July 12, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE SECRET POLICEMAN’S BALLS (Or the Lack Thereof):

More in this X thread:

 

The late Steven Den Beste had Amnesty’s number back in 2003:

I use the ACLU’s Skokie decision because Amnesty International now faces exactly the same decision. But Amnesty International is selling out. It’s making the popular decision, not the right one popular with its membership, even though it’s inconsistent and unprincipled. Unlike the ACLU, AI is demonstrating that when the cards are down, its soul is for sale.

In the case of AI, they too are dealing with a subscriber base whose political opinions don’t totally agree with the stated principles of the organization. They tend to be from the hard leftists, the same demographic who have been strongly protesting the war. And in particular, many of them seem to be protesting the war simply because it’s America that’s fighting it; their real principle is anti-Americanism, not pro-peace. (Indeed, it’s not uncommon to hear them say that they’d support a war to remove Saddam from power, as long as it wasn’t America doing it.)

It may well be that AI has, in the past, tried to bring attention to the abuses of the Baathist regime. But all this happened before the political question of an American invasion of Iraq became important.

The principled thing for AI to do now would be to issue an honest report about the situation. It would say that America may have committed a small number of war crimes but was clearly making a very serious attempt to avoid harming civilians or to break the laws of war, while the Iraqi regime was totally ignoring the Geneva Convention and was actively committing immense atrocities. The report would conclude with a blanket condemnation of Saddam and the rest of the Iraqi regime.

And that would alienate a large percentage of AI’s contributing membership, because many members would view this not as AI telling the truth, but as AI siding with America, “the true terrorist nation”, the biggest rogue nation on earth, the rapacious over-consumer of resources, and so on ad nauseam. Not to mention being seen as siding with George Bush, and you can fill in your own list of epithets about him.

It’s not going too far to say that many of Amnesty International’s members have approximately as strongly negative of feelings now about America and George Bush as the ACLU’s members had about the Nazis when the ACLU defended them in Skokie.

* * * * * * * *

It’s because a large percentage of AI’s membership hates America and would cease making contributions if AI actually took a principled stand and told the truth. So Amnesty International, and other groups like it, are facing the same decision that the ACLU did in Skokie. But unlike the ACLU, they’re demonstrating moral cowardice, and letting mercenary issues overrule principle.

Since telling the truth would cost them, they aren’t doing so. Instead, they’re pandering. Since staying true to their stated principles would cost them, they’ve discarded their principles.

The fact that in the past AI has written so often about Iraqi abuses makes their current silence all the more damning.

They’ve come a long way since the days of celebrities toasting “to freedom” — and not in a good way. As Conquest’s second law of politics states, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

COMMUNIST SEEKS TO MEMORY HOLE MOLOTOV–RIBBENTROP PACT:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

LINDSEY GRAHAM’S FINEST MOMENT:

The sudden passing of Senator Lindsey Graham at the age of 71 on Sunday morning prompted many reflections on his long and immensely influential career in public life.

Among them, Graham’s impassioned support for Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

Tweet concludes, “‘To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.’ Rest in peace.”

As Noah Rothman writes, “Yes, it was a fiery exchange that summoned a lot of theatrics. But Graham channeled a sentiment that both animated and united Republicans at a time when the bitter debates over Donald Trump’s ascension to the top of the GOP’s ranks were still quite raw. It’s easy to forget the strength of the cultural currents against which Graham bravely struggled in this clip. Democrats probably hope that you’ve forgotten. The casual bigotry they promulgated, the sordid and baseless allegations they made, not just against Kavanaugh but anyone who shared his accidents of birth, would become features of the ‘woke’ discourse that was soon to consume the country. At no point, even today, could any of Kavanaugh’s accusers place him in a room with his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, much less establish the claim that he had participated in ‘gang rape.’ Nevertheless, his guilt was assumed. Even Kavanaugh’s efforts to defend himself against what he claimed were false allegations were held up as further evidence of his guilt.”

Posted at 10:54 am by Ed Driscoll

IT CERTAINLY FEELS THAT WAY LATELY:

Posted at 10:13 am by Stephen Green

GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT: A $20M Ridley Scott-Style Epic Just Beat James Gunn’s Superhero Movie at the Box Office. “Telling the story of George Washington as he tests his honor, loyalty and courage by fighting in the French and Indian War long before he became the first President of the United States, Young Washington had a reported budget of just $20 million and is distributed by Angel Studios, which historically debuts films within strategic release windows.”

They also know their audience and do that old-timey Hollywood thing of actually catering to it.

I don’t know what James Gunn’s DC Comics movies are supposed to be, and I’m not sure he does, either.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

THAT’S A BAD 24 HOURS:

A friend in the industry can barely mention Sam Altman without adding “snake-oil salesman.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

R.I.P. LINDSEY GRAHAM:

He has his fans and detractors, but for me his best moment was his insouciant response to being followed by shrieking harridans during the Kavanaugh confirmation.

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Posted at 8:15 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE HISTORY PROFESSION IS QUESTIONABLE: A Decorated Historian’s Research Comes Under Fire.

A major publisher appeared to pull a prizewinning history book about a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family and its role in the abolitionist movement, after several scholars accused the author of misleading readers about details that were central to what reviewers had described as a groundbreaking narrative.

The book, “The Grimkes,” and its author, the historian Kerri K. Greenidge, received widespread acclaim when the book was released in 2022 by Liveright Publishing.

Glowing write-ups came pouring in, including from The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly, which named “The Grimkes” one of the 10 best books of 2022. In 2023, the American Historical Association awarded Greenidge with the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, which recognizes scholars in women’s history and feminist theory. . . .

In the review, Glenn noted that the book quoted letters exchanged between the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, “antebellum radicals who renounced their family heritage to campaign for abolitionism, racial equality, and women’s rights,” while the siblings discussed their biracial nephews.

But Glenn asserted in her review that the University of Michigan did not possess the letters in its archive, despite the book’s claims that they were kept there.

Glenn also disputed Greenidge’s account of an 1838 attack on Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia by an anti-abolitionist mob, which indicated that the Grimke sisters “led thousands of antislavery women through prayer” and helped them escape the “flaming building.”

“But as numerous sources have documented, no one was in the building when it was torched since antislavery activists cancelled a scheduled meeting, fearing impending violence,” Glenn wrote.

Shades of Michael Bellesiles, whose Arming America, which had the astonishing thesis that guns in colonial America were rare and usually held by the government in armories, won a lot of awards but was ultimately found to be full of lies, including references to nonexistent archival sources.

But as a white male, Bellesiles didn’t have access to this tactic: “In an interview on Friday, Greenidge, who is Black, said that her life’s work had been torn down by white scholars who disagreed with her conclusions about racism, slavery and white supremacy.”

Plus, this doesn’t inspire confidence: “She criticized the university’s peer review panel, which she said included two senior historians whom she described as hostile toward Black women in academia. She did not name them. She said that the university’s review was prompted by the complaints from a white woman scholar, whom she also declined to name. She said that she had sought a restraining order against that scholar.”

Puhleez. Race doesn’t excuse fraud, plagiarism, or even sloppy scholarship. And people who think it does have no business in academia.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds