August 16, 2026

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Bill Maher thinks immigrants must assimilate, accept American values and principles to be in US: ‘Not negotiable.’

Exit quote:

UPDATE: Great moments in intersectionality:

Flashback to Daniel Greenfield in 2023: The Left Can Have Islam or LGBTQA+. Not Both. The Democrat coalition is falling apart.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: The Unmaking of Jason Arday.

Overwhelmed, Arday resigned his chair. I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive. Alas, on Friday, August 14, the humiliation became too much. The police were called because Arday was found “unresponsive.” He was pronounced dead on the scene, an apparent suicide.

Who was to blame? A curious subhead to a story in The Wall Street Journal seems to me to get the question completely wrong. “Jason Arday’s academic rise and fall set off a debate about whether he was a plagiarist or victim of a racial witch hunt.” But that is a false dichotomy. There is no doubt that Arday was a plagiarist. And far from being the victim of “a racial witch hunt,” he was the victim of his own lies and intemperate behavior. And let’s not forget that his fabulations were directed not only at aggrandizing himself. He was also perfectly happy to play the race card to damage others, as when he complained to the police that journalists who were investigating his credentials were guilty of harassing him. The police duly opened a four-month-long investigation into a journalist who was simply going about his job.

Cambridge will of course be investigating how someone like Arday could have gamed the system to reach such spectacular heights at a comparatively young age. Nahh, just kidding. They’re blaming the media for doing their jobs: Cambridge college head: Investigate media onslaught against Jason Arday.

The head of a Cambridge college has called for an investigation into the “media onslaught” against Jason Arday.

Lord Woolley, the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, said the 41-year-old had been subjected to the “most horrendous, toxic, vicious witch hunt” before his death.

Mr Arday was pronounced dead at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday.

He had resigned from his position as professor of sociology of education the week before after a plagiarism row.

On Sunday, Lord Woolley said: “We need an investigation into the media onslaught, the vicious media onslaught.”

Why not investigate the media for their original not-so-vicious onslaught, which placed Arday on an impossibly tall pedestal?

“Already, leftists are blaming the media for Arday’s death. Hacks hounded him into despair, they say. I’m not having this,” Brendan O’Neill writes. Once Arday was discovered to be a fabulist, “The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it… Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.”

Tweet concludes, “Still waiting for the media to A) go at Cambridge and B) attack itself. For falling for all of this.”

UPDATE:

Evergreen:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS ARE PRESENTED TODAY:  Honoring Our Own.

Be there or be…. well, whatever shape you are, really. We’re very uncomfortable dictating to people.

Posted at 10:54 am by Sarah Hoyt

JAMES JAY CARAFANO: Donald Trump Already Won the Iran War. Ending It Is Tehran’s Problem Now.

Outmatched by Enemies. Iran doesn’t really have sufficient combat power to take the war to their enemies in any major way. The U.S. won’t oblige by trying to fight a land war in Iran. What’s worse, Trump had promised “the biggest attack since World War II.” If the regime survived, they could have maybe claimed that as a kind of a win. For now, Trump has decided he won’t give them the chance. What’s more, the operational pause gives the U.S. forces a breather, time to rearm and refit, and take advantage of a slower operational tempo. For the Iranians, that means the longer the U.S. sits out there, the stronger they could become. If Trump does decide to go all out next time—that could be really bad for the IRGC.

Abandoned by Hope. The IRGC must have thought for sure by now Americans would have tired of this war like a Netflix series that just went on a season too long. They hope dragging the war into the midterms will be a nightmare for the White House.  But there are no signs of that. Trump has already discounted the midterms, signaling he won’t change his strategy in hopes of turning a few seats in the next election. In Trump Time, Trump has two and a half years to watch Iranians play stupid games.

But does he? As the Brothers Judd wrote in their 2001 review of Lewis Sorely’s A Better War:

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area,
you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

And I think we know how that went from there:

Posted at 10:48 am by Ed Driscoll

NASHVILLE ISN’T DOING WELL:

Posted at 9:42 am by Glenn Reynolds

CHRISTIAN TOTO: The Brink of War Makes Reagan Human, Not a Caricature.

[Jeff] Daniels’ Reagan leans heavily on his good sense of humor, a grasp of basic psychology and endless resolve. He isn’t a caricature or a man teetering on the edge of senility. In fact, taking 2024’s “Reagan” out of the equation, it’s the most positive portrayal of the world leader in any Hollywood production.

That’s because it hails from Angel Studios, not La La Land.

“The Brink of War” isn’t dumbed down, but it’s accessible enough for teen viewers as well as adults. It’s hard to grasp the scope of the meeting if audiences weren’t alive back in 1986.

What’s most shocking – slash -welcome? President Reagan’s frequent attacks on the inhumanity at the heart of Communism. “War” doesn’t overplay that message, but it’s a welcome departure from Hollywood’s head-in-the-sand approach to the fascist cause.

Daniels is outstanding here, giving a consistently strong performance that isn’t bogged down by unnecessary tics or personal attacks on the president. He’s not deified, per se, and his stubbornness and folksy charm both help and hinder the mission in play.

In order to remain employable in Hollywood, Daniels is quick to point out that he doesn’t share Reagan’s worldview: Jeff Daniels on Reagan-Reykjavik Movie: ‘We Are All One World.’

Liberal actor Jeff Daniels plays President Ronald Reagan in the movie The Brink of War about the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, but during a promotional interview with CBS Saturday Morning, he appeared to have completely missed the point of the story. According to him, the key takeaway is that we should all aspire to the amoral hippie-ism of John Lennon, “We’re all one person. We are all one world. You know, John Lennon wasn’t wrong in his song ‘Imagine.’”

Except that he was; in his last year, Lennon admitted to be being embarrassed by his political phase culminating in “Imagine” — and reportedly supported Reagan over the hapless Carter during the 1980 election cycle: Trapped in 1972.

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF CAMBRIDGE UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Why is Cambridge platforming Islamic creationism?

At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric* monoculture.”

It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.

The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Ahmed’s extraordinary CV, and her long record of grossly bigoted, extremist and separatist views, were revealed by a 2002 pamphlet exposed by The Spectator on Tuesday.

IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. Camtree is a project of Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a governing fellow. Ahmed is also an “affiliate” of Camtree.

IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” which asks: “Does the common modern biological assumption that humans have common ancestry with other life forms conflict with [Islamic] religious beliefs about God creating Adam and Eve?”

* I’m pretty sure most British parents footing the bills for their sons and daughters’ educations are rather hoping that their kids are being taught from a largely “Eurocentric” point of view.

Meanwhile:

Tweet concludes, “and [Cofnas’] position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll