ms. Wang is just the latest to act as an agent for the PRC and it should terrify Americans that she was able to rise to the highest levels of local office in her city,” Essayli said. “I expect her to resign quickly if she hasn’t already.”

As Mark Judge wrote in 2024, Remember those corny anti-communist movies from the 1950s? They were right. “Starting in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left, it became sport for cool people and liberals to mock movies such as I Was a Communist for the FBI or My Son John. The excesses of Sen. Joe McCarthy had made red hunting suspect, even shameful. Yet McCarthy was more often right than wrong. There were communists in the government, and in Hollywood, who wanted to destroy America. In 2024, however, with the far Left not only alive after the collapse of the Soviet Union but thriving in Washington, these films from the 1950s seem prescient — and deadly serious rather than goofy.”

Posted at 5:33 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT’S THE CHICAGO WAY:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE:

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY BLACK HELICOPTER DAY TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE:

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED: If you want to sum up the European immigration crisis in one question, this is how to do it. “Sometimes, someone comes along and just casually reframes an entire bitter, long-running debate in just a handful of words. Like this:”

“This is one of the things that European policymakers never stop to ask themselves when they import thousands upon thousands of male ‘refugees’ into various developed European countries.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALEX BERENSON: A huge win in Berenson v Biden.

Today, the Trump Administration and I settled the federal government’s role in Berenson v Biden, my lawsuit against Biden Administration and Pfizer officials for violating my Constitutional rights and forcing Twitter to ban me in summer 2021.

After three hard-fought years, this settlement marks a massive win in my fight to hold the government and Pfizer accountable for their conspiracy to silence me. I could not have done it without your support. (Or Elon Musk’s.)

The agreement includes a six-figure payment and a statement “the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantial coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.”

James Lawrence, my (very able) lawyer, and I believe this settlement marks the first time any individual American has received a cash payment to resolve a lawsuit over government coercion of social media companies.

More importantly, the government’s admission may prove crucial as my suit moves ahead against its remaining defendants, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb and chairman Dr. Albert Bourla.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PASSING TUCKER OFF AS A CON TO OWN THE CONS:

I miss Norm.

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

HOW THE SBC GOT PLAYED: That’s “SBC” as in the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. You may recall events from 2019 during which the SBC was convulsed and damaged by multiple allegations of sexual abuse of women.

The story you heard on the MSM and elsewhere was the SBC was guilty, tried to coverup its guilt and ultimately only conceded when so many victims  came forward there was no other choice. Now, seven years and multiple revelations of what actually happened as opposed to incessant claims of reform advocates, the whole truth is out.

What the whole truth is ain’t pretty, for the Left or the powers-that-be of the SBC. What it is is a detailed description of the Left’s five-phase strategy for taking over and emasculating a Christian denomination. The SBC wasn’t the first to endure this strategy applied, so you’d think they would have been better prepared. They weren’t. Check out “How the SBC Got Played.”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Mark Tapscott

KEIR STARMER: I want 10 years in No 10 and will fight my challengers.

Keir Starmer has said he wants a decade in Downing Street and will fight anyone who challenges him for the Labour leadership.

The prime minister described his government as a “10-year project of renewal”. Asked whether he would definitely lead his party into the next general election and serve a full second term, he said: “Yes, I will.”

Unfortunately for Britain, it’s these ten years that he has in mind: Starmer wants to revolutionise Labour by taking Britain back to the 1970s.

Ironically for a man attempting to find a new vision for the future, Sir Keir’s approach looks set to haul the nation back 50 years.

We’ve been here before when it comes to Europe. The UK formally joined the European Communities in 1973, after being rebuffed twice by Charles de Gaulle, the French president. A referendum was then held in 1975 to decide if Britain should continue to be a member, with the “Yes” campaign emerging victorious.

Sir Keir insisted that he wanted to take a “big leap forward” at this summer’s UK-EU summit, bringing Britain closer to the bloc “on trade, the economy, defence and security”.

Importantly, the Prime Minister did not rule out joining the single market or customs union, which Labour previously considered red lines.

He said he would “turn our back on the arguments of the past, not open old grievances, but look forward together to how we make this country stronger and fairer”.

He is not the only one who thinks this way.

Andrew Bailey has signalled his support for the idea of closer ties with the Continent, insisting last week: “We’re an open economy, we do need allies. I think seeking to rebuild trade relations with Europe is a sensible thing to do.”

Rachel Reeves has suggested she would be happy to copy and paste EU rules into UK law, effectively ceding sovereignty to Brussels.

Yet, despite this recent enthusiasm, there is no guarantee it would work in spurring growth. Entwining Britain’s economic fortunes with the Continent 50 years ago did not trigger an immediate economic boom.

What actually happened was that the UK fell into recession shortly after, during the 1973 oil crisis when Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on countries led by the United States over their support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Or as Labour — and much of the American left — looks at the 1970s, “the good old days.”

Earlier: Scenes From The Labour Party Wipe Out.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

I HAVE A LIST OF CANDIDATES:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW SPACE RACE REALLY IS SPACEX VS THE WORLD:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Chasing Immortality in Hollywood.

The indie financier graveyards are full to the brim with the corpses of wealthy entrepreneurs, Texas oilmen and Bay Area tech bros mostly, who thought they could find immortality by beating the house in the movie business.

The movie business has always attracted the world’s biggest dreamers, and certainly no one ever comes to Los Angeles hoping to “make it average”… we come here to make it Big. But if we are going to spend our lives chasing immortality to the exclusion of all else, the question of whether or not the movie business can actually deliver that immortality becomes an important one.

Certainly Tom Cruise has achieved immortality, right? And what about Michael Jackson, who has a blockbuster movie about his life in theaters right now… surely MJ achieved immortality?

Well, maybe.

Bing Crosby was once a massive crossover star in both the movies and in popular music, just as Michael Jackson was… so much so that he was even caricatured in a 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon aimed at kids. But ask someone under the age of 25 who Bing Crosby was and the best case scenario is that they maybe kinda mighta sorta recognize his name from the Christmas songs they hear on the radio once a year. As with Bing Crosby, it’s entirely possible that there will come a time when “Tom Cruise” and “Michael Jackson” will be names future generations may have heard before, but which no longer carry much meaning for them.

And of course the Cruises and MJs of the world make up the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%… most of us here in Tinseltown are not Movie Stars or Pop Legends, and the list of executives, producers and agents whose names are remembered long after they march off to the great movie premiere in the sky is a very short one indeed.

The business of Hollywood is, as Jerry Maguire once said, “an up-at-dawn pride swallowing siege.” It is a 24/7/365 business in which agents and managers get calls (and texts) from their clients late into the night and then again first thing in the morning long before most Americans’ alarms have even thought about going off. It is a business where American studio movies shoot in Budapest and Bratislava, where night shoots go from dusk-till-dawn and production craftsmen don’t see their own beds for months at a time. And where studio executives stay up into the wee hours pouring through scripts in a futile effort to stay one step ahead of the development flood. And in all this mania and mayhem, there is often very little time, to say nothing of headspace, to chase the one kind of immortality that is actually real and measurable.

As Kyle Smith wrote in his 2019 article, “The Great Forgetting:”

These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Bing Crosby, as Terry Teachout recently pointed out in Commentary, has more or less disappeared. A case could be made that, in addition to being one of his era’s most popular singers, Crosby is the single most popular movie star in Hollywood history. Certainly he is in the top ten. Today he survives in the memory of specialists and historians and suchlike boffins. To the broader populace, the words “Bing Crosby” no longer have meaning.

Looking back on his four decades as a movie critic, John Podhoretz points out that even if you go back only to the 1980s, hardly anything survives. People still talk about Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride (but not E.T., the biggest hit of the decade). Rain Man not only swept the Academy Awards in 1988 but was the biggest hit of that year, selling the equivalent of $380 million in tickets in today’s dollars. Bring up that movie in a classroom today and I suspect the reaction will be the same as if you brought up Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Step forward, 1990s movies, and report to the vaporization facility. You’ve got a few years left, but only a few.

Ironically, modern-day Hollywood seems like one of the worst places to chase immortality. And in any case, Mark Manson wrote in his 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, “when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror—that horrible, depressing anxiety—creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as [Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death] points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many f*cks about something, because giving a f*ck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single f*ck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence. In that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in various forms of entitlement.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll