I would click any tabbie, surf across the stormy web …
I ran into a “Republicans for Talarico” type lady here once, came into my replies talking about how she was a lifelong conservative Republican voter who’d been forced to support Democrats because of how radical the Republican Party had become, so I searched her history and found… https://t.co/9k6DEAjPBY
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) August 10, 2026
… stuff with her talking about how she’d left the Republican Party because it was too radical… in 2008. Because John McCain was too radical for her.
Ed: Ah, the memories. Remember the heady days of 2007-8, when John McCain was going to blow up the world and was the leading Nazifasciststinkybottom? The Democrats and the Left were running these same kind of “Republicans For [Insert Dem Name]” scams back then, too, and even with George W. Bush.
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Daily Wire: “Republicans for Talarico is as real as the six genders that Talarico claims exist, but has yet to explain what they are. This lame rebrand of White Dudes for Kamala is full of lifelong Democrat donors, activists, and other losers,” RNC spokesman Zach Kraft said in a statement to The Daily Wire.
That “rebrand” was put on display earlier this month when MS NOW aired a segment from the political show “Long Play,” featuring three white women from Tarrant County who portrayed themselves as disgruntled conservatives eager to vote for one of the most liberal candidates in Texas to run for federal office. The exchange went viral after Talarico’s campaign seized on the segment, dubbing the women “Republican Moms.”
During the segment, former school board candidate Mindy McClure described herself as a “moderate Republican,” but as the saying goes, follow the money. Federal Election Commission filings show McClure has repeatedly given through ActBlue to Democratic candidates and anti-Trump groups dating back to 2018, including the Lincoln Project and Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.
Ed: The irony is that we’re likely to see more Dems flipping sides this year, thanks to the radical DSA takeover of the party. These kinds of scams are pre-emptive narratives for the media, and for the gullible. They exist so that the Protection Racket Media can frame Republicans as either radical or “pouncing.”
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I just found this clip of Zohran Mamdani on an Arab podcast, admitting that he fooled white liberals
Progressive ideology is just a tool
His real priority? “Identity” pic.twitter.com/cj9TrN3ryu
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 10, 2026
Ed: White progressives are basically the equivalent of Lenin’s “useful idiots.” The “idiot” part is pretty obvious already.
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Off the stump, Mr. Osborn passes the political test of a guy you’d like to have a beer with. He is loose, chatty, goofy and prone to saying stuff that would give the average campaign consultant a heart attack.
What a blast from the past! The New York Times hasn’t pulled out the infamous “beer test” for a political candidate since May 22, 2015, when it ran this story …
The “beer test” was once a massively overused campaign reporting cliché. It grew out of a Sam Adams ad campaign in the 2000 race, and from Bush-Gore through the 2016 cycle it was nearly impossible to escape “beer test” coverage. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 beer test by default — it was hard to imagine Hillary Clinton having a beer at all — leading even Slate to pronounce “there has never been and perhaps never will be a candidate you’d be more eager to have a beer with than Donald Trump.”
When Trump won, it led pundits to rush out pieces explaining the beer test is no bueno, especially in races involving female candidates, and therefore “it doesn’t matter which candidate you’d rather have a beer with,” as ABC proclaimed during the 2024 cycle. Writers like Yascha Mounk of the Atlantic by then had already tried introducing a replacement called the “Inverted Likeability Test.” It never caught on.
Ed: This is another fascinating walk through history with Matt, well worth the time (and he’s well worth the subscription price). He explains that the real origin of the beer test wasn’t an expression of populism, but that it started as a way for reporters to make themselves the arbiters of populism. The application of the beer test to Kamala Harris, Matt writes, was “ironic on several levels,” and Hot Air readers will easily grasp why. Hic.
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Joe Scarborough looks visibly sickened as he hears DSA co-chair Megan Romer say October 7th was “largely inevitable” and admit she “probably would have” attended a pro-Hamas rally the day after the massacre.
Even MSNBC couldn’t stomach this one.
SCARBOROUGH: “The co-chair of… pic.twitter.com/lmtGxsXhnn
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) August 10, 2026
SCARBOROUGH: “The co-chair of the DSA supported going to a pro-Hamas rally the day after Hamas gleefully slaughtered more Jews on October 7th than any day the Jews were slaughtered since the Holocaust.”
“This would be like going to a pro-al-Qaeda rally on September 12th, which I’m sure many people in the DSA would say, ‘Well, that would be perfectly fine.'”
Joe Scarborough left the GOP over Trump in 2017. Nine years later, he’s admitting his own side is full of people who would call a pro-al Qaeda rally on September 12th “perfectly fine.”
You have to wonder what’s going through this guy’s head right now.
Ed: Well, “even Morning Joe couldn’t stomach this one.” That show is an oasis of rational thought on M-SNOW. I’m not sure why this surprises anyone on the panel, though. The DSA has aligned with Hamas for years now, and is actively supporting candidates who support Islamists. Abdul El-Sayed’s father-in-law dumped millions into his campaign while maintaining ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Not only is it no surprise that the DSA supports Hamas’ massacre, but most of them also rationalized 9/11 the same way as “inevitable” results of foreign policies.
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John Ondrasik in the WaPo: Then there are our colleagues in the music industry, particularly global icons, who have been moral cowards on a historic scale. Virtually every artist I shared the stage with at “The Concert for New York City” after 9/11, who stood for America 25 years ago, has been silent (or worse) in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
It was thus understandable that Boy George, after the Bandcamp music platform recently removed “We Will Dance Again,” accused its operators of censorship. Bandcamp responded that they had done so because the song, as Boy George had acknowledged, used artificial intelligence in its composition. Whatever you think of AI, the practice is common in the music business these days. But that spat was a sideshow in the main story: the angry response to a song memorializing young people slaughtered at a music festival.
What makes Boy George so enraging to the haters is that he, like me, is not Jewish. That fact sends a signal: This is not a religious battle but a moral one. One of good versus evil, without relativity or equivocation. To the haters, that means Boy George must be ridiculed, marginalized or intimidated, lest he give license to others who might have been cowed into not voicing their support for the Jewish people.
In 1982, Boy George, with Culture Club, released the hit song “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” In this battle for civilization, the answer is, indisputably, yes. But he is unbowed, defiant, as he stands up for what’s right. Boy George: good man.
Ed: Christian and I discussed this essay in our OTBP episode today, and it turned into the main topic. (Well, after Paul Verhoeven, anyway.) John has demonstrated extraordinary courage in defending those targeted by terrorists for annihilation. The silence of most of his colleagues in the arts is damning. Be sure to read it all; it’s outside the normal WaPo paywall.
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The left thinks guys like Platner and Abdul whathisface are ‘masculine’ because they have effectively turned masculinity into a caricature. They don’t know it when they see it anymore pic.twitter.com/WJSPj4fPNJ
— Kira (@Kiradavis) August 11, 2026
Ed: I’ve been making this same point for weeks now. The Left has massive daddy issues, and as a result, its politicians and activists have no idea how mainstream America views actual masculinity. A couple of verbal-fried kooks in Manhattan created a character in Maine that showed how the Left sees masculinity in middle America – rapey, violent, rude, and lacking impulse control. Abdul El-Sayed is their attempt to outsource masculinity to Islamists. James Talarico is their aspirational model of masculinity, which is to say, soft and useless, still depending on Mommy’s checkbook at 37. This is what happens when an entire political movement grows up without effective fathers.
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Fr. Dwight Longenecker: Harper and Barker expose the idiocy of the left wing, woke elitist politicians and academics, but the same closed mindedness, bigotry, self righteousness, projection and shifting of blame occurs wherever ideology triumphs over theology. Right wing ideologues, religious ideologues, political ideologues will all drift into the same paranoid, tribalistic, cult like behaviors. I have written more about the cancer of ideological drift and its comparison to theology here.
The root problem here is not left wing lunacy or right wing radicalism or any other particular ideology. It is a deeper malaise that they all share. It is what I analyze in my book Immortal Combat and name as “the sin of the world”. The sin of the world is the resentment that derives from what Girard calls mimetic desire. Mimetic desire is a kind of envy on steroids, but all the more powerful because it operates below our level of conscious awareness. The whole woke ideology—like every ideology—is driven by mimetic desire—deep seated envy of the other which breeds resentment, which in turn breeds projection and blame, then the virtue flip happens— where I start to believe myself to be superior to the one I envy. I’m no longer the inferior “bad” person. He is, and if he is the bad guy then I must be the good guy.
Thus, “I may be poor, but at least I’m not greedy like that rich person!” Then once I am virtuous in my own estimation, I heap more vitriol and blame on the other and then it is not just that one rich (or white or brown or immigrant or resident or man or woman or Republican or Democrat etc. etc) person but all people in whatever category. Then I gather with other people who are in the same resentment loop and we vilify the perceived bad person or bad people together. Thus a tribe forms.
The next step is to take action because if we are the a good people and “they” are bad people what do good people do? They fight evil. They eliminate bad people.
Ed: I’ve thought a lot about these issues, too, and I’ll take it one step further. This is not just sin but Original Sin. The nihilistic desires of the woke Left (and maybe the woke Right too) reject the objective reality of the world and their ideologies promise to “fix” the world by contradicting its existing order. We see this most obviously in the efforts to ignore biological sex, but it also extends (contradictorily) to ethnic/racial determinism, on which both woke and every bigotry imaginable is founded.
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This is so inspiring. I’ve always said women should prioritize lifting and not just cardio. Good for her! https://t.co/SLkatPsZvG
— Brittany Hughes (@RealBrittHughes) August 11, 2026
Ed: Someone needs to remind Enes that he has to cover up the pecs now that he identifies as a woman.
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Free Beacon: Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once declared his sacred “obligation” to follow Sharia law in every aspect of his life until he meets his maker on the day he dies, according to unearthed comments he made to the New York Times in 2009 as a young man buying his first home.
“Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation,” said El-Sayed, who the Times identified at the time as a 24-year-old medical student and Rhodes scholar who had just taken out a “Sharia-compliant” mortgage to purchase a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor.
Sharia, or Islamic religious law, sets strict rules for living that include harsh restrictions on women and gruesome, medieval-era forms of criminal justice. Sharia law also prohibits the paying or earning of interest, a restriction that has led some banks to offer special mortgages for devout Muslims, like El-Sayed, which tack onto the principal what a typical borrower would pay in interest across the life of the loan.
The young El-Sayed’s expression of lifelong devotion to Sharia law takes new meaning following his narrow primary victory last week and raises the question of how much Sharia law continues to guide him.
Ed: Ya think? I may write more tomorrow about this, but I’ll say this for now – it sure looks like Mike Rogers, the NRSC, or both have already begun the general-election campaign. This should cinch the Dearbornistan vote for El-Sayed, though.
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An Amazon driver stopped to untangle and salute an American flag outside a Kentucky home Monday, a moment that deeply touched the military family who lives there.
“Thank you for reminding us that there are still people who understand what that flag represents,” homeowner Ange… pic.twitter.com/bg2FtoSOct— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 11, 2026
Ed: Your feel-good clip of the day.
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Last night’s lyric: “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel.
Editor’s Note: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight. If you’re digging these Final Word posts and want to join the conversation in the comments—and support independent platforms—why not join our VIP Membership program? Choose VIP to support Hot Air and access our premium content, VIP Gold to extend your access to all Townhall Media platforms and participate in this show, or VIP Platinum to get access to even more content and discounts on merchandise. Use the promo code FIGHT to join or to upgrade your existing membership level today, and get 60% off!
