April 28, 2026

THIS IS, IN FACT, THE CENTRAL ISSUE OF OUR AGE: Managerial Bureaucracy’s Threat to Democracy and Humanity.

One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy.”

In country after country, governments are moving to desparately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.

They must be taught not to do that.

Posted at 12:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK:

Exit questions:

Related:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

BRANDING: Trump backs idea of changing ICE’s name to ‘NICE.’

President Trump on Sunday endorsed the idea of changing the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would give the agency the acronym NICE.

The idea was promoted by conservative influencer Alyssa Marie last month.

“I want Trump to change ICE to NICE (National Immigration and Customs Enforcement) so the media has to say NICE agents all day everyday,” Marie wrote in a March post on social platform X.

Late Sunday evening, the president publicly endorsed the switch.

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Democrats are usually so much better at this stuff. It’s, uh, nice to see Republicans playing the game.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

IT’S (D)IFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

CORN, POPPED: Grassley Demands FBI, DOJ Records On Clinton Foundation Probe. “The letter, accompanied by a 2016 FBI electronic communication, an FBI Little Rock PowerPoint presentation, and a March 2020 investigative update memorandum, outlines years of alleged pay-to-play schemes connecting the Clinton Foundation to favorable U.S. government actions for major donors across multiple countries.”

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

LET THE WHEELS OF JUSTICE GRIND:

UPDATE: From the comments: “Nothing says ‘believe the science’ better than destroying evidence.”

Posted at 10:29 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES:

Posted at 10:23 am by Stephen Green

PENCIL IT IN: Iran Has DAYS Until This Crisis Hits. “The Islamic Republic is ‘scrambling’ to find places to put the oil that President Donald Trump’s blockade stops the regime from selling before suffering ‘irreversible’ damage to the country’s oil production.”

Posted at 10:08 am by Stephen Green

REMEMBER THIS GUY?

Politico: The Benghazi Patsy: “Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws. You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad. . . . Very few people have been willing to stick up for Nakoula (with “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds a prominent and dogged exception).”

Posted at 9:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE RECORD SO FAR:

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

Posted at 9:45 am by Glenn Reynolds

BACKGROUND: Tech titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman head to court in trial over OpenAI: What to know.

Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI claims that the company violated its founding mission as a nonprofit to develop AI for the benefit of humanity by creating a for-profit entity in 2019.

His suit seeks the removal of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, as well as more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, which Musk has said he would provide to OpenAI’s nonprofit entity. Altman and Brockman were among OpenAI’s co-founders.

OpenAI is countering Musk’s claims by noting that the Tesla CEO pursued a merger with OpenAI and was involved with discussions about creating a for-profit entity for the company before his departure from its board of directors. They also view the suit as a tactic to boost his own AI startup, xAI, as a competitor to OpenAI.

The company’s 2019 creation of a for-profit entity governed by OpenAI’s nonprofit arm allowed the company to raise money from investors to scale up its computing capacity to facilitate AI research, which helped spur the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

OpenAI restructured again last fall, transitioning into a public benefit corporation in which its nonprofit arm as well as its other investors, including Microsoft, hold stakes. The nonprofit arm has a 26% stake with additional warrants if OpenAI’s valuation hits certain targets.

Musk’s legal team arrived at its estimate of damages owed to him by OpenAI by multiplying its valuation and a portion of the nonprofit’s stake that could be attributed to his contributions, claiming that between 50% and 75% of the OpenAI nonprofit’s stake can be attributed to him.

“Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon – and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity,” Musk’s suit claims.

Big tech, big money, big egos… this trial has it all.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

SECURITY ‘N’ CIGARS: Patterns in Presidential Assassinations. “This post-1900 record does not mean every disturbed individual is politically motivated, nor does it excuse mental health failures or security lapses. But it does reveal an asymmetry: ideologically driven attacks on American presidents and candidates have overwhelmingly come from the radical left or been filtered through left-coded cultural influences. Acknowledging this pattern honestly, without dismissing the role of mental illness, is essential for understanding political violence in modern America — and for lowering the temperature in our bitterly divided times.”

Posted at 9:25 am by Glenn Reynolds

GOOD QUESTION:

Democrats have spent the last 10 years saying, “Will no one rid us of this turbulent priest, who also happens to be literally Hitler pedo rapist bent on murdering people and ending our democracy?” and have no intention of stopping until they get the desired result.

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green

FOR, LITERALLY, NOTHING:

But from the California Blue Machine’s standpoint, it’s not a failure. All of that money went somewhere.

Posted at 9:13 am by Glenn Reynolds