Inheriting the [Bernie] Sanders fanbase would give AOC a pretty darn solid base of support to start a presidential campaign. Even if the calendar of early states isn’t quite as Sanders-friendly as it was in 2020, you figure she would have a decent shot of winning Nevada and New Hampshire, and the recent narrow primary victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primary suggests that about half of the state’s Democrats are open to a Democratic Socialists of America-style candidate.
That doesn’t add up to a guarantee of winning the 2028 presidential primary, but it is about as good a shot as any Democrat has. If she waits another four years… who knows what the national political dynamics will be like?
As with Kamala in 2024, there’s a treasure trove of nutty statements AOC made in 2019 and 2020. But if the economy is perceived to be bad (QED, the way the DNC-MSM portrayed the economy under Papa Bush during the 1992 election cycle), that might not be enough.
I LOVE A HAPPY ENDING: Armed Good Guy Successful in Miami Gardens When 2 Street Entrepreneurs’ Business Plan Goes Badly. “The pair approached the driver and tried to rob him at gunpoint. The driver, who just wanted to deliver an order of banana pudding, apparently unimpressed with their career choice and professional skills, produced his own firearm and abruptly ended the negotiation.”
CAN AI BE TRUSTED? Maybe, maybe not, according to Just Facts, which just released a fascinating and impressive analysis of the answers provided by four major AI products to 100 questions specifically designed to elicit evidence of ideological bias to the Left or the Right. Can you guess how they did? Check out my latest Substack column.
Perhaps the most obvious comparison between Arday’s story and a fictional tale concerns Forrest Gump. The classic 1994 film features a boy compromised by both mental and physical handicaps, who, thanks to the enduring love of an unflappable, aphorism-spouting mother who dismisses the doctors who write him off, breaks free of his shackles, becomes a long-distance runner, and goes on to secure his triumphant place in history. In his memoir, Arday directly compares his inspiring life story to the “fantastical” film. He cites his unflappable mother, who is herself a font of the sort of self-help sayings women embroider on pillows, pointing out the “similarities there.
Arday fully acknowledges in his book the remarkable parallels between his life and Forrest Gump’s, quoting his mother, Giff, pointing this out.
Prone to fixations, autistic people often become superfans of narrow slivers of pop culture and other arcana. Research shows they also have a tendency to engage in “scripting”—memorizing and rehearsing, for example, lines from films or TV and weaving them into their everyday lives—and can form strong parasocial bonds with fictional characters. This can help them mirror and better comprehend real-life emotions.
Referring in particular to the penchant among people on the spectrum for role-playing games, Liam Cross, an autism researcher at the University of Plymouth’s school of psychology, told the Free Beacon: “Not only can this act as a way to scaffold social learning, but we see what’s called ‘bleed,’ where parts of the character one is playing and the self start to merge together and overlap.”
Gray Atherton, who is Cross’s Plymouth colleague, said: “One possibility of an individual ‘confusing’ fantasy with reality could be that if an individual spends an inordinate amount of time engaging with a fictional world or characters, they may begin to relate to those characters or story in a way that can feel ‘real.'” But Atherton cautioned: “It would be a stretch to characterize autism as a condition that would mean an individual genuinely confuses their own lived experience with those in a TV show, movie or book.”
Newton is remembered now as a great genius, which he was. He was also a peculiar man. He was famously rude and antisocial, with little apparent interest in friendships or romantic relationships. He was obsessed with his work, which included theology as well as natural science, and he would labor on a problem for days without food or sleep. An assistant who worked for him for five years saw the great man laugh only once: when someone asked Newton why anyone would want to study the mathematics of Euclid. His was a mind that not only voyaged “through strange seas of thought,” but did so—as Wordsworth understood—alone, for all his life. Brilliant people are not like the rest of us.
I wonder how Newton would fare in the Cambridge of today. Would he be able to negotiate funding applications? HR? Student politics? Would he demonstrate social grace, prudence and a veiled but also irrepressible drive toward acquiring power within the institution? Would he use the correct pronouns, honor the correct identity groups and keep perfectly within the confines of the Overton Window at all times? Would he succeed as a 21st-century academic? Something tells me he wouldn’t.
Nahh, Sir Isaac would be right at home in 21st century Cambridge. The Grauniad assures me that Arday was simply a strange one-off who somehow beat the long odds against him and stumbled into the university (albeit with the BBC there to videotape his arrival, along with the head of the university’s faculty of education declaring him, “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”)
Now the Guardian is obsessively delving into the backstory of the Arday saga, to reinforce the ‘one bad apple’ theme and quietly obscure the structural problem of which the paper is itself a part: the ideological capture of culture and intellectual life. https://t.co/yjJ2s0eGrX
UPDATE: Grauniad still continues to assume Arday was a one-off. Tweet continues, “Did they not consider that students were doubtlessly being damaged and — when it eventually came out — so would sociology and the reputation of black academics? It seems second and third order consequences weren’t their strong points.”
The far-Left comedian recently went on social media to celebrate the death of GOP stalwart Sen. Lindsay Graham. She also wished death on Sen. Mitch McConnell, the retiring politician who hasn’t been seen in public for weeks following a medical incident.
A comedian could make hay with the latter, mocking the lack of transparency in play.
Instead, she played the Cruelty Card.
Margaret Cho celebrates the death of Senator Lindsey Graham while wishing for Trump to be next. “From the closet to the coffin- real seamless. So it’s Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham…it does happen in threes. Hope.” pic.twitter.com/hkXxmFXLtb
— NATIVE_AMERICAN_BITCH_FROM_THA_SLAPAHOE_TRIBE 𖧶🪓 (@TRUMPGIRL_STL) July 13, 2026
Now, Cho is demanding her fellow comedians stop telling jokes at the expense of the trans community. That sentiment ran wild during Peak Woke, a time when the Left nearly cancelled Dave Chappelle for sharing those jokes in 2021’s Netflix special, “The Closer.”
Did it matter that Chappelle ended that stand-up special with a heartfelt tribute to a late trans comic? Apparently not.
Cho says the mere act of telling a trans joke can be deadly.
She means they might commit suicide over hurt feelings because they’re mentally unstable. https://t.co/am5zJjlP31
Cho has a point though. “In 1945 Peace broke out. It was the end of the [Killer] Joke. Joke warfare was banned at a special session of the Geneva Convention, and in 1950 the last remaining copy of the joke was laid to rest here in the Berkshire countryside, never to be told again.”
KRUISER: WaPo’s Assessment of Potential 2028 Dem Field Reads Like a Program for a Sad Circus. “There are no centrists in the Democratic Party, not even relative to the Democratic Socialists of America. Also, as I’ve been writing all summer, the only real difference between the establishment Dems and the DSA upstarts is the average age of the people claiming to be one or the other. What WaPo is trying to do here is make it seem as if there has been some sort of Dem course correction by asserting that there are objective ideological differences in a party that hasn’t allowed them since Lyndon Johnson was a young racist.”
As of Thursday, certain people could buy suppressors and short-barreled long guns without a Form 1 from the ATF. While the tax stamp died, we still had to have those products registered with the feds to avoid breaking out in handcuffs. However, a federal court ruled that with the tax gone, the registration is unconstitutional, and a temporary stay in that ruling’s impact expired at midnight Wednesday. Thursday was a brand new world.
At least, it’s one on paper.
Right now, no one seems to know precisely what the hell any of it means. The people covered are numerous, but the people who aren’t covered are also numerous. Some gun stores aren’t covered, but individuals are. Then there are affiliated groups that have an exemption because they’re affiliated with a plaintiff organization, even if they weren’t part.
Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.
In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times2, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically3 and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.
But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”
The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.
At well over 15,000 words in length, I can’t automatically just say “read the whole thing,” but it’s definitely worth perusing.
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