November 9, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Legacy Will Brilliantly Survive Last Tuesday. “Democrats are always better at messaging because they’re not honor-bound by things like telling the truth or basing their policies in reality. That doesn’t excuse the Republicans from historically having almost no messaging skills whatsoever, though. Republicans not named Donald Trump, that is.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYNONLINE: It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Russell Crowe in Master and Commander.

Fans of Peter Weir’s 2003 adventure movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are often heard to ask, “Why didn’t they make a sequel?” as a halfway stop to the question “Why don’t they make more films like this?” The answer to the first question, like any Hollywood mystery, has to do with money and studio expectations.

The answer to the second requires you to think about men, what they like, what they want, and if any of those things have been a priority at any movie studio in the near quarter century since Master and Commander came out.

Because the audience that’s grown up around the film is palpably male, which GQ magazine thought worth exploring, in a 2023 story written by senior editor Gabriella Paiella that stated plainly: “If you kidnapped a hundred of Hollywood’s top minds and forced them to work around the clock, they could not engineer a more exquisite Dad Movie.”

It’s worth mentioning that the GQ story came out at the same time social media was briefly aflame with women asking men in their lives how often they thought about Rome. So it was time once again to hire a woman to wonder aloud just what was up with men, after all – in no less than GQ magazine. (Men’s magazines have, for years, hosted regular variations of this exercise – a regular, occasionally hostile and more than faintly condescending interrogation of its readership, their tastes and motivations that’s rarely echoed by women’s magazines.)

QED: British GQ’s condescending 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson, at the height of his superstardom. As I wrote back then:

Why would British GQ — whose name is a contraction of its original American title Gentlemen’s Quarterly serve as a platform for a radical feminist interviewer who so hates their core audience of British males? It’s the equivalent of Ebony hiring an anti-black racist or Rolling Stone hiring a reviewer who hates rock music and its fans. To Americanize what Robin Ashenden writes above at Spiked regarding the modern BBC’s disdain for Python, evidently British GQ also believes the role of the corporation is to patronize and re-educate its readers.

During Trump’s first term, Hollywood began to settle into a similar stance (see also: Kennedy, Kathleen), which answers why there are so few — if any — modern films with the tone of Master and Commander. 

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

LESS THAN IT SEEMS: Google and Microsoft among those signing up to OpenAI’s plan for a new website crawling standard — including opting-out of internet scraping.

Google and Microsoft have joined OpenAI and Anthropic in promising to honor a single line in robots.txt that tells AI developers whether a website’s content can be used to train their models.

Until now, a site that wanted to say no had to write a rule for each company’s crawler, and sometimes for several crawlers run by the same company. The shared signal is meant to replace that sprawl with a single entry that every participating provider reads the same way.

That is genuine progress for overworked webmasters, but the promise is narrower than much of the coverage suggests: The new line states a preference about how content may be used rather than stopping bots from fetching it; it is not an approved standard, does nothing about content already collected, and none of the four major players fully honor it yet.

So less of a new standard and more like something the companies involved can point to and claim they’re doing something.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

JONATHAN TOBIN: Why do American Jews vote for antisemites like El-Sayed?

In order to fully understand why the majority of Jews remain among the most loyal supporters of the Democrats, one needs to comprehend the cultural shift among Americans in general when it comes to politics. It is now axiomatic that in this hyper-partisan era, in which most Americans are thoroughly secular, politics now plays the role in their lives that was once played by religion.

That is even more the case for the overwhelming majority of Jews, who are non-Orthodox and politically liberal.

For this dominant sector of U.S. Jewish demography, liberal political stands—a list of beliefs that can shift with changing political fashions on the left—and devotion to the Democrats is their religion. Indeed, the positions taken by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the policy arm of the largest U.S. Jewish denomination, are more or less those of most Democrats on a host of issues, many of which are not specifically Jewish in scope.

Dennis Prager made a similar point back in 2006: “Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every ‘ism’ of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew’s belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian’s belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.”

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

DON’T LISTEN TO CRAZY PEOPLE:

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

GOTTA FLY THAT FREAK FLAG: You Thought Woke Was Dead? It Was Hibernating. “The woke can’t contain themselves. On Sunday, New Jersey Democrats introduced legislation that adopts a definition of Islamophobia that includes factual criticism of the religion and its customs and includes civil and criminal penalties. The Houston mayor has already told his officers not to honor ICE detainers, despite a state law banning sanctuary cities. And even in Washington, D.C., they can’t keep hiding the ball.”

Posted at 8:03 am by Stephen Green

THERE THEY GO AGAIN:

Posted at 7:47 am by Stephen Green

BACK IN THE USSR:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

YES: Ron DeSantis Calls for a ‘Big Change’ in Right-Wing Media After Midterms Trouncing: ‘A Lot of That Is a Grift.’ “‘I think you need more bottom-up, I think you need less focus on the presidency, and I think you need more focus on not just people running for elected office, people that are involved in the conservative groups, [but] I think we need a big change in kind of the conservative media culture,’ DeSantis said. ‘Because a lot of that is a grift, and it’s pay-to-play, and it’s just not offering very much in the way of strong ideas and things that are really going to illuminate your understanding.'”

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

GOODER AND HARDER, GEORGIA:

Posted at 7:16 am by Stephen Green

YOU AND I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH SCARCITY:

 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll