November 10, 2026

HUGH HEWITT: Three big legal fights are looming, and Trump needs answers before January.

Everyone should expect President Trump to follow the examples of Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden and play full-court defense against what have already been announced as sweeping inquiries into executive branch conduct by such members as Garcia and Congressman Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who will chair the House Judiciary Committee. Both committees have subpoena powers.

President Trump may require a legal opinion from the attorney general under 28 U.S.C. § 511, and when such a demand is made, the AG turns to OLC. Before OLC is deluged with requests from President Trump and AG Blanche in 2027 on the scope of executive privilege across the executive branch, the president could secure some important OLC opinions between now and January 3, when the new Congress is sworn in.

Three such questions come to mind in light of last week’s sweeping Democratic wins across the country and the often very extreme positions put forward by Democrats campaigning for House or Senate seats.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

BRADLEY THOMPSON: You Can See Nothing.

As a “documentary,” you learn nothing about how or why Holmes started Theranos, you learn virtually nothing about Theranos’s development of their wonder device, and you learn nothing about the trial in which Holmes was found guilty of defrauding customers and investors. Instead, you get to hang out for four weeks with a neutered ménage à trois of self-absorbed, millennial strivers at a California beach house. Can you imagine anything more tedious or interminably boring!?!?! In the end, the film is a cross between François Truffaut’s 1962 Jules et Jim and Robert Klane’s 1993 Weekend at Bernies II.

The self-promoted premise of this not-true-to-life “documentary” is radical transparency but in a dark, shadowy, brooding, film-noir sort of way. But there is nothing transparent about this fictional account of reality other than the utterly depraved worldview of postmodern millennials and millennial postmodernism. The whole thing has that edgy, avant-garde, NYU film-school vibe to it. It’s all about being clever, all-too-clever.

Here’s the storyline.

Thirty-four days before she is about go off jail to serve her 11-year sentence, Elizabeth Holmes and her live-in boyfriend, Billy Evans, invite Fielder and his film crew into their home virtually 24-7 right up until the moment she goes off to prison. Half of the film (and yes, I’m calling it a film rather than a documentary) is set at the couple’s rented Del Mar, California beach house. The couple has a toddler and a nursing baby, who, you might think, deserve the full attention of their self-obsessed parents.

Let’s stop right there and ask the obvious question: Who does that? Seriously, what kind of human being would want a film crew and a creepy interlocutor encamped in their house ‘round the clock as they’re about to experience the worst moment of their lives? Normal people would, of course, want privacy. Normal people would want to spend every remaining second with their children, but we’re not talking about normal people. We’re talking about postmodern millennial narcissists.

Every scene of this tawdry melodrama screams, “Look at me, look at me, look at me! I’m important, don’t ya know?”

From Let It Be to Gimme Shelter to Hail, Hail Rock & Roll, to The September Issue, the 2009 look back at Vogue and the sneering pomposity of Anna Wintour just before the dead tree publishing industry hit the big iceberg, as Kyle Smith wrote, the magic of the documentary format is simple: “Convince somebody that you’re going to make them a big-screen star, then let them hang themselves.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

MUH DEMOCRACY™ IN ACTION:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

JENNIFER WELCH IS BIG MAD AT CONSERVATIVES FOR ‘BULLYING HER SPONSORS:’

Gosh, golly, gee. Would you look at that?

Advertisers started bailing on Jennifer Welch’s podcast after the hosts joked about digging Charlie Kirk up just so they could kill him again, and the women are still insisting the departures are the result of harassment rather than the completely normal reaction to that level of unhinged content.

They’re such simple-minded, evil little creatures, don’t you think?

Roughly 30 sponsors have already walked away. THIRTY.

It’s a tidy little lesson in how the media economy actually works: major brands quietly decide they don’t want their names attached to open fantasies about desecrating a corpse.

This has been the Media Matters playbook for ages — look for a show with any sort of conservative content, and then bully its sponsors into submission.

Related: “I want an inclusive world and non-violent world,” while calling for Charlie Kirk’s body to dug up and shot again: 

Discussing Watergate with lefty Bill Moyers in 1988, Tom Wolfe said, “This is a very stable country politically, very stable. Richard Nixon thrown out of office, forced out. Not only was there no junta rising from the military to take over the situation, there wasn’t even one demonstration by Republicans or anybody else. In fact, as far as I know, there wasn’t even a drunk Republican who threw a brick through a saloon window.”

Sad to say, the “Silent Majority” era of Republicans are gone — after having spent the last quarter century watching how the left protests.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES:

“This is about co-opting the one American institution that has remained true to the Constitution: the U.S. military.”

As I keep saying, losing Hegseth would be a huge win for the Swamp — or worse.

Posted at 2:01 pm by Stephen Green

SUCH A TERRIBLE DECISION:

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green

SPACE: ESCAPADE on its way to Mars after Earth flybys. “During both flybys, the Rocket Lab-built spacecraft fired their engines, using a principle called the Oberth effect to maximize the performance of the maneuver. It was the first time a NASA spacecraft used such a powered flyby to go to Mars.”

And that was after they spent almost a year hanging out at the Earth-Sun L-2 Lagrange point waiting for the right moment.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: [James] Gunn’s Gone, Girl.

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRUMP’S IRAN WAR OVER? Or is it really. President Donald Trump said the war is effectively over, but Richard Pollock, who has covered Washington for more years than many Instapundit readers have lived, wonders if this isn’t another Trump chess move. And what about that Tupelov bomber that landed in Israel the other day?

Posted at 1:30 pm by Mark Tapscott

WHAT HE MEANS IS CENSORSHIP:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

HOW REPUBLICS FALL:

More:

The process becomes the punishment. It’s what happens when a civilization mistakes restraint for virtue, aggression for evil, and procedural obedience for courage.

Eventually, the men who can’t wield the sword discover they can wield the law against those who do. And the cowards who would never stand before an enemy become the judges of those who must.

“It is backwards. But above all, it is unsustainable.”

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM ALMĀNIYĀ: Islamists have Berlin’s politicians in their grip.

Elif Eralp, the Left Party’s candidate for mayor, won Berlin’s city state election in September. She is now in negotiations to form Berlin’s government. Yet despite her prospective power, she lives in fear of some of her own pro-Palestine supporters.

We know this thanks to a mistake by her press team. An interview transcript containing her internal annotations was accidentally sent to Der Spiegel, along with the authorised version. In the margins, Eralp reminded her staff that she had been advised against naming names in public, and noted that her husband, too, was afraid. ‘What do we do now? Cancel the whole interview?’, she wrote. ‘I should never have agreed to this interview.’

The question that so agitated her concerned Ibrahim Ibrahim, a well-known Palestinian activist who has organised many of Berlin’s anti-Israel demonstrations. He supports the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), whose members took part in the massacre of October 7, and which the EU has designated a terrorist organisation. He has also called former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar a ‘martyr-hero’. Yet none of this stopped Ibrahim from being filmed arm-in-arm with leading Left Party figures at their September election celebration.

Yes, but at least they’re helping keep those nasty right-wingers out of power.

Exit quote: “What better way to embolden radical elements than to let the world know that you are terrified of them?”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

SEASON’S GREETINGS FROM EURABIA:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Translation: “You know Christmas is coming when the anti-Muslim concrete blocks arrive.”

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green