May 21, 2026

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green

AND NOW, A FIRESIDE CHAT FROM MAYOR FRANKLIN DELANO MAMDANI:

It’s an “unexpectedly” appropriate comparison:

● FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

—Frontiers of Freedom, December 14th, 2015.

● New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.

—Steve Usdin, Tablet, April 29, 2018.

● A controversial executive order leads to internment camps:

The executive order didn’t specify Japanese-Americans as a group, but the U.S. military detained more than 100,000 people in the next six months and moved them to camps and facilities with armed guards and barbed wire.

There were 10 camps set up nationally, and about 120,000 people were interned in the camps during the war. About two-thirds of them were Japanese-Americans who were born in the United States. People of Italian and German heritage were also detained.

The controversial moves were met with legal challenges, which eventually were unsuccessful in freeing the detainees from the camps, despite the serious constitutional issues involved.

—The National Constitution Center, February 19th, 2024.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX stacks Starship V3 rocket, completes major fueling test ahead of debut launch.

The rocket’s two halves, the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, were stacked yesterday (May 19) at the newly-built pad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas. Starship V3 is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) on May 21.

It’s the second time the two stages have been mated in the last several days, as SpaceX has rolled Ship to and from its Starbase hangar for extensive prelaunch checkouts and tests. Super Heavy has undergone its own assessments in recent weeks, including test firings of the booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines.

Starship Flight 12 will be a suborbital launch, with soft landing splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean for Ship and Super Heavy, respectively, rather than a return to Starbase for recovery and reuse. Ultimately, SpaceX has designed Starship for full reusability, and has successfully recovered Super Heavies using the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms to catch the booster in midair, but has not yet attempted a catch of the Ship upper stage.

Faster, please.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

YES:

Exit quote: “A nation that cannot verify who is voting is a nation that is slowly surrendering the meaning of citizenship itself.”

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Texas Soy Boy Talarico Is Giving Dems Premature Electoral Elation. “Talarico’s moderate shtick means little in the context of 2026 Democratic Party politics. It just means that he’s more boutique Eurotrash socialist than full on Castro Cuba Commie. He’s trying to pass himself off as a Texas normie all the while yammering on about needing to stop eating meat to save the planet.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

SO WHAT’S THERE LEFT TO TALK ABOUT?

Posted at 8:52 am by Stephen Green

UGH: Soros Redirects $300 Million to US, Targeting Trump Policies.

The New York-based organization announced the initiative Tuesday after years concentrating much of its activism overseas, including in Africa and the Middle East.

OSF now says the U.S. has become a frontline political battleground.

“We certainly believe that civil society is essential and must stay on the playing field,” Laleh Ispahani, OSF’s managing director for the U.S., told The Guardian.

Ispahani, previously senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, compared current conditions to countries where “autocratic administrations” targeted civic groups.

Soros has donated more than $32 billion to his Open Society Foundation, which funds progressive legal groups, voting-rights organizations, and left-leaning policy initiatives worldwide.

Well, Elon?

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

THE MEDIA CAN’T SEE THE POPULIST VOTE CLEARLY TO SAVE THEIR LIVES:

If you’re looking for an explanation of Massie’s defeat in a Republican primary election, consider the extraordinary possibility that Republican voters might have had something to do with it, having made their own evaluation about the quality of his service in public office. The change in the last two years is that Massie entered into a political partnership with Democrats, allying with the Bay Area Congressman Ro Khanna, a particularly repellent Democrat, to try to harm Trump politically. He was also one of two Republicans in the House to vote against the Big Beautiful Bill, the landmark legislation of Trump’s second term.

Republican voters are punishing elected officials who don’t work consistently to advance the agenda of the Republican Party and its much-ignored base, while also telling a clear story about working to advance a Republican agenda. Republican voters are … Republicans. Massie didn’t lose because of Donald Trump or because of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE: Schlitz beer discontinued after 177 years.

UPDATE AND BUMP (FROM GLENN): Schlitz was once one of the top brands in America. Then the bean-counters got involved, cutting corners to save production costs. Customers noticed it didn’t taste the same, switched brands, and never came back, even when Schlitz ran a series of ads saying they’d fixed the problem featuring their master brewer.

A cautionary tale for other companies, and for political parties.

Posted at 8:24 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE IS COMING:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 7:50 am by Stephen Green

HOW IT STARTED: Smear Campaign Against Larry Elder Reveals Fraud by Woke Media.

Elder, who would have become the state’s first black governor had he won, was smeared continually by California media at the behest of the left in the most absurd and often quite offensive ways.

The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion column in August [2021] headlined “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.” Another Los Angeles Times columnist linked Elder to the politics of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.

How It’s Going:

Tweet concludes, “‘so I love the status quo here in LA. Anyway, please vote for the candidate that will allow me to keep pleasuring myself to the sight of living corpses on our streets.’”

Sean Davis responds, that the L.A. Times are “claiming Pratt has a ‘dark vision’ for Los Angeles because he opposes the city constantly being on fire. What a bunch of psychopaths.”

In 2026, that’s the level to which the DNC-MSM has descended. As Jim Treacher writes: Dems to Spencer Pratt: Ha Ha, Your House Burned Down.

A “journalist” named Marlo Stern recently responded to Pratt’s promise to leave Los Angeles if he loses. I guess he said that on some podcast. I don’t know if he was joking. I don’t know. He said it.

And Marlo Stern’s response was:

Okay. Why does he live in Santa Barbara?

Because his house burned down.

That’s the whole point of his campaign. That’s why he wants to be mayor. He knows better than most people how incompetent the government is.

But the Democrats don’t have an answer for that. They can’t rebut the centerpiece of his campaign. So they just pretend it didn’t happen. They act like he doesn’t live in his own home by choice. He decided to move.

And that was Pratt’s response:

That was a “wild meltdown,” according to the Daily Beast. Because Spencer Pratt is not a Democrat.

And now this Marlo Stern idiot is playing victim, because the big bad Republican was mean to him. All he did was make fun of the guy for his house burning down. That’s journalism, isn’t it?

That’s all they’ve got, because he’s exactly right about the problem. And they don’t know how to solve problems. All they can do is lie about it. All they can do is call you names about it.

I’m skeptical that Spencer Pratt can win in L.A., but the Democrats sure think so. That’s why they’re panicking.

Either way, I’m glad he’s pushing back against these corrupt… I can’t think of a word that I won’t have to bleep out. These corrupt so-and-so’s. How about that?

Philadelphians reelected Democrat Wilson Goode in 1987 after his administration burned four city blocks, which “killed 11 people, and left 250 people homeless,” when the police bombed the radical chic MOVE group out of their compound and the resulting fire spread out of control. Los Angelenos will soon likely award far worse incompetence.

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s Psyche Mission Aces Mars Flyby, Targets Metal-Rich Asteroid.

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft completed its close approach of Mars on May 15, coming within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the planet’s surface. This flyby used a gravity assist from Mars to provide a critical boost in speed and to adjust the spacecraft’s orbital plane without using any onboard propellant, sending it on its way toward the metal-rich asteroid Psyche.

The spacecraft is now headed directly toward the asteroid, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. After the Mars flyby, the flight team analyzed radio signals between the spacecraft and NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), the agency’s global system for communicating with interplanetary spacecraft, to confirm that Psyche was on the correct trajectory.

“Although we were confident in our calculations and flight plan, monitoring the DSN’s Doppler signal in real time during the flyby was still exciting,” said Don Han, Psyche’s navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We’ve confirmed that Mars gave the spacecraft a 1,000 mile‑per‑hour boost and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the Sun. We are now on course for arrival at the asteroid Psyche in summer 2029.”

It’s almost impossible to overstate how important/exciting this mission is.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

TEDIOUS REPETITION:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds