July 31, 2026

THERE IS DEFINITELY A ZEITGEIST THING GOING ON:  Of Swine and Men.

Posted at 3:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

WORSE THAN INFANTILE NONSENSE. IT’S POISONING BY STORY:  These guys have a game they play where they propose the worst solutions imaginable, and if you reject their solutions, they act like you have no plan to defeat the Left at all. I’ve read your idiot manifesto, Charles. Your plan calls for us to lose on purpose, to accelerate the destruction of the United States, kick off a civil war, and somehow build something better from the ashes. Other solutions from your tribe include burning the Constitution and installing a new Franco. It’s all infantile nonsense.

X-cancel.

Look, movies and the media and even “historians’ have sold us on the idea a lot of things are inevitable. They’re not. For each “this worked” there are a million outcomes that are unimaginably bad.

Posted at 2:15 am by Sarah Hoyt

WE CAN BE MERCIFUL BECAUSE AS A SOCIETY WE’RE RICH BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE:  A Costly Indulgence.

Posted at 12:36 am by Sarah Hoyt

July 30, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Happy Thursday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FIRST OBAMA’S CHEF, NOW THIS:

Posted at 9:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S COME TO THIS: Boy George Drops Out of London Jesus Christ Superstar Production After Stirring Controversy With AI-Generated Pro-Israel Song.

Boy George is dropping out of a London production of Jesus Christ Superstar, the “Karma Chameleon” singer’s manager said on Instagram on Thursday, days after he stirred controversy after releasing his AI-generated, pro-Israel song “We Will Dance Again.”

“The decision has been made with the utmost respect for the producers, the creative team and the entire company,” manager Paul Kemsley wrote on Thursday. Boy George was set to play King Herod starting in August. Kemsley didn’t specify why George was leaving but wrote that the singer “has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that.”

“Equally, I believe it is my responsibility to make decisions that are in the best interests of my artist while also showing respect to others,” Kemsley said. “In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”

Yeah, you don’t someone who’s too pro-Jewish to be in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar…

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AARON HANSCOM: Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor.

Search for “traitor” on X this week, and one man will flood your timeline: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The reason? Shocking images of thousands of migrants from Morocco crossing the border and flooding into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. The head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta told the Associated Press that the border had “totally collapsed.” After watching video footage of migrants breaking through fences to get into the city, one would be justified in using the word “invasion” to describe what’s happening. Indeed, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the rising populist/conservative Vox party, called it just that and wrote that “Pedro Sánchez is its main promoter and guilty of all its consequences.”

The migrants don’t disagree. Video footage captured some of the arrivals chanting, “Viva Pedro Sánchez!” or “Long live Pedro Sánchez!”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Old and busted: Can Greeks Become Germans?

—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, July 19th, 2011.

The New Hotness? Spain has become France:

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPAIN IS BEING INVADED RIGHT NOW; UPDATE: Georgia Meloni Responds, Threatens to Cut Off Spain.

Most people don’t know that there is Spanish sovereign territory on the African continent.

I sure didn’t. But it turns out that there are bits and pieces in what you think is Morocco that are, in fact, part of Spain, including islands and cities in what you probably think is Morocco.

Ceuta is one such tiny bit of Spain on the African continent. It is literally Spanish territory, similar to the little spur of Minnesota that looks like it should be part of Canada because it is not connected and is embedded in Canada, or the Kaliningrad Oblast, which is Russia, but entirely surrounded by Lithuania and Poland.

Weird, I know. But there it is.

Right now, today, the City of Ceuta is being invaded by Moroccans (and likely people from other countries) through that border. They are not coming in boats. They are storming the border, and in some cases, border guards have opened the gates to let them stream in.

Ceuta is a city of only 65,000, and at this rate, the invaders will outnumber the population of the city. It is a crisis so great that the city government is begging the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to declare a State of Emergency, which so far he has declined to do.

In April, Theodore Dalrymple warned: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

As Spain is about to find out, the hard way (again):

Tweet below reads, “THIS IS VERY SERIOUS. I’m receiving these images of how Moroccan authorities are emptying trucks full of young people near the border with Ceuta. Anyone who doesn’t want to see that this is a perfectly orchestrated operation by the regime is simply blind.”

Tweet below says, “But when we go on vacation – fingerprints, facial scanners, advanced biometrics, baggage scanners…:”

In English, the tweet below reads, “It won’t be shown on television: this is how the beaches of Ceuta are right now.”

Posted at 8:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

JAMES MIEGS: A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight.

I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. In fact, I’ve spent two decades challenging the pernicious lies of the 9/11 Truther crowd. But sometimes conspiracies do happen. I think the actions of Dr. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, constituted a type of conspiracy. I’m not saying the Covid outbreak was some kind of deliberate “plandemic.” But the disclosures reveal how Dr. Fauci organized his colleagues to obscure his agency’s connections to the suspect Chinese lab.

We now know U.S. scientists collaborated with their Chinese counterparts on controversial gain-of-function experiments and that grants from NIAID flowed to the Wuhan lab through various channels. It’s highly likely that U.S. researchers provided the skills and our government offered some funding that allowed Chinese researchers to continue independently tinkering with deadly viruses until one accidentally escaped the lab. From the start, the NIAID head used his enormous bureaucratic clout to make sure no one explored that relationship. While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was “just conspiracy theories,” he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.

Things got rolling on Feb. 1, 2020, when Dr. Fauci organized a conference call involving a dozen of the world’s top virologists and health officials. Within weeks, four of those scientists were listed as authors of a letter titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” published in the journal Nature Medicine. The authors confidently asserted that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”; the virus must have jumped to humans from some animal species. At the time, many experts believed that leap happened at Wuhan’s messy “wet market.”

The “proximal origin” paper seemed to give scientific clout to Dr. Fauci’s oft-repeated dismissal of the lab-leak idea. Other scientists dropped the question like a hot fireplace poker. The press doubled down, portraying the lab-leak theory as “debunked bunkum,” in the words of MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Social media sites downgraded the topic as “misinformation.”

But this supposed scientific consensus was entirely manufactured. The newly released documents, along with earlier disclosures, show that many scientists in the NIAID leader’s orbit believed the virus had been deliberately modified and then accidentally leaked. In fact, Dr. Fauci’s own diary notes show that most of the researchers on that Feb. 1 call “felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” The entry also mentions that the lab’s famous virologist Shi Zhengli had “been working for years” on gain-of-function modifications that would help certain viruses be more transmissible to humans. Recently released messages reveal that even the scientists who signed the “proximal origin” paper continued to suspect a lab leak; “we can’t rule it out,” one admitted.

He’s the Wuhanian Candidate:

Related: Don’t Forget the Role the ‘Scarf Queen’ Played in the Fauci Cabal:

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Birx painted herself as a heroine for what she framed as balancing Trump administration skepticism over COVID-19, politics, media narratives, the need to treat millions of Americans, and the effort to prevent or mitigate the spread of the virus.

In that book, Birx admitted that she was integral to the effort to extend the initial lockdowns beyond the “15 days to slow the spread.”

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them, she wrote.

Technically, Birx was a Trump insider. He relied on her, Fauci and their team to give him the advice he relied upon to make critical national decisions. But as we’ve seen with Fauci, who clearly worked against Trump and his administration, Birx was more discreet but still a kindred spirit.

As Glenn wrote at the end of 2021: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

AN EMPIRE OF LIES:

Posted at 7:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON CLARKSON’S FARM: “Life, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. Take Amazon Studios for example. They’ve pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into producing prestige triple-A sludge like Rings of Power. And yet, the show that gets consistently higher viewership, critical acclaim, and audience support is a low-budget reality TV show about two idiots messing around on a farm in England. The thing is though, you only need to watch a single episode of Clarkson’s Farm to understand exactly why.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll