September 19, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOV. STOMPY FOOT: California Gov. Newsom signs order demanding federal government regulate AI ‘before it’s too late. “”We’re not waiting to act – we’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it’s too late. We’re going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action.”

Thoughtfully but with urgent velocity, eh?

Here’s how just one of Newsom’s urgent-velocity decisions played out:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S (D)IFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

Of course, sometimes the press even gave Biden — well, Biden’s handlers — the questions in advance.

Posted at 1:20 pm by Stephen Green

INGRID JACQUES OF USA TODAY: The real reason people are mad at Sydney Sweeney’s new ad.

After the first American Eagle ad, critics accused her of promoting “White supremacy.” She was outed as a registered Republican. Then President Donald Trump posted his support on social media.

That’s all it took for Sweeney to become blacklisted for her views among progressives, especially the Hollywood crowd.

Unlike most of Sweeney’s liberal acting colleagues, who can’t shut up about their obnoxious anti-Trump views, Sweeney is very private about her personal politics, demurring consistently when she’s asked about it. And she often is.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan in January, for instance, she was questioned about the “MAGA Barbie” nickname that some had given her online and how she “understood” the moniker.

“I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney responded. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn.”

That’s exactly what they want to do.

New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson wrote an entire piece questioning whether conservatives have “taken sexy back” and the “political implications of cleavage,” devoting her opening to Sweeney and her SYRN lingerie campaign.

“While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded,” Wilson opines.

Despite all the discourse and uproar over Sweeney and her bosom, she’s trying to live her best life and make the most of her 20s (which, trust me, go all too quickly).

Let’s not stand in her way.

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on those “Cashing In on Sydney Sweeney’s Cash-In:”

I just gave a talk to some Fund for American Studies students. The assigned reading was the introduction to The Myth of Left and Right by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis. One of the very effective techniques the authors use is to show how the positions held by the left and right move back and forth over time. I don’t think they talk about porn in the book, but it fits. When I was in college, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were leading a crusade against porn as dehumanizing to women. It commodified women, turned them into objects, reinforced sexual stereotypes, etc. I think they sometimes overstated their case, but the case was pretty solid. There were definitely feminists who disagreed, but in the early 1990s, the anti-porn side of second-wave feminists had the whip hand, so to speak.

By the middle part of the decade, the pro-porn side grabbed the whip, sometimes kinda literally. Camille Paglia is a special case, but there was also Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy (author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography), and all the feminists who embraced sex work, sex “positivity”, etc. Suddenly, selling sex—literally and figuratively—was empowering and cool.

I think there were wrong and right opinions all along the continuum. But we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that. My only point is that these arguments are often weaponized for essentially partisan purposes. I don’t necessarily mean Republican vs. Democrat—though that certainly happens. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat—not at all improbable given that he was one for quite a long time—I’m sure his appearances in softcore porn Playboy movies would have offended a lot of Republicans who now couldn’t care less about his cameo in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins (sorry pervs, no links to the actual movie). Heck, they don’t care that he cheated on his (third) wife with Stormy Daniels, award-winning star of Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure. Heck, given all the AI chatter these days, I’m surprised she hasn’t been interviewed on MS Now about that one. And, let us not forget that many of the people who don’t care about Stormy D now cared a great deal about Monica Lewinsky back then.

No, I simply mean partisan in terms of the culture wars more generally. I think it’s preposterous to claim that Sweeney dallied “with eugenics-inflected advertising” or “flirted” with the “aesthetics of white supremacy.” The same ads could have been made with Beyoncé, and the people who read “great jeans” as an offshoot of The Boys from Brazil would probably be shouting “you go, girl!” at Beyoncé’s ownership of patriarchal white male space or some such.

The obsession with Sweeney’s very familiar self-marketing strategy is a great example of how media bias isn’t just about left versus right. Sex sells. Ask any TV producer to choose between two hot controversies (well, at least one of them is hot). The first is about water safety and the other is about Sydney Sweeney using footballs to barely conceal her boobs. When the choice is between a story with B-roll of people in lab coats testing water samples and footage of Sweeney frolicking, guess which one they’ll pick? When the B in B-roll stands for boobs—very nice ones, at least—your notes from that seminar at the Columbia Journalism School achieve their highest utility as a coaster for your coffee. I don’t make the rules.

This morning, in response to The New Statesman piece, I tweeted that “People are just trying way, way, too hard on this topic.” My friend Kyle Smith replied, “When you’re writing about bazongas, you have to try extra hard to convince yourself you’re writing an intellectual think piece.”

Trump wants to Make America Great Again – that’s a tall order. Sweeney, simply wants to Make America 2012 Again, a much more fun era before “breasts had somehow become Republican-coded:”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I ASSUME PEOPLE SAYING BLACKPILL STUFF LIKE THIS ARE AGENTS OF THE DEMOCRATS, OR THE CCP, TO THE EXTENT THAT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE NOWADAYS:

Posted at 12:56 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BEWARE THE DEEP SEVEN: A new arms race is unfolding on the ocean floor. “It comes amid growing concerns of so-called hybrid warfare, a broad term which can include cyberattacks, energy sabotage, disinformation, and economic pressure, with or without being accompanied by conventional military methods.”

Posted at 12:41 pm by Stephen Green

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT OPENLY DEMANDED HIGHER GAS PRICES:

Tweet concludes, “Do you see why they have to desperately obsess over the temporary increase in gas prices? It’s all they have.”

Obama and his cronies obsessed over creating a permanent increase in gas prices. As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANALYSIS: TRUE. They were, in fact, being dicks about it.

Posted at 12:13 pm by Stephen Green

GOOD ADVICE:

Exit quote: “As a journal editor, I’m not sure what to do with this. If I gave up on human reviewers and used GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus instead, my bosses would fire me, probably rightfully so. The only constructive thing I can recommend is that, before submitting something to a journal, researchers and scholars use this tremendously valuable resource. (Just don’t tell the models that it’s your paper, because they do suffer from sycophancy.)”

Posted at 11:17 am by Stephen Green

THE NOT SO FINAL COUNTDOWN: If You Were Born Before 1980, The Left Has Killed You With Climate Change At Least 17 Times!

That’s SEVENTEEN. Dated. Sourced. Expired. Verifiable in about twenty minutes by anyone with an internet connection and the mild curiosity to actually look. And I didn’t even reach for the ones still technically ticking, AOC’s 2031 deadline, Bernie’s “eight or nine years” from 2019 running out around 2028, Bill McKibben’s “nine years left” from 2021 expiring 2030, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s “nine-year window” from 2022, which lands, shockingly, right around 2031 too. Funny how the math always seems to land somewhere comfortably past the speaker’s own current relevance and never, ever inside it.

Here’s the pattern, and I want to be fair about it, because I don’t think these are all stupid people. Some of them hold genuine credentials. What they’re responding to is an incentive, not a conspiracy. “Sea level may rise a meter or two over 150 years under a specific emissions pathway” does not get you a Vanity Fair cover or a standing ovation. “TEN YEARS TO SAVE THE PLANET” does. Every single time, somebody got the applause and moved on to the next stage before the receipts caught up with them.

NOW WATCH THE BODY COUNT CLIMB, BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE IT STOPS BEING FUNNY AND STARTS BEING GENUINELY STRANGE.

Once “years left” stops scaring people, the next move is always the corpse count. Watch the actual number inflate, in order, name by name.

Rush Holt, 2013: “millions will die.”

Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006: showed Florida, Shanghai, and Calcutta going under from a Greenland-and-Antarctica collapse, and warned about the impact of “a hundred million or more” refugees. A UK High Court judge who reviewed the film for British classrooms called that specific section “distinctly alarmist,” and pointed out that a full Greenland melt plays out over MILLENNIA, not a news cycle.

Florida? In 1982, Dan Rather believed that would be underwater with (say it with me now) ten years:

Exit question: What Is Their Next Lie?

That’s a pretty easy one, to be honest:

Posted at 10:41 am by Ed Driscoll

“SHUT UP, NAZI,” THEY EXPLAINED:

More:

Rupert Lowe says one of his team was hospitalised with burns.

Read that again.

A legal party, standing a candidate on 8 October, handing out leaflets. Then a mob. Then hospital. Then the attackers boast about it.

You can hate Restore Britain’s policies. Debate them. Vote against them. That is democracy.

What is not democracy is driving campaigners off the street and treating an injury as a win.

If the establishment keeps calling mass deportation voters “Nazis” this is what it produces. Not debate. A mob.

Ask yourself: would the same people cheer if the colours on the leaflets were reversed?

Mob rule is democracy in its purest form.

Posted at 10:19 am by Stephen Green

NOT TIRED OF WINNING YET:

Posted at 9:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

ALWAYS TRUST CONTENT FROM SALENA ZITO:

Posted at 8:53 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE MAP HASN’T CHANGED, BUT GREENLAND WILL EFFECTIVELY BECOME A US PROTECTORATE:

Protrumptorate?

Posted at 8:26 am by Stephen Green

THE PRESS CAN STILL AMPLIFY, OR MUTE, STORIES AND MOODS: A Booming Economy: Who Cares?

I believe President Trump’s approval rating on his “handling of the economy” now stands consistently below 40%. This is rather weird, given that the U.S. economy is as strong as it has ever been. I suppose when most people say “the economy,” what they mean is gas prices.

But the most recent numbers released by the Census Bureau indicate that in 2025, the U.S. poverty rate was the lowest it has ever been, while median household income was the highest it has ever been, at $87,460. The stock markets hit record highs, too.

One would think that Americans would be happy about such a strong economy, but my guess is that most aren’t even aware of it. Either that, or the current anxiety about gas prices has overshadowed everything else.

I’m reminded of a passage from Mark Penn’s book on how the media treated the economy in 1992:

I have found over the years that there is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs. Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy through the eyes of the national media. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency based on worries about the economy, the statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth. . . . In his 1996 State of the Union speech, President Clinton said we had the best economy in thirty years — a statement that sent a flurry of reporters to check actual statistics rather than popular political movements and sweeping, politically motivated statements. The more people looked at the facts, the more they agreed, and six months later, there was near-unanimity that the economy was in good shape. Had the economy changed? No, what had changed was knowledge about the true facts of the economy.

Hmm. Regardless of the data, we get bad economic “news” when there’s a Republican in the White House., and good economic “news” when a Democrat is running for reelection.

Trump isn’t on the ballot, though.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds