KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Sophie Cunningham Triggered an Avalanche of Bluff-Calling for the WNBA. Hey, it’s all about who and what people “identify” as, isn’t that what they’ve been telling us all these years? It would be bigoted to deny White and Freedom a shot at living out their WNBA dreams if we’re playing by the left’s rules.”
August 10, 2026
WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN: Thoughts on the 25th Anniversary of InstaPundit.
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WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE: Great question and one that requires careful thought. The latest “What Would You Say” from the Colson Center takes on the challenge and offers three points to ponder.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: UK probes major Muslim charity after director charged with funneling aid to Hamas. “The probe into the Al-Khair Foundation came after its director, Mohammad Yousef Hasna, was arrested in the UK last week on US charges alleging he conspired to funnel money and supplies to Hamas through his senior role in what prosecutors said was a sham global humanitarian organization.”
THAT’S WHAT XI SAID: The Odyssey and the Clash of Civilizations.
The most interesting figure affecting the interview, though, does not show up on the screen and may not be aware that the conversation even occurred. That is Xi Jinping.
The interview opens strangely: [Yiyang] Zhuge’s first question is to ask Nolan if he’s “a bard for a civilization at dusk.” After Nolan points out that in Homer’s time, Greece was on the ascent but had not yet regained the glories of an earlier age, Zhuge interjects that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War because of the democracy’s hubris.
This may seem like an odd way to begin the conversation that focuses on other topics, but Zhuge had little choice but to start along those lines. She is parroting two of Xi’s favorite arguments. The first is that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” The other is that the United States is on the verge of falling into the “Thucydides trap” of provoking a war with Xi rather than making way for China’s inexorable rise. Xi brought up the Thucydides trap in his most recent meeting with Donald Trump.
A Chinese lover of the Western classics, as Zhuge clearly is, has to frame her thoughts around Xi’s ideas because the CCP abhors the discussion of interesting ideas or works of art on their own merits. Xi, parroting Mao and Stalin, says that “art and literary workers are the engineers of the human soul.” Much as another engineer might use a backhoe to reshape a pile of dirt, so an artist or writer will use their paintings and prose to reshape souls. For now, Zhuge can still openly admire these parts of the Western tradition that she finds so beautiful, but first she must dance to the party’s tune.
Nolan, who sat for the interview during the publicity campaign for his movie in China, may have had no idea that this was occurring. He may be uninterested in ideological struggle. His responses nonetheless showed why Western ideas fill the CCP with fear.
Read the whole thing.
WHAT DO YOUNG PEOPLE REALLY WANT? The Suburbs.
Suburbs serve a critical role in the American system. They are our way of reconciling our competing aspirations. The U.S. was imagined as an extended, commercial republic. That is kind of like asking for a “jumbo shrimp land mammal.” How to combine ancient republican virtue with modern industry, across a vast continent? And yet, to a surprising extent, our double oxymoron has worked.
A lifestyle once reserved for royalty can now be attained by used-car dealers and advertising executives. A typical American may never become president or a CEO, but can vote, run for city council or school board, own a single-family home in a safe neighborhood, buy a pickup truck, and even start a business out of the garage. And in stark contrast to our European counterparts, we can even enjoy working air-conditioning while we’re at it. We are kings and queens of the cul-de-sac.
This is a beautiful, even noble thing. And besides, what’s the alternative? A rural lifestyle may appear attractive on a screen. Yet these days, it seems like you need to be a large corporation or an Instagram influencer just to make the economics work. Cities are a good place to get ahead, but settling down and raising a family in one presumes a kind of competent urban governance that is shamefully rare in the U.S.
In the end, the American dream simply is suburbia. And if we want Americans to keep believing in the American dream, policymakers at all levels must stop inhibiting young people’s suburban aspirations.
As Tom Wofe wrote in his epochal 1976 article on “The ‘Me’ Decade:”
I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for the common man in the early 1950s. (They actually used the term “common man.”) They had brought the utopian socialist dream forward into the twentieth century. They had things figured out for the workingman down to truly minute details such as lamp switches. The new liberated workingman would live as the Cultivated Ascetic. He would be modeled on the B.A.-degree Greenwich Village bohemian of the late 1940s—dark wool Hudson Bay shirts, tweed jackets, flannel trousers, briarwood pipes, good books, sandals and simplicity—except that he would live in a Worker Housing project. All Yale and Harvard architects worshiped Bauhaus principles and had the Bauhaus vision of Worker Housing. The Bauhaus movement absolutely hypnotized American architects, once its leaders, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Miës van der Rohe, came to the United States from Germany in the 1930s. Worker Housing in America would have pure beige rooms, stripped, freed, purged of all moldings, cornices, and overhangs—which Gropius regarded as symbolic “crowns” and therefore loathsome. Worker Housing would be liberated from all wallpaper, “drapes,” Wilton rugs with flowers on them, lamps with fringed shades and bases that looked like vases or Greek columns. It would be cleansed of all doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, and radiator covers. Radiator coils would be left bare as honest, abstract sculptural objects.
But somehow the workers, incurable slobs that they were, avoided Worker Housing, better known as “the projects,” as if it had a smell. They were heading out instead to the suburbs—the suburbs!—to places like Islip, Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles—and buying houses with clapboard siding and a high-pitched roof and shingles and gaslight-style front-porch lamps and mailboxes set up on top of lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity and all sorts of other unbelievably cute or antiquey touches, and they loaded these houses up with “drapes” such as baffled all description and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in, and they put barbecue pits and fish ponds with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back, and they parked 25-foot-long cars out front and Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway.
And the left are still furious about what Wolfe later dubbed the “Escape to Islip,” as Russ Greene notes in his Free Press article:
And the theft of the suburban dream has even more to do with local policy than state and federal regulations. NIMBYism, or local opposition to new development, has reduced and sometimes zeroed out the amount of developable land in many areas, driving home prices skyward.
It gets worse. Environmentalists and urbanists are often explicitly opposed to pillars of suburbia, such as sprawl and cars. And the surging Democratic Socialists of America are prone to seeing American suburbs as the root of all evil. The left-wing vanguard’s ideas may not be broadly popular, but thanks to our political system, it can exert outsize influence on policy outcomes.
Yes, that worked out well in 2020:
LIGHTNING DEAL: Solar Camping Fan. #CommissionEarned
SEEMS LEGIT: Iranian sex offender able to vote without ID in Michigan.
O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) journalists reportedly investigated two Michigan registered voters whose noncitizen status was identified through Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records. One of the individuals, Afshin Masheli, is an Iranian national who was previously featured on DHS’ “Worst of the Worst” list, which shows non-citizens who have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for serious criminal offenses.
Masheli is listed as a registered sex offender.
“OMG proved that at Masheli’s assigned polling location, election workers confirmed a voter registration under his name appeared in the poll book and stated that a registered voter listed there could cast a ballot,” the media company said in a statement. “Our undercover journalist spoke to Afshin Masheli himself and Masheli said he planned to vote later that day.”
When a state lets the “worst of the worst” vote, it’s fair to ask how many nicer — but equally illegitimate — voters are on the rolls.
THE UNCHALLENGED GLOBAL LEADER:
No chance. America remains the global leader in this field. Making Jason Arday a Cambridge professor so everyone involved can congratulate themselves on their virtue is beginner level stuff. America took a serial plagiarist with embarrassingly poor scholarship and made her… https://t.co/f89Wray6f2
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) August 8, 2026
TRUE:
Kareem might have a point if anyone could name a single other WNBA player. https://t.co/pBxl0KEGEs
— Julie Frost–That Werewolf Writer🐺🦉 (@JulieCFrost) August 9, 2026
IT’S A COMPANY TOWN, AND ITS MAYOR HASN’T GOT A CLUE ABOUT THE INDUSTRY:
I’ll tell you something about Karen Bass. Three months after she was elected, she spoke at one of the guilds. She clearly knew nothing about the film industry, I mean nothing. It was shocking.
At one point she asked that film productions give jobs to homeless people—that this… https://t.co/XuxCgA0CRD— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) August 9, 2026
“At one point she asked that film productions give jobs to homeless people—that this ‘would really help her out,’ Bateman tweets. “What kind of idiot walks into a room of mostly out-of-work people, in an industry that is collapsing upon itself, that does productions with limited time and money where a mistake from an inexperienced worker can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and suggest that unskilled, perhaps drug-addled, clueless homeless people should be employed instead of qualified guild members?”
Isn’t it the mayor’s job to help out one of the city’s chief industries, rather than the other way around?
AN INTERESTING — AND IF YOU’RE A WRITER IMPORTANT — THOUGHT: Poison Pills, the New Spider-Man Film, and Some Thoughts.
NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME PLAYER: Clean Up in Aisle 4! Abdul El-Sayed Makes a Mess on ‘Meet the Press.’
STANDING UP TO RACISM: Race Discrimination in Admissions Suit Against U Washington Can Go Forward.
SINCE IT’S ISRAEL’S SURVIVAL ON THE LINE, HE’S RIGHT: Netanyahu Rejects 15-Point Gaza Plan, Says No Withdrawal Until Hamas Disarms.
ARE THEY BIOLOGISTS? WNBA to Hold Meeting to Discuss What the ‘W’ Stands for.
YOU MIGHT THINK THAT, BUT YOU’D BE WRONG. CONGRESSCRITTERS GROW UP TO BECOME SENATORS, GOVERNORS AND EVEN PRESIDENTS UNLESS STRANGLED IN THE CRIB: You Think We’d Let This Dem Congressional Candidate Forget What She Said Five Years Ago.
BUT IF THEY DON’T, THE RESULT IS THE SAME: US defense giants Lockheed and Raytheon are reportedly resistant to licensing Patriot missile production to Ukraine because they fear that Ukrainian manufacturers will be able to “improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money.” -The Atlantic
FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, THE REASON WAS ALWAYS OBVIOUS: Isn’t It Time to Gut the 26th Amendment? (The Marxist Undertones of “Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote” Exposed).
OH, HAY, THERE’S MY SHOCKED FACE AGAIN: BOMBSHELL: Undercover Video Shows Non-U.S. Citizens from Iran Allowed to Vote in Michigan Primary Without ID.
THE SLOW COLLAPSE OF THE RULE OF LAW IN BLUE TOWNS AND CITIES: On becoming Karen, destroyer of worlds. I left a polite note on the windshield of a vehicle stored illegally in front of my home. Then the police came—to my door.
