August 31, 2026

JUST THE 20TH CENTURY’S SECOND-GREATEST MASS MURDERER…:

…being honored by a medical school.

Posted at 10:22 am by Stephen Green

DON’T GET COCKY: Iran Is Facing Its Soviet Moment and Possibly Its End.

On September 13, 1985, Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani announced that his country would stop propping up the price of crude. Prices collapsed, and the Soviet Union lost roughly $20 billion a year in hard currency—“money without which the country simply could not survive,” in the estimate of Yegor Gaidar, later Russia’s acting prime minister. Gaidar dated the collapse of the Soviet Union to that announcement.

Tehran is now in a weaker position than Moscow was in that autumn. The Islamic Republic is exporting almost no oil, its currency has lost nearly a third of its value since March, and it is rationing water and electricity to its own capital.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a sweeping new sanctions campaign last week, Operation Economic Outcast, aimed at what remains of the regime’s revenue, with the stated objective of severing “every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”

I guess we’ll see how much lifeline Beijing and Moscow can get to Tehran under the new sanctions.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

Posted at 9:20 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Here’s Hoping Trump Leaves the MSM Propaganda Machine in Ruins. “Near the end of 2024, I wrote a column in which I said that the MSM death rattle had begun, but it was going to be a long one. I believe that President Trump and his administration’s relentless kneecapping of the antagonistic media bottom-feeders has probably sped up my timetable on that.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

THAT TRUTH IS NOW OBSOLETE. THE PARTY HAS NOW DECLARED A NEW TRUTH.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

LEAKS THAT KILL, JOURNALISTS WHO REJOICE:

Today, the Washington Post published an article detailing how senior military leaders have cautioned the Secretary of War against certain possible courses of action regarding the war in Iran. The primary source for this article was, as the article itself states: “. . . the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of [War] Orders Book (SDOB).”

The Secretary of War Orders Book is a highly classified summary of worldwide U.S. force posture, capabilities, plans, and related information. It is the Rosetta Stone of U.S. military capabilities and intent, and it is a major basis of strategic decisions by the Secretary of War.

How, pray tell, did the Washington Post acquire such highly classified information about wartime military operations? Well, as the Post describes, that highly classified information came from “people familiar with [the] assessment,” who “described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.”

Wow.

Now I know that the war with Iran is not World War II. The entire globe is not at war, and this is mostly a U.S. operation. Iran has not conquered most of a continent. It is not the same kind of threat as Nazi Germany.

However, while Iran’s crimes are a mere fraction of what Nazi Germany actually did, realize this—in terms of INTENTIONS, Iran makes Hitler look like an amateur.

Iran is a fascist theocracy that seeks to impose Shia Islam on the entire world. It funds terror across the globe. Like Nazi Germany, Iran seeks the extermination of all Jews. Unlike Nazi Germany, Iran seeks to forcibly convert or destroy Christians, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and most other religions, and it seeks to eradicate or drive underground the world’s LGBTQ+ community. Worst of all, Iran desperately seeks nuclear weapons so that it can detonate them on U.S. and Israeli soil, and precipitate Armageddon so that the Twelfth Imam will arise from a well in Qom and conquer what is left of the world for Shia Islam.

That’s what we’re up against.

But the Washington Post does not care because Trump.

The ghosts of Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings smile knowingly:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEEDS OF THE PARTY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE, COMRADE:

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

WAR ON MEN:

Related:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: Morality Tales.

As part of the recent Bookforum symposium on the future of fiction, the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh penned a brief and extremely eloquent polemic against didactic fiction. That it’s being so heavily circulated, especially by fiction writers, suggests that Moshfegh hit on a touchy topic:

I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves.

Wait, who is staffing those “murderous corporations and exploitative industries?”

Khachiyan’s tweet concludes:

It’s not “murderous corporations and exploitative industries” that poisoned culture either, but activist-brained cultural commissars who resent excellence and want to eliminate the competition using flimsy political pretexts so they can feel like Good People.

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018: Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.

The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.

What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.

The madness of 2020 was already hoving into view back then.

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

HE SAYS THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING: Hunter Biden’s Lawyer: DOJ Would Not Have Prosecuted Without Pressure From IRS Whistleblowers.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer asserted that the Justice Department was on the cusp of a “non-prosecution resolution” with his client had it not been for the two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers.

IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler had alleged the Justice Department slow-walked the probe of the 46th president’s son. Shortly after going public with their concern, attorney Abbe Lowell said federal prosecutors changed course.

The Daily Signal obtained documents from the Justice Department about the prosecution of Hunter Biden for tax and gun charges through a Freedom of Information Act request. A Delaware jury convicted Hunter, but his father, President Joe Biden, pardoned him shortly before leaving office.

In an Aug. 14, 2023, letter to special counsel David Weiss, Lowell complained that prosecutors made a complete reversal.

“Before the May 2023 leaks, discussions with your Office involved a consensual non-prosecution resolution to all conduct under investigation, where the resolution proposed by both sides did not include any guilty plea,” Lowell wrote.

But he wrote that changed after Shapley was interviewed by CBS News.

Isn’t that how whistleblowing is supposed to work?

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

CHINA SYNDROME:

Posted at 7:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

“LATTE TOWN” ENTERS DOOM LOOP:

Also contributing to the descent of what David Brooks dubbed “Latte Town” in the mid-1990s is more than a soupçon of antisemitism: How Vermont Became Ground Zero for the Anti-Israel Movement.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

As InstaPundit readers know, Syracuse has been a dumpster fire for years.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds