May 21, 2026

May 20, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

AND NOW, A FIRESIDE CHAT FROM MAYOR FRANKLIN DELANO MAMDANI:

It’s an “unexpectedly” appropriate comparison:

● FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

—Frontiers of Freedom, December 14th, 2015.

● New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.

—Steve Usdin, Tablet, April 29, 2018.

● A controversial executive order leads to internment camps:

The executive order didn’t specify Japanese-Americans as a group, but the U.S. military detained more than 100,000 people in the next six months and moved them to camps and facilities with armed guards and barbed wire.

There were 10 camps set up nationally, and about 120,000 people were interned in the camps during the war. About two-thirds of them were Japanese-Americans who were born in the United States. People of Italian and German heritage were also detained.

The controversial moves were met with legal challenges, which eventually were unsuccessful in freeing the detainees from the camps, despite the serious constitutional issues involved.

—The National Constitution Center, February 19th, 2024.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT’S UP AT CIA? A CIA veteran tells a Senate committee that political leaders in the agency reversed the draft assessment that Covid was leaked from China’s Wuhan lab. But just before the hearing opens, the CIA’s Director of Public Affairs releases a bruising condemnation of the proceedings. Apologies demanded, but not given. Silence from the White House and CIA chief John Ratcliffe. My latest Washington Stand post explores the behind-the-scenes eruption that seems to be brewing.

Posted at 9:00 pm by Mark Tapscott

RUBIO TO CUBA: “The reason you are forced to survive without electricity is not an oil blockade by America. It is because the people who control your country have plundered billions.”

In sharp contradistinction:

Posted at 8:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

BRIDGET PHETASY: We’re All Alex Jones Now.

There’s a famous joke that gets at where we suddenly find ourselves:

A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God greets him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully.”

The man asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?”

God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone.”

The man pauses. “Shit. This goes higher up than I thought.”

That’s the country now. Not just the guy in the joke—all of us, drowning in what I’d call X-Files politics: a shallow understanding of first principles, a deep distrust of every institution, and a general paranoia in which the lack of evidence is proof. “The truth is out there,” The X-Files promised. Except it isn’t. Increasingly, it feels like the truth is nowhere.

In fairness to the conspiracy-minded, most of this stuff has some basis in reality. There really was an island with a shrine where young girls were served up to the most powerful men in the world. The Boy Scouts really was full of pedos. There really are grooming gangs in the UK.

All the ugly truths escaped containment, and every conspiracy theorist could point at them and say see, we were right all along. Add to that the blatant “don’t believe your lying eyes” levels of propaganda that have occurred in the last decade. Racism is the real virus. Mostly peaceful protests. Russiagate. Very fine people on both sides. Politicians, institutions, and their media mouthpieces got caught lying enough times that “trust the science” became a punchline.

The Establishment collapsed. The Void opened, and it filled with half-truths.

The Kennedy analogy is apt; a fellow leftist assassinating JFK caused massive cognitive dissonance and paranoia among big government Democrats in the 1960s. That was one of the topics explored by James Piereson in his 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:

The distrust and suspicion of the national government that developed in the years after Kennedy’s death represented an especially important adjustment in approach by the reform movement. From Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, including most especially John F. Kennedy, liberals expressed great faith in the capacity of the national government to carry out programs to improve the lives of a majority of Americans. The countless programs they promoted are ample testimony to that faith. Yet such a faith could not help but be undermined by accusations that elements of the national government might have engineered the assassination of a president and then conspired with prominent leaders to cover it up. It was perhaps not well understood that such accusations, when not backed up by hard facts and evidence, struck at the heart of the welfare state that liberals over the preceding generation had worked so hard and intelligently to construct. After all, one can hardly argue before a perceptive audience that the national government is so corrupt as to engineer the assassination of a president but at the same time sufficiently competent and trustworthy to administer the pensions and health care of the American people. This ambivalence about national power-that is, the idea that the government is at once deeply corrupt and potentially beneficent-entered into the mainstream of liberal thinking in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Such ambivalence compromised the case for the welfare state; indeed, it may have opened the way somewhat later for potent attacks on it from a conservative direction.

Or as Charles Cooke asked the left in 2016, “Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: ‘Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?’”

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TEN YEARS GONE: Stephen Colbert Shook Up Late-Night Twice, but His Push Into Politics Could Have Ultimately Hurt the Format.

The sense that late-night plays to a particular type of audience wasn’t supposed to be part of the mix. Johnny Carson made fun of politicians, but mostly their public goofs, not their policies. Leno rarely became political. And Letterman, often irascible, feuded with politicians but not over what they did in Washington.  John McCain became a Letterman target because the former U.S. Senator canceled a 2008 appearance on “Late Show” in favor of talking to Katie Couric. When Letterman squabbled with former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it was because of a demeaning remark he made about Palin’s teenage daughter.

Late-night shows in 2026 are a wholly different creation. “These shows were built to be vaudeville in the box in your living room,” says Young. “They were a place to watch jugglers and clowns and funny people doing impressions. They were not made for this.”

Colbert wasn’t looking to alienate crowds. He was simply following what had already made him successful. This is, after all, an improv comedian and writer who got his big break working for Jon Stewart at Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” at a time when Stewart was presiding over a cable program that asked its young viewers to look harder at media and politics. Colbert did the unthinkable when he launched “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central in 200, playing a fictional character for nearly a decade who was meant to satirize conservative TV pundits.

So entrenched was the character in viewers’ minds that Colbert spent several sketches after he moved to CBS trying to separate himself from the creation he once played. Indeed, his former employer, Viacom, made outreach asking whether such use of intellectual property was fair. It didn’t help, of course, that the character shared Colbert’s name.

“Colbert never shook his ‘Colbert Report’ persona. That show was groundbreaking,” says Marx. “And he really brought some of that savvy audience with him from Comedy Central.”

Comedy Central’s fortunes rose and ebbed over how many younger male viewers it could reach. CBS’ hinged on the network’s ability to draw the biggest, broadest crowds. The challenge: The biggest crowd CBS could get was a cohort composed largely of people who wanted to see Colbert zing the powers-that-be. And maybe some hate-watchers, too.

Even as CBS won the ratings, the group of people watching late-night became less heterogenous. And as other hosts adopted a similar stance, more of midnight-TV viewership developed in the same way.

In which Variety either rewrites or stumbles upon the same observation that Robert Tracinski made in 2017 at The Federalist: “What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.”

Like Conan O’Brien, Colbert will in short order reinvent himself as a podcaster and/or YouTuber. Or perhaps he’ll host a show on CNN or M-SNOW, albeit one with a far smaller budget.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOMELESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: “No one getting paid $26,153.85 every 2 weeks to solve the homeless problem is going to solve the homeless problem.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPENCER FOR HIRE:

If you notice, the clips don’t come with the usual disclaimer at the end: “I’m Spencer Pratt, and I approve this message.” That’s because his campaign isn’t producing them. These are “fan” videos, made by filmmaker Charlie Curran.

This is something new—videos that look like and do the work of political advertising but that aren’t paid for by a campaign or political action committee and don’t feature any footage or audio from the candidate himself. The Federal Election Commission regulates political advertising, largely by requiring disclosures and enforcing funding limits and coordination rules. Does any of that apply here? Hard to tell. Mr. Curran has free speech, after all.

In the predigital world, campaigns were limited by what they could afford. The typical candidate’s fundraising pitch is built around the need for money to put commercials on TV. Nobody can say for sure how much a 60-second AI-generated spot costs to make. But it’s radically less expensive than hiring a film crew to produce cinematic ads like Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” or Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy.”

Mr. Pratt may not ultimately win, and his approach may not work for every outsider looking to make a quick splash on the cheap. But his campaign is proving that AI and social media are enough to make the right candidate competitive in the right circumstances. Campaign consultants have gotten rich for decades by selling the idea that a strong spot at an opportune time can determine the outcome of a race.

What will they sell now?

The promise that they and only they know the magic coding sequence to prompt the AI. Or that “nobody reads Facebook and X” in the local market that a candidate is running in, so it’s still necessary to set millions of dollars alight to buy traditional TV commercials.

Because otherwise, the future is now:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PORTION CONTROL? Why meat-eating dinosaurs like T. rex evolved tiny arms. “The researchers suggested that the increasing size of prey, in the form of gigantic sauropods (long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters) and other large herbivores, may have resulted in a shift to hunting using jaws and head instead of claws.”

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH CUBA:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll