February 15, 2026

JONATHAN TURLEY: In Munich, Democrats pledge a return to wealth taxes and climate hysteria.

This week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) joined the many Californians now seeking their fortune elsewhere. The difference is that Newsom is planning to come back to California, even as billionaires, investors, and companies flee his state for greener pastures.

Newsom and Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) were selling a brave new world that looked a lot like the broken old world. It was an ironic moment. They were addressing countries at the Munich Security Conference that had previously destroyed their economies through socialist and far-left policies.

The rush of liberal Democratic officeholders to Europe was telling. A new poll shows that a record 58 percent of voters believe their party is “too liberal.” But Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez found a welcoming audience in Europe.

The global elite gushed over Ocasio-Cortez and sat enraptured as she rattled off socialist platitudes. That included New York Times correspondent Katrin Bennhold, who thrilled the audience by treating it as a given that Ocasio-Cortez will run for president.

Both Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez spoke of returning the U.S. to the good graces of the global elite. Newsom assured the Europeans that Trump’s reign is temporary, and that the U.S. will soon enough dismantle the “wrecking ball” that the administration has taken to the EU.

Newsom offered his leadership and his state as the model, proclaiming that “California is a stable and reliable partner” for Europe. The model includes high taxes, massive spending programs and greater bureaucratic regulations — precisely the policies that have driven the European economy into its current stagnation. In other words, Democrats were in Europe to offer precisely what Newsom outwardly condemned: “doubling down on stupid.”

When not fumbling with security questions about issues such as Taiwan, Ocasio-Cortez was demanding that wealth taxes be implemented in the U.S. “expeditiously.” Such a tax on billionaires’ wealth, including unrealized gains, is currently being pushed in California. The predictable result is that billionaires and other wealthy citizens are rushing to leave the state and taking their investments and companies with them.

As Turley concludes, “Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez certainly found their element in Munich, and the EU certainly found the ‘reliable partners’ it has longed for in creating ‘a new World Order with European Values.’”

To be fair, this isn’t the first time that an anti-democratic regime has used Munich as the launching point to create a “new world order” with, alas, quite European values.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

BARACK OBAMA IS A BIG, FAT LIAR:

Related:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OSTRACISM USED TO BE THE SOLE PURVIEW OF THE LEFT: Hegseth ends military education at Harvard, citing ‘Hate America’ activism. “Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon will end professional military education and fellowship programs at Harvard in 2026–27, citing anti-Semitism, DEI ideology, and alleged ties to U.S. adversaries like the CCP. He also said the department will review graduate programs nationwide to ensure taxpayer dollars support institutions aligned with military readiness and critical thinking.”

Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPEAKING OF HUMILIATION:

Posted at 8:40 am by Charlie Martin

HISTORY FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH: My Nigerian Grandfather Sold Slaves. “Nwaubani Ogogo lived in a time when the fittest survived and the bravest excelled. The concept of ‘all men are created equal’ was completely alien to traditional religion and law in his society. It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles. Assessing the people of Africa’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology.”

There’s a mythology that white slave traders ran around the bush kidnapping Africans, but that’s bunk, of course — they’d pretty much all have died. They bought African slaves from Africans. My brother talked to people in Ghana about that some years ago, and they reflected little guilt: Back then if you lost a war, you either died or were enslaved. That’s just how it worked.

One of the reasons Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon couldn’t get published when she wrote it was that the black literary community didn’t like that it portrayed the extent of African complicity in slavery. But history is history, despite efforts to rewrite it.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTION ASKED:

How did they know? For the same reason that Ted Kennedy knew that same media had his back when he was smearing Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings/show trial in 1991:

I liked political theater, so I watched that initially rooting for Clarence Thomas to be taken down. By the very end, I believed the seeds of my future were planted right there when I realized that Ted Kennedy knew something. What did he know that he could ask Clarence Thomas these questions of a man who came from humble beginnings as an African-American? What did he know about the media? What did he know about the political process? What did he know about Hollywood? That they would side with a known Lothario with Chappaquiddick, you know, in his background. That they would allow for him and his allies in the Democratic Party to ask this man in the realm of privacy have you ever rented any pornography. Do you know who Long Dong Silver is? It was so obvious that this was a takedown that eventually I started to see things through what I called the Democrat Media Complex.

—Andrew Breitbart, in conversation with Peter Robinson, April, 2009.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

ELON’S IMPACT:

He’s de-Dilbertized an entire profession. “That’s not just a business achievement. That’s a civilization remembering how to make things that matter in the physical world again. And it might be the only thing that saves American technological leadership when the competition is just building faster because they never forgot.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

OLD AND BUSTED: “Get Clean for Gene!”

The New Hotness?

More details here: Hillary Clinton says migration ‘went too far’ and ‘needs to be fixed in a humane way.’

While in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Hillary Clinton participated in a panel titled, “The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values.”

During the panel, Clinton appeared to take a stronger approach to her previous stance on border security.

“There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” Clinton said.

“It went too far, it’s been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people and how we’re going to have a strong family structure because it is at the base of civilization,” she added.

Elián González has entered into the conversation:

Media claims of authoritarianism? On the contrary, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times famously wrote in 2000:

I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: ”America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that.”

And I was also warmed by the picture of Elian back in his father’s arms. Some things you can fake — like a 6-year-old wagging his finger on a homemade video and telling his father to go back to Cuba without him — and some things you can’t fake. That picture of Elian and his father illustrated the very parent-child bond that our law was written to preserve.

Hats off to Janet Reno for understanding that the Elian Gonzalez case was about both of these pictures: the well-being of a child and the well-being of our Constitution, on which all good things in our society rest. But hats off twice to Ms. Reno for understanding that these two noble virtues are not equal. The fear of causing some trauma to Elian by rescuing him could never outweigh the need to uphold the rule of law.
One only hopes that this affair will remind the extremists among the Miami Cubans that they are not living in their own private country, that they cannot do whatever they please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more than they love the U.S. Constitution — but that doesn’t apply to the rest of us.

One also hopes that now that Ms. Reno has ended the kidnapping of Elian by the Miami Cubans, the other hard-nosed lady in the cabinet, Madeleine Albright, will end the Miami Cubans’ kidnapping of U.S. Cuba policy as well. Ms. Albright could start by relaxing the embargo on Cuba.

Fortunately, Albright didn’t take the advice of a columnist even further to her left, and as a result, as Glenn asked last week at his Substack: Will Cuba be Libre soon, and if so what happens next?

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

IT’S FRAUD ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Posted at 7:01 am by Glenn Reynolds

February 14, 2026

CLEANUP TIME:

Posted at 10:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RIGHT?

Posted at 10:16 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want to be happy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds