October 6, 2026

HUGE, IF TRUE:

Posted at 5:56 pm by Stephen Green

ALEX, I’LL TAKE “DAVID LEAN’S WORST MOVIE” FOR $500, PLEASE: Fox Butterfield of Arabia.

Fox Butterfield is famous for his repeated inability to tell cause from effect in stories like the one headlined “Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.”

We now have the Arab-Israeli conflict version of Fox Butterfield, thanks to a piece in Foreign Affairs authored by Michael Robbins, Amaney A. Jamal, and Mark Tessler. This time the punchline isn’t the headline. Instead, it’s more like a recurring joke throughout the article.

Titled “Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution,” it’s a rare optimistic essay on the conflict. The authors review Palestinian opinion surveys over time and show a clear trend toward a willingness to negotiate. That, by itself, is a positive development, though limited because those polled don’t live in a democracy and therefore their leader, who has already rejected the framework, must still be convinced of the value of peace. A real test will be whether there is any public pressure from Palestinians on their government to reverse its position and to discard the “resistance” culture built into Palestinian cultural and education institutions.

But assuming this desire for a negotiated solution is accurate, what inspired it? Here we have our Fox Butterfield moment:

“Gazans, despite having borne the brunt of destruction over the past three years, tend to be the most pragmatic: an even greater proportion of them are open to a two-state solution than are Palestinians living in the West Bank.”

Gazans, having seen their invasion of Israel ultimately fail, are indeed being pragmatic by expressing their openness to a different strategy. The authors appear to believe that pragmatism fell from the sky like fairy dust. But in fact what’s being described here is quite simple: The Palestinians started and then lost a war, and now they are open to a negotiated end to hostilities.

History has numerous reminders of when happens when the side that started a war loses it:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS PARIS BURNING? Could the Riots in France Lead to the Election of Conservative Marine Le Pen?

President Emmanuel Macron and his supposed “centrists” can scream “Nazi!” all they want about Le Pen and National Rally. That’s been their electoral strategy since Le Pen’s father was running for president in the 1970s. But the colossal failure of Macron’s left-wing policies and those who preceded him, along with the rise of populists in France, has created a genuine opening for the right that Le Pen will almost certainly exploit.

The fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is trying to start a revolution will make Le Pen’s job a lot easier.

UnHerd:

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, levelling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

“Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a ‘Sixth Republic’ — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and ‘a New France,'” writes UnHerd’s Andrew Hussey. “Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants.”

This kind of overreach by Mélenchon is already leading to a significant backlash against the left.

“Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the ‘Old France’ — which still makes up the majority of French people,” Hussey continues. “With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s.”

It’s not hard for “Old France” to decide which side they should be supporting.

And it’s not hard to notice, as John Daniel Davidson writes at the Federalist, that “The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.”

Posted at 4:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

YEP, WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES:

Make the Ottoman Hejaz Great Again?

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Barack Obama to campaign with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

The Oct. 24 event will feature Obama, as well as El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson, who is seeking the governorship, the Michigan Democratic Party announced on Monday.

Obama has generally stayed out of the spotlight since leaving the White House, though he has ocassionally appeared on the campaign trail for other Democratic candidates.

The Michigan race is expected to be one of the most competitive of the cycle and a pivotal contest in the battle for control of the upper chamber.

The trick, of course, is trying to figure out which one is actually to the left of the other.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

THE STANDARDIZED TEST WAR HEATS UP AGAIN. Between the sudden reemergence of woke thought policing, campus sexual assault being on the front pages again, and a plague arising from the East, it seems like everything old is new again.

Posted at 3:10 pm by Robert Shibley

NEEDS AT LEAST TWO MORE ZEROES, BUT POINT TAKEN:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT, THEY RAN OUT OF KANGAROOS FOR THEIR COURT?

Posted at 2:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Correctly Understanding the ‘Stupidity’ of the Left.

A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.” Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning,” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind.

Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative.

Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence. Consider a recent interview in which Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “Just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and in a later interview, adding, “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”

So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.

“Evil” works.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

EVERY RECORD HAS BEEN FALSIFIED:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Glenn Reynolds

UM…:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green