September 17, 2026

THE MAKING OF ROGER SCRUTON:

Amid all this there was one radiant certainty: that he believed in civilization, and that civilization was still alive—precariously in England, perhaps, but magnificently in France, in its architecture, its wine, its national culture, in the villages and churches he had loved to visit on his Lambretta scooter ever since he first arrived in the Pyrenees. Even the president, Charles de Gaulle, had once granted a state funeral to the poet Valéry, and de Gaulle’s own memoirs, Scruton discovered, were both exquisitely written and illuminated by what the president called a certain idea of France.

In May 1968, then, as he visited Danielle in Paris, with his friends spending their days on the barricades, what Scruton saw shocked him. The atmosphere of that month was genuinely revolutionary. Ordinary life practically stopped, replaced by strikes, occupations, demonstrations, meetings, and spontaneous theater events. The entire city seemed to be involved in a mass political conference. The Paris police chief, Maurice Grimaud, called the events of May 1968 “the strangest . . . that Paris, and indeed France, had ever lived through.” As Arthur Marwick wrote in his history of the ’60s, the activists really believed that transformation was around the corner—that “the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”

When the bricks started hitting the windows and the cars went up in flames, Scruton felt, at one level, a “literary critical” distaste: The whole performance was shallow and vulgar. More viscerally, he experienced an anger, a desire to fight back on behalf of what was most precious to him. He had little political knowledge. What he had—from his battles with his father and his headmaster, from his experiences as a grammar-school boy at Cambridge—was a long training in rebellion and its ironies. You can rebel against the left by being more radical than they are; you can rebel against people and institutions that you also respect; you can rebel to provoke; you can rebel on behalf of tradition and the establishment; you can rebel simply by baffling and disconcerting the people who think they’re better than you. (“What do you mean, potatoes?”) Many people in the 1960s were caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the hour, or swept along on a current of their own emotions. Scruton’s rebellion was always likelier to be conscious, deliberate, and original.

And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends’ politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. “I came back to Cambridge,” he once said, “determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world.”

Rejecting “les événements de Mai 68” was extremely wise: Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMOCRACY!

More:

Patrick Schiltz, who admitted his longtime involvement in a pro-migrant nonprofit, reveals how judges remained on their cell phones nonstop to halt deportation proceedings. And rather than evaluate each case individually — as is required — the judges developed pro forma orders (as I predicted) to immediately stop cases in their tracks.

This is something:

Schiltz: “Some judges built templates of legal orders so they could respond quickly to some of the detention issues that were arising again and again.”

Emphasis added.

Posted at 11:58 am by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Dems Get Crazier, NYT Coverage Stays the Same.

Most normal Americans would agree: This year’s Democratic candidates are noticeably stranger and more radical than they’ve been in past elections. The New York Times, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have noticed.

For whatever reason—blind partisanship, most likely—the Times’s coverage of these uniquely nutty and terrorist-adjacent cranks has been as flattering and credulous as ever. Scandals are downplayed or ignored, sketchy associations shrugged off. The past comments most Americans would consider genuinely insane are dismissed as old news. Business as usual.

No, her moment hasn’t come. Nixon is an anti-Israel socialist running in Florida. The Times fawned over her “high-volume tactics” and suggested she “doesn’t fit the mold” of other socialist candidates. As evidence, the paper cited her ownership of Cafe Resistance, a left-wing bookstore and coffee shop that glorifies convicted cop-killers. The Times didn’t mention that last part. Nor did it scrutinize her refusal to pay her fair share in taxes.

Much more at the link.

Also, I apologize for the mistake in the Insta-headline. There’s nobody to the left of the NYT.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

PERSONNEL IS POLICY:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

BEEGE: Said the Spider to the Fly: EU Issues Invitation to Canada to Be Its First ‘Associate.’

For a while there, I thought petite Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was just flexing his minor muscles for local consumption and the elections in Quebec where his party is currently polling poorly.

But with this latest move, I do have to wonder if this globalist agenda wasn’t his aim all along – glomming onto any excuse to move the Syrupeans’ relatively minuscule economy out from under the protective, and what’s been nurturing umbrella of the United States into the arms of the European Borg Collective.

Spoiler: That was his agenda all along.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

ROB LONG: Coyote Vs. Studio.

A successful studio walks a tightrope. It needs to be big enough to take the Coyote vs. Acme swing—big enough to green-light the oddball, release it widely, and eat the loss if it comes—but not so big and debt-saddled and answerable to a fractious quarterly-earnings call that the verdict on a promising movie gets made in the tax department instead of the theater.

Warner Bros., under David Zaslav, didn’t make it across the tightrope. It was big enough to pay for Coyote vs. Acme, but too big to release it. The studio is now in the process of being swallowed by Paramount Skydance, in a deal worth something north of $110 billion. The proposed combination is making its treacherous path through regulators and hostile state attorneys general. And to sweeten the prospect, David Ellison, the man trying to do the swallowing, has made a very specific California-friendly promise: The combined company will release 30 theatrical films a year, 15 from each studio, each with a real 45-day theatrical window. Last year, for comparison, Paramount released eight movies. So, big talk from Ellison. It’s worth remembering that in 2022, Zaslav promised that Warner Bros. would release 16 films in 2023 and 20 in 2024. He ended up delivering 11 and nine. Quarterly debt payments don’t care about your promises.

If Ellison keeps his promise, there will soon be a shelf of weird, specific comedies that got to exist because the combined company was large enough to absorb the risk but not too large to take the risk in the first place. But Ellison might simply end up owning the latest studio to fall off the tightrope, and the guys at Ketchup [Entertainment] will have another shot at picking up dead projects and making some real money.

Speaking of Warner Brothers: Warner Bros. Is Having Its Worst Box Office Stretch in Nearly Three Decades.

As September arrives, Warner Bros. still hasn’t produced a single $100 million domestic grosser this year. The Bride!, Mortal Kombat II, They Will Kill You and The Mummy have all failed to provide the sort of mainstream theatrical breakthrough the studio desperately needs. Practical Magic 2, arriving this week, was supposed to be one of the obvious candidates to change that. Current tracking, however, has been nowhere near the level required for a $100 million domestic run.

And that makes the historical comparison particularly fascinating.

Warner’s last comparable drought came in the late 1990s. Contact, released in July 1997, became a $100 million domestic film, finishing just above the century mark. Then Warner went roughly a year without another one until Lethal Weapon 4 arrived on July 10, 1998. Lethal Weapon 4 ultimately reached $130.4 million domestically.

There is a delicious bit of irony in that comparison. Contact was a prestige-minded science-fiction movie starring Jodie Foster, directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on Carl Sagan. Lethal Weapon 4 was the fourth entry in a wildly successful action franchise starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Warner’s solution to the drought was not some carefully engineered brand strategy. It was simply a giant movie arriving at exactly the right moment.

The same problem feels different today because the theatrical marketplace itself has changed.

Assuming Warner Brothers is swallowed up by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, they’ll be yet another Covid-related death: Christopher Nolan’s Warner Bros. Partnership Betrayal Was a Big Mistake.

Like with all things regarding the current state of media, from the fading popularity of the MCU to the rise of video game movies, Nolan’s breakup with Warner Bros. can be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Mar. 15, 2020, all theaters in the United States shut down following the pandemic as many states went into lockdown. There was concern about whether theaters would ever open again. Christopher Nolan’s then-current film, Tenet, was given the director’s favored third-weekend-of-July release date and was set to be one of the year’s biggest films.

Nolan was never going to let Tenet be sent straight to streaming as Warner Bros. had done with Scoob!, and the studio wanted to keep the filmmaker happy after many years of creative partnership. Nolan wanted the movie delayed until September 2020 and hoped it could be positioned as the first major Hollywood film to welcome audiences back to theaters. Tenet had a limited release at first and was rolled out in the United States and a few select countries over the coming weeks. However, this was before a vaccine became available, leaving many moviegoers uneasy about returning to theaters.

Four months after Tenet’s limited release, Warner Bros. made the controversial decision to release its entire 2021 slate of films, along with Wonder Woman 1984 at the end of 2020, in theaters and streaming on HBO Max day-and-date. This initiative was known as Project Popcorn. Nolan, a big proponent of the theatrical experience, famously balked at the decision. On Dec. 7, 2020, Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter:

“Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service. Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”

Related: The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

ERIC S. RAYMOND:

There’s really no way to properly excerpt from this one, so read the whole thing, as they say.

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green

EXPLOSIVE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE REPORT ACCUSES ACTBLUE OF MAJOR FRAUDULENT DONATION COVER-UP:

It also noted that “internal logs show how ActBlue maintains a culture that instructs fraud analysts to err on the side of accepting questionable foreign donations.”

ActBlue continues to deny any wrongdoing.

This report should send shockwaves through the Democrat Party, because the issue here is bigger than a handful of suspicious donations or a few questionable decisions by fraud analysts. Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to American elections, and ActBlue, as it moved billions of dollars into political campaigns, had a responsibility to take signs of foreign or fraudulent activity seriously and to follow federal law.

The Committees’ investigation alleges that ActBlue repeatedly did the opposite: weakening safeguards, loosening guidelines, giving questionable donors the “benefit of the doubt,” and instructing employees to look for reasons to accept contributions even when transactions raised red flags.

A criminal organization masquerading as a political party, to coin a phrase.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

RACISM IS COOL NOW BECAUSE SHUT UP, WHITEY: Nearly 40 universities maintain neo-segregated housing despite HUD demand to end practice.

Research by The College Fix found 39 universities this fall semester operate “affinity housing” or “living-learning communities” geared toward students of a particular race or ethnicity.

Proponents argue such arrangements improve retention rates, foster peer mentorship, and support academic integration for historically underrepresented groups. However, these offerings have been deemed a euphemism for discrimination by the Trump administration. Another term used to describe such arrangements is “neo-segregation.”

Fix research identified 39 universities with one or more such residential programs, but because many universities operate multiple communities, the total number of individual segregated housing programs is substantially higher, coming in at 74.

Of the 39 universities, at least 28 offer housing geared toward black or African students, 17 toward Hispanic or Latino students, 10 toward Native American or Indigenous students, and nine toward Asian students. Several universities offer multiple affinity housing programs.

The dorms are separate but equal, to coin a phrase.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

IT’S THE SAME OLD SONG:

Well, cool — I guess we saved the climate.

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Karen Bass Will Probably Get Her Shot at Finishing Off Los Angeles. “What’s happened in the eight years since I got out is heartbreaking. I haven’t gone back for a while for a couple of reasons. One is that a good many of the friends I had there have also left California. The other is that some of the friends who are still there have repeatedly told me that the Los Angeles I loved no longer exists at all and that I’d be saddened by what I saw. “

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

MORNING IN AMERICA:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED:

Posted at 8:21 am by Stephen Green