September 27, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Cambridge University abandons full investigation into hiring of plagiarist professor Jason Arday. 

Cambridge University will no longer fully investigate its hiring of Professor Jason Arday. The university had previously said it would investigate the circumstances surrounding the professor’s appointment and his time at Cambridge.

Arday was found dead by apparent suicide last month after facing public scrutiny for allegations concerning plagiarism in portions of his doctoral thesis and other work. Cambridge announced its review would instead look into whether the university had adequately supported Arday amid allegations of plagiarism.

The move is a departure from a promise made by the school’s Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice, who said there would be a “thorough and transparent” investigation into the hiring of Arday. It is now unclear if Cambridge will ever publicly address the vetting process used for Arday to obtain his senior teaching job.

They won’t, or at least not until much more pressure is applied. And thus, nothing will change. Professor Kingsfield and even Dean Wormer left the academy a long time ago:

 

 

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOARDERS AND WRECKERS DESCEND UPON THE LAST DITCH: Paranoid owner of woke Mass. lesbian bar puts big restrictions on mask-free Saturday over ‘infiltrator’ fear.

The first mask-free Saturday since a Massachusetts lesbian bar went viral for descending into a catty culture war was nearly canceled after its last remaining owner claimed the venue was being “infiltrated.”

Greenfield’s Last Ditch Bar caused an uproar when it broke the news last month to its “immunocompromised disabled divas” it was lifting its mandatory mask policy for just one night a week in a bid to boost business — six full years after the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than one dozen patrons gathered at the door shortly after 7 p.m. for a “goth night” with underground DJs “Hannibal Directive” and “Puppy Synthesis” were turned away and told to come back at 10 p.m. because staff was holding a last-minute emergency meeting. Most hadn’t gotten the memo about theme.

When they returned, the by now nearly 100 people rushing to get in were promptly informed by the financially struggling establishment that because of unspecified “safety breaches,” the mask-free dance night they’d been eagerly anticipating for the past three hours was now a private event — and that if they couldn’t name someone they knew inside, they were being 86’d.

Patrons also had to hand over their ID to staff as a supposed “security measure,” and could only pick it up on the way out.

Despite the outcry about the decision to go mask-free one night a week by those who called it a “mass disabling event” and a “eugenicist” attack, on Saturday fewer than a dozen patrons were masked.

“It just feels off-putting,” said Pete, 43, who lives in nearby Northampton, the city that’s been labeled “Lesbianville, USA,” of wearing a mask.

“I thought it would be more inclusive for me to go on Saturdays,” Patricia Sonaike, 24, a Houston, Texas, native who is a junior at UMass Amherst studying biology and member of the LGBTQ+ community, told The Post.

“In my humblest of opinions, the moral grandstanding that is happening right now is like how a lot of these queer and BIPOC spaces won’t last.”

The crowd danced to techno pop music on the black and white checkered dance floor that had a stripper pole in the middle, as anime cartoons played on a projector screen and neon lights flashed.

Yesterday, I described the Last Ditch as a prewritten Saturday Night Live sketch that the show wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot stripper pole. But a story this bonkers deserves a much bigger screen, or at the very least a TV series all its own: Viral Lesbian Bar Article From Boston Globe Is Piquing Hollywood’s Interest.

Of course it’s peaking Hollywood’s interest:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALSO, SHE LOOKS LIKE SHE’S HAVING FUN. MOST FAMOUS WOMEN TODAY SEEM LIKE JOYLESS SCOLDS.

Posted at 11:19 am by Glenn Reynolds

A REMINDER OF WHAT IS AT STAKE IN NOVEMBER:

 

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

OUT ON A LIMB: AOC’s team admitted it: The Green New Deal was never about saving the planet.

The Green New Deal is all about power and control.

Shortly after Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal, her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, let the cat out of the bag.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti admitted to reporters. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a ‘how do you change the entire economy’ thing.”

With most Americans no longer worried about a climate change apocalypse, I suspect the left will simply invent another scaremongering campaign to justify the Green New Deal.

Whatever they come up with, Americans should remain skeptical because the Green New Deal is just a mechanism for the far Left to exert unprecedented command and control.

As summer wound down, the left seamlessly transferred the “we only have five/ten/12 years to save the planet” rhetoric of radical environmentalism to AI doomsday rhetoric:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THE DNC-MSM’S BATTLEFIELD PREP FOR THE MIDTERMS:

Posted at 7:17 am by Ed Driscoll

FIRST, DO NO HARM.

Posted at 7:07 am by Glenn Reynolds

AWFUL PRESIDENT:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

September 26, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“IRONY.”

Posted at 9:21 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CRUSADESMAXXING: The Jerusalem Cross is going up on A-road lampposts. Richard the Lionheart kit at Reform rallies. Templars at Tommy Robinson marches. “Christ is King!” cried by Danny Tommo and his lot down in Dover. Crusader crosses are quietly usurping the Cross of St George — itself a crusader cross — at Portsmouth, London and points between. The algorithm is pumping out AI knight reels faster than a medieval pope pumping out papal bulls. England is Crusadesmaxxing.

The crusades were a defensive struggle by indigenous peoples against occupation by settler colonialists.

Posted at 9:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE FUNERAL OF CNN:

CNN is getting a new owner, on a short clock. Paramount Skydance is expected to complete its acquisition of WBD by early October, according to reports from KVIA — which means whatever CNN becomes next gets decided by people who didn’t build it.

Leadership is a question mark. Mark Thompson’s future at the network remains unresolved, and Fox News reports that Paramount CEO David Ellison still has to figure out how CNN fits alongside CBS News — two once-fierce competitors about to share a corporate parent, with no clear answer yet on who runs what. Attention, Bari Weiss: I’d not be spending much time unpacking just yet.

Layoffs are coming, and CNN’s own people are saying so. Brian Stelter, still on CNN’s payroll, (why I have no idea) said on air that layoffs and cost-cutting are “almost certainly” coming as Paramount hunts for efficiencies and works off the debt load from the deal, according to CNN’s own transcripts. When the in-house media reporter is narrating his own newsroom’s layoffs on air, that’s not spin — that’s a company bracing for it in real time.

And the audience problem hasn’t gone anywhere. Variety notes CNN’s linear ratings sit well below where they were during Trump’s first term, even as the company has poured effort into building out a digital subscription business to compensate. The cable-news gravy train that used to cover for everything else isn’t pulling its weight anymore.

Here’s the detail that makes the whole thing almost too perfect: this isn’t the funeral of a company hemorrhaging money. WBD had actually projected CNN would pull in roughly $600 million in profit on $1.8 billion in revenue in 2026. So nobody’s burying a corpse. They’re burying the CNN its own employees thought they worked for — the assumptions, the standing, the sense of being untouchable, all going into the ground at once, while the balance sheet, ironically, still looks fine. Traditionally, that’s the description of a company chugging along on a reputation it no longer deserves, if it ever did.

That’s the real story here, and it’s worth stating plainly: CNN isn’t being buried because it lost money. It’s being buried because the business model, the audience, the ownership, the management, and every assumption that defined the network for three decades are all getting interred simultaneously, on the same afternoon, by a company that didn’t build any of it and owes it nothing sentimental.

And the symbolism practically writes itself from here. CNN is about to join the same corporate family as CBS News — a rival network it spent decades trying to beat — while Paramount reportedly contemplates real structural changes to both operations at once. The merger settlement even mandates the creation of a joint News Editorial Independence Board covering both CNN and CBS, which Investing.com reports experts are already warning will be toothless in practice — a supervisory body built mainly to look reassuring on paper.

Exit quote:

The truth is that CNN spent the better part of two decades building a newsroom that half the country correctly identified as leaning against it, then acted surprised when half the country stopped showing up. You don’t get to alienate an audience for twenty years and call the funeral a mystery.

As late as 1992, you could be a journalist like the late Ginny Carroll, a bureau chief with the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek, who admitted on C-SPAN that she wore a button with “Yeah, I’m in the Media. Screw You” printed on it at that year’s Republican convention, and suffer no repercussions. CNN was the first attempt to build a 24/7 news channel, kicking off a new era of what Alvin Toffler dubbed the “demassification” of media. Too bad its on-air newsreaders had exactly the same worldview as those on the original Big Three American television networks, before the other half of the viewing public was finally given choices that aligned with their ideology.

Posted at 8:33 pm by Ed Driscoll

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT:

Posted at 8:17 pm by Stephen Green