August 21, 2026

Posted at 2:01 pm by Helen Smith

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS STUCK LIKE THAT:

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

NO, TEVI TROY, 1976 WAS NOT REAGAN’S GREATEST SPEECH: Those unscheduled impromptu remarks to the Kansas City GOP convention were a fine moment, but, for those millions of us then-young Americans who worked for him know, Reagan’s greatest speech started in 1964 and he finished it 25 years later. It’s my latest Substack column and it is close to my heart, so I hope you will take time to read and ponder it.

Posted at 1:23 pm by Mark Tapscott

CHANGE:

Posted at 1:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THEY’RE SERIOUS: Islamic advocacy group demands James O’Keefe be prosecuted after team dressed as Muslims to expose Minnesota elections. “CAIR-Minnesota called on authorities to investigate after O’Keefe and members of his team entered Minneapolis polling locations during the Aug. 11 primary wearing traditional Muslim clothing and using obviously fake accents to test how election workers would handle attempts to register voters through Minnesota’s vouching process. The demand comes after Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon similarly said law enforcement was reviewing the conduct and warned that the participants may have placed themselves in ‘legal jeopardy.’ O’Keefe and his team are undercover journalists with a long history of exposing fraud and corruption.”

It’s Minnesota, so who knows what will happen.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

WEBSITE BEHIND WIDELY SHARED FAKE ELECTION POLLS RUN BY 21-YEAR-OLD.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”

Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median polling data after it appeared to put her ahead of her election challenger by more than 10 percentage points. The poll was also cited by the California Post. A widely followed polling aggregator on X also shared the group’s Nevada poll, although several credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median polling because they could not verify its methodology.

“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” said Prakash. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”

He added: “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this.”

On the upside, I guess we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving for a few more years:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

NATHAN COFNAS: How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair.

I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame. I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist.

Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal study conducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American—a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action.

I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism.

Many people have asked me if I regret writing the Arday exposé. This is a tricky question to answer. I set off a series of events that led to a death. If I say I have no regrets, it sounds like I don’t appreciate the horrific nature of the outcome. If I say I do regret it, it sounds like I’m accepting moral responsibility for what happened.

The lesson can’t be that it’s unacceptable to point out wrongdoing that implicates powerful public figures. That’s what I did when I exposed fraud and institutional corruption at Cambridge.

Now, for self-interested reasons, there’s another case of corruption that I object to: the scapegoating of a whistleblower by powerful institutions that refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions.

Cofnas writes that he’s been “flooded with death threats, [and] smeared in countless newspaper articles.” It’s obvious from his piece in the Wall Street Journal that all that ink has placed him under a considerable amount of pressure. In an effort to foster an environment where public discourse is informed, fair and respectful, shouldn’t journalists back off in that sort of situation to reduce the potential amount of “media harm?”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY: The Disconnect Between Some Military Families and Their Service Member’s Actual Job Is Stunning.

I have, as you might have noticed, pretty much stayed out of the brouhaha over the USS Abraham Lincoln and the other ships keeping watch and running operations in the Middle East.

Mostly because, in my unfiltered honesty, coupled with my personal experience, I haven’t much patience with the whining coming from the junior sailors on board or, frankly, the families who, to excuse a lot of it, oft times don’t really know any better. All they are hearing is that life sucks in every direction, and they hear it often enough, thanks to the age we live in, that they grow convinced that this is something out of the ordinary and their child or young spouse/father/wife/child/whatever is suffering some extraordinary deprivations and conditions that have never before been experienced in the history of modern seafaring.

None of which is true, but these experts would beg to differ, bolstered by a frenzied flood of press reports all feeding on anything that makes the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth’s War Department look really bad, with as much fervor as great whites on a dead humpback.

It’s an easy, lazy target filled with all the ingredients for a drama soup.

I have to admit, I have seen this dependent/family v duty conflict coming for a long time, and the innerwebs age has only exacerbated the situation.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

ONCE AGAIN, REALITY OUTPACES THE BEE:

Posted at 10:26 am by Stephen Green