September 22, 2026

YES: America Must Be Able to Restore Its Space Power at War Speed.

The White House’s new National Security Science and Technology Strategy identifies space as one of only three priority areas, alongside undersea capabilities and artificial intelligence and autonomy, for U.S. “battlefield dominance and power projection.” It calls for clear U.S. technological superiority from very low Earth orbit through cislunar space, the area between Earth and the moon.

The administration also released an updated National Space Transportation Policy, replacing guidance issued in 2013. The Obama-era policy already called for responsive, resilient access to space and rapid restoration of capabilities during conflict. The Trump update goes further, explicitly linking rapid and resilient access to space to U.S. space superiority. It calls for space ranges to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030 and directs the Pentagon to evaluate barriers to supporting high-priority national security launches within 48 hours of need, including from expeditionary locations.

Those goals matter because China is building capabilities both to exploit space and to deny it to the United States. The Pentagon assesses that Beijing is developing jammers, lasers, anti-satellite missiles, and on-orbit systems intended to restrict U.S. access to space during conflict. China also operates more than 500 satellites that contribute to a broader “sensor-shooter kill web” architecture used to locate forward-deployed U.S. and allied forces. Beijing is also rapidly scaling its ability to put new capabilities into orbit; targeting 140 launches in 2026, a 52 percent increase from 2025.

With China improving both its space and counterspace capabilities, U.S. space superiority cannot rest solely on having better satellites. Washington also needs the ability to rapidly replace or augment critical capabilities when satellites or supporting infrastructure are disrupted.

We haven’t had a White House this serious about national defense — or more forward-looking about it — since Reagan.

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green

AS GLENN SAID THE OTHER DAY, BUCKLE UP:

Posted at 7:20 am by Stephen Green

IN AMERICA, MURDER HAS BECOME MAINSTREAM:

It’s not millionaire socialists such as Piker who pick up rifles to gun down Charlie Kirk or Zionist Jews or anyone else on the far-left’s hit list. Piker’s role is simply to create an environment in which others will act. He’s not alone: the hatred and hysteria whipped up to kill Kirk was fomented by countless small-time radical campaigners. They put a target on Kirk’s back by painting him as a threat to transgender people’s lives. The reality was that his own life was endangered – and was then taken by a gunman.

His slaughter is now a source of ongoing glee for the sort of people who listen to (and sing along with) Piker. There may be other forces at work in the brains of those who pity Lindsay Clancy, a child-killer without a political agenda. Yet it’s hard to avoid comparing her apologists with Luigi Mangione’s left-wing admirers. Mangione became a folk hero to anti-capitalist radicals after he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Clancy’s case lacks the overt ideological angle, but emotions run deeper than ideas. Mangione and Clancy have both benefited from a warped sense of sympathy for the underdog and greater identification with the killers’ plight than with that of the victims. It’s been argued that this is a projection of “Main Character Syndrome,” the narcissistic belief of many people, in this age of social media, that the whole world is nothing but a film in which they are the star.

Other people are not really real – they’re just extras, or stock villains (the heartless healthcare executive), or mere props to set up the psychodrama (Clancy’s dead children). Clancy’s five-year-old daughter and two sons, one three years old, the other just eight months, were too young to be main characters. But Clancy, like Mangione, looks like someone who might star in a TV drama where the obviously guilty defendant miraculously turns out to be innocent. That kind of story is so much easier to relate to than one in which a mother really does intend to kill her defenseless children, or one in which a leftist young man isn’t justified in his murderous rage against “the system.” When was the last time you saw anything like that on Netflix?

Including:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

SEEMS LIKE THERE SHOULD BE A TERM FOR TAKING FOREIGN MONEY TO UNDERMINE THE US CONSTITUTION, DOESN’T IT?  Mexico’s Government Funds Gun Grabbing Group.

And a penalty. Something about… by the neck, till dead.

Posted at 4:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

THIS KEEPS HAPPENING TO ME:  You can file this under the category of unsolicited advice.  I bring it up because it keeps happening to me.  If there’s somebody on the older side out there that you know only slightly or perhaps you don’t know at all, but you’ve always wanted to sit down with him or her and talk, try to do it sooner rather than later.  Much sooner if possible.  You never know when they will be gone for good.

I won’t mention any names–but let me give two examples (out of a half dozen so).  A few years ago, I kept telling myself that I needed to drive up to Los Angeles and have coffee with a friendly acquaintance of mine who had lived an interesting life.  LA isn’t that far from here.  It would have been easy.  As a young man, this friendly acquaintance of mine had been a pro-Castro communist.  Somehow by old age he’d become a remarkably thoughtful conservative.  I really liked him and wanted to know just how the transformation had occurred.  On the rare occasions that we had been together at conferences there just hadn’t been time to talk about that sort of thing.  Then suddenly it was too late.

Today something similar happened. For the last fifteen years or so, I’ve been wondering whether I could locate a certain lawyer who had been working at the Department of Justice during the period when Congress was working on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  He had worked with Hubert Humphrey on how to word the Act.  Then he’d been in the General Counsel’s office at the EEOC during the early years and had clashed with the most aggressively leftist attorney there on how to interpret Title VII.  I’ve cited his work many times in the past, and when I do I’ve always wondered if he is still alive and if there was any part of his experience that he would feel comfortable telling me about.  But because his name is somewhat common, I worried it might be hard to find him.

Today, I was citing him again in connection with a lawsuit I’m working on. (If all goes well, I’ll tell you about my new lawsuit soon.  I hope will be a big deal.)  I decided to put a little effort into finding him.  I figured the chance that he was alive 62 years later wasn’t all that great, and I turned out to be right about that.  But here’s the kicker:  He died only a few weeks ago.  If he was of sound mind at any point over the last decade or so, I missed my chance.

Don’t miss yours.

Yes, it goes without saying that the same applies to the older people you do know well.

Posted at 3:00 am by Gail Heriot

DANGER AHEAD. AND NOT JUST FROM THE ELECTIONS:  Heads-Up!

Posted at 3:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

IS STILL GRAFT AND FEEDS THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:  “Honest” graft.

Posted at 1:30 am by Sarah Hoyt

September 21, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTION ASKED: What’s next for Jayden Daniels, Washington Commanders after elbow injury? “Commanders coach Dan Quinn said Daniels will visit specialists Tuesday and Wednesday to determine the best course of action. It’s the same injury Daniels sustained in Week 9 last season; he returned in Week 14, but after reinjuring the elbow in that contest, the Commanders shut him down for the final four games of the campaign.”

In sharp contrast to Tom Brady, who dropped an S-bomb on air during the shot of Daniels’ dislocated elbow, Daniels’ teammates seem rather non-plussed about his injury:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Hard Bigotry of Progressives.

This is just a refusal to acknowledge disparities not only in race and income, but in parental expectations, discipline, and an education system meant to fail children forward. It’s not segregation, money, teachers, or all the other people Jones has decided to blame that are holding black children in New York City back. It is the failure of parents to demand more from their children, and the failure of the teachers’ union and government to fail children forward. Black children in Mississippi don’t have universal school choice, a voucher program, or anywhere near the kind of money spent on black students in New York City, $52,349 in the case of Jones’s daughter’s school vs. $12,324 for the average school in Mississippi. Yet, the latter outperforms New York City students in testing.

Neither Jones nor her daughter can admit the hard truth that these black students didn’t have less when it came to school spending. In fact, because of New York City’s Fair Student Funding rule, she and her classmates actually had more.

In the comment section of the article, Jones said her daughter doesn’t believe she’s being hard enough on herself, and there’s a lot of truth to that. How did she knowingly put her child in an unsafe, failing school without supplemental tutoring? Why did she wait till the fourth grade to realize that none of her work was being graded? For someone who claims to be an education expert, Jones was constantly surprised. Still, aside from running to the principal or emailing the teacher, she didn’t do personalized follow-up to make sure her daughter met her standards. It’s question after question on a slow-moving train wreck that’s supposed to conclude with the thought that at least she was honest. But is that enough? Because if she had her way, her daughter would still be on track for a much harder life, where she failed to meet the basic needs of a college freshman. So she would have been left behind, and it would have been nearly impossible ever to catch up.

Jones worries that in fighting for all children and standing true to her values, she let her child down, but she’s asking the wrong question entirely. It’s not that raising your children with values rooted in your ideological framework is a bad decision; it’s the choice most parents make, whether that be based on religion, culture, or politics. The problem is that Jones’ ideology is inherently poisonous.

All of her answers to the problems were because of whiteness, structural racism, funding, poor teachers, or understaffing; on deeper examination, all of those explanations fall apart. Jones is so profoundly inept at analyzing cause and effect that at this point it’s a moral failing.

Metaphor alert:

Still though, Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

So as the proverbial liberal who’s been mugged by reality, welcome onboard, NHJ!

UPDATE: Great moments in hubris:

Posted at 9:05 pm by Ed Driscoll