October 24, 2026

NONE SO BLIND:

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

A TALE OF TWO BILLIONAIRES:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

REQUIRED VIEWING:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Stephen Green

INCENTIVES MATTER:

Posted at 12:18 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S NOT 1939. IT MIGHT BE 1933: A Final Appeal to Michigan’s Jewish Voters on the Fence About El-Sayed.

UPDATE:

Posted at 11:17 am by Charlie Martin

RESIST:

Italy, too:

Posted at 11:15 am by Stephen Green

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS KIND OF THING WAS NOTHING BUT RIGHT-WING PARANOIA: Treasury traces SPLC to debanking of Christians after group dismissed it as conspiracy.

Federal finance authorities have identified the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” labels as the driving force behind the debanking of conservative individuals and organizations, particularly clients that were giving to Christian causes.

The explosive findings directly discredit a recent proclamation from the SPLC declaring, as part of its “Hatewatch” monitoring project, that anti-Christian debanking was a conspiracy theory spread by the “Christian supremacy movement.”

Though only a regulatory audit, fulfilling an executive order from President Donald Trump to ensure that banks were not discriminating against customers on the basis of their political or religious beliefs, the government’s findings add to the SPLC’s latest woes.

Let this serve as your occasional reminder that “conspiracy theory” these days usually means “slightly ahead of the news cycle.”

Posted at 10:48 am by Stephen Green

WE SAW THIS BEFORE IN FEBRUARY, SO WHO KNOWS?

Posted at 10:10 am by Stephen Green

IT’S A TERRORIST GROUP: Georgetown Law student association denounces Ted Cruz staffer over Muslim Brotherhood lecture. “Erielle Azerrad, Cruz’s deputy chief counsel, spoke to students about the Brotherhood’s origins and how the group had expanded its operations in the US. She also noted the Muslim Students Association’s ties to the Brotherhood, though she disputed that such ties meant all Muslim students, or even all MSA members, were connected to the terrorist group.”

Plus, what Mollie said:

Posted at 9:43 am by Stephen Green

IT’S AN INVASION:

Posted at 9:03 am by Stephen Green

CARL CANNON: Why RealClearPolitics Didn’t Fall for the Fake Polls.

The first episode involved an obscure outfit calling itself “Median Strategies,” which claimed that its August poll showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass with a double-digit lead over challenger Nithya Raman. There was no such survey. It was a sham carried out by a 21-year-old recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash. He briefly copped to the scam, then disappeared without revealing where he lived, who he really was, and what he hoped to gain.

This week, a much more ambitious con job came to light. “Wedgewood Polling” admitted it was a bogus operation hours before it was about to be exposed. Its proprietors promptly claimed (as did Rahil Prakash) that it was all a social science experiment designed to alert gullible news organizations, news consumers, and polling aggregators to the dangers out there.

“The polling industry needs major reform,” Wedgewood posted on X. “Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public’s trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverifiable, low-quality methodology. We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?”

The statement continued: “Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.”

Well, not everyone treated Wedgewood as legit. RealClearPolitics, the pioneer poll aggregator, never included these bogus polls – either in the RCP Poll Average or in the voluminous number of surveys cited daily on our polling pages.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

CHRIS QUEEN: Mein Home Team Goose-Stepped in It With a Throwback Profile Pic.

Screenshot

NBC News cited one expert who gave the Falcons the benefit of the doubt:

“Absolutely there was no ill intent, and I can’t imagine in a million years the Atlanta Falcons would do something like” seeking Nazi alignment, sports logo historian Chris Creamer told NBC News on Thursday.

“It’s throwback weekend for the team, and the social media team just wanted to dress up like the players were going to, and it’s a very common thing that social media accounts do across all sports,” he said. “If a team’s wearing a throwback uniform, usually their profile photo will be updated to match that.”

You know what I think it is? I think it’s the gold stripes. (See? Tech fans ruin everything! I kid. I kid.) In all seriousness, I don’t think the Falcons meant anything negative at all. It’s just unfortunate that the combination of several factors made things really weird for the Dirty Birds.

It is the stripes in the above image – Atlanta’s original uniforms and logo were iconic; I doubt anyone would have complained if the Falcons announced that they wanted to celebrate the era of Steve Bartkowski:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll