May 17, 2026

DON’T MISS THE LATEST FROM SALENA ZITO:

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

ROGER KIMBALL: The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West.

[Allan] Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works from the woke grievance industry that rules us, works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Aristotle, Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism, imperialism, and so on. A favorite recent example was the news that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, has embarked upon the project of “decolonizing Shakespeare” in order to rid the bard’s work and reputation of “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly West-centric worldviews.”

“Gosh,” I thought, “has it come to that?” I am afraid that it has. In many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment and look to the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

Earlier: Deconstruction is “a virus. It self-replicates. Once inoculated, it turns everything it touches into a target. Science is patriarchal, so let’s deconstruct it. Language is colonial, so let’s reinvent it. Meritocracy is racist, so let’s abolish it. Sex is a construction, so let’s choose it. There is no more bedrock. Everything is sand.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario.

President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted Democratic climate policies after scientists moved away from one of the most extreme global warming scenarios previously used in United Nations-backed climate modeling.

“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

15 years? More like 37:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

—“U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked,” the Associated Press, June 29, 1989.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

NOW WE REALLY KNOW HOW THE LEFT PLAYED THE SBC: A deeply deceptive piece in the Texas Monthly illustrates how the Left uses sequential linking of otherwise unrelated entities to create a damaging narrative. How they did it to two giants of the SBC is examined in my guest column on Substack this morning.

Posted at 8:55 am by Mark Tapscott

DIPLOMACY: Trump Keeps His Friends Close, But China Closer. “Trump brushed off Xi’s veiled threats. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out that the Chinese ‘always raise [Taiwan] on their side, we always make clear our position, and we move on.'”

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:

”It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

May 16, 2026

CLASS IS A HUGE PART OF IT:

Posted at 10:10 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

REPORT: My sources tell me Keir has decided to stand down, but he’ll do it on his terms.

If true:

UPDATE:

Tweet concludes, “Nothing on Starmer’s X feed. I have to assume he’ll have some self serving excuses. But the fact is, after he smeared these people repeatedly, they were the ones who showed and behaved like Englishmen today. And it was clearly a cross section of native Britons, to include those of non-native descent who have chosen to adopt the ways of Britain. And clearly it finally got through to him. May he come to understand how he has defamed them and injured them.”

Posted at 7:37 pm by Ed Driscoll

“KEIR STARMER BANNED FOREIGN JOURNALISTS FROM ENGLAND TO STOP A RALLY → IT PRODUCED THE LARGEST ANTI-GOVERNMENT MARCH IN YEARS:”

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ITS ORIGINS AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: He struck pedestrians with his car, injuring eight, four seriously. “He was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. The man is a 31-year-old Italian of Moroccan origin, who plowed into pedestrians [in Modena, Italy] at 100 km/h. He then attempted to flee, striking one person but was stopped by passersby. He had previously undergone psychiatric treatment….Salim El Koudri, a thirty-one-year-old Italian of Moroccan origin, was arrested on charges of massacre.”

English text via Google Translate; Western media likely to be calling for sensible car control in 3…2…1:

Posted at 6:17 pm by Ed Driscoll