I hope life treats you kind, and I hope you have all you’ve tabbed of …
You’re the one who campaigned with that twitch streamer and won’t denounce him. Who tried to equate a radical Muslim running a truck into a Jewish pre-school with the IDF killing a Hezbollah member in Lebanon. Who said many of your own supporters were warm toward Ayatollah… https://t.co/5Z0WIC3b25
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 25, 2026
Who said many of your own supporters were warm toward Ayatollah Khamenei. Own it.
Ed: El-Sayed literally campaigned with Piker and provided him a platform and podium for his odious politics. Rogers will likely debate El-Sayed at some point, but right now, El-Sayed’s melting down and Piker is making it worse. Why would Rogers interfere with that by providing a distraction?
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Noah Rothman at NRO: The minimally curious should by now have grappled with the medical literature that finds young people suffering from gender dysphoria do not, on balance, experience positive mental health outcomes as a result of surgical or pharmaceutical interventions. Indeed, their conditions often worsen. El-Sayed and others should be expected to have surveyed the landscape in Europe, where the public health apparatus expresses increasing uncertainty about the value of those interventions.
They should recognize, at the very least, the political peril associated with their incuriosity, especially if they’re running for office. It’s not too much to expect candidates to familiarize themselves with the public’s anxieties toward biological males playing in women’s sports or the increasing episodes of violence attributed to gender dysphoric personalities.
If El-Sayed had acquainted himself with even the basic contours of the issue, he probably wouldn’t have struck the condescending posture he adopted on Monday night. Instead, he smirked his way through an exhibition of profound ignorance — a display that was not masked by the candidate’s obviously practiced and admittedly expert Barack Obama impression — that conveyed only his contempt for the concerns shared by a majority of Americans, including a plurality of Democrats.
Ed: Noah also briefly mentions the nuanced antisemitism El-Sayed indulged by bringing up circumcision at all. That’s a good point, one I missed in my earlier post, although circumcision is widely practiced in the US for a variety of reasons. The widespread nature of that practice is yet another way in which El-Sayed made himself a fringe voice.
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🚨 WOW… ABDUL EL-SAYED ROASTED FOR SAYING IT’S “WHITE SUPREMACY” TO OPPOSE SHARIA LAW 🚨
MUST WATCH 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/TSUuLGd1p1
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) August 25, 2026
Ed: Shari’a law is Islamic supremacy, intentionally and explicitly so. And it has nothing to do with “canon law,” either. Canon law applies to Catholics, by the way, not all Christians (believe me, the Protestants will explain that very clearly), and only applies to the practice of their faith. Shari’a law is not just a theological code for practicing faith; it is a political system that becomes enforceable statute. This entire exchange is a disaster, right up to the point where Watters rebuts El-Sayed’s claim that Mike Rogers is ducking Watters.
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Ira Stoll at The Free Beacon: Anti-Jewish hate crimes outnumber anti-Muslim hate crimes about seven to one, according to FBI crime statistics. Yet the New York Times is offering its readers a different view of the relative seriousness of the issues. The newspaper—which the Israeli government says “consistently demonizes and delegitimizes the Jewish State and publishes false blood libels against the State of Israel”—has escalated its coverage of supposed anti-Muslim bias to the point that, by some measures and at some times, the volume exceeds or roughly equals Times coverage of anti-Jewish bias.
Critics accuse the Trump administration and supporters of Israel of “weaponizing antisemitism,” a frequently groundless charge that is shorthand for the assertion that the antisemitism complaint is being used to silence criticism of Israel and also as a pretext for an authoritarian crackdown. Yet some of the Times coverage seems to engage in—to borrow a phrase—weaponizing Islamophobia, using the hate label in an attempt to silence criticism of Islamist extremism, of Muslim-dominated countries, or of support for terrorism. …
For numerically inclined readers, the FBI reports 8,236 hate crimes with anti-Jewish bias in the U.S. over the past 5 years, and 1,170 hate crimes with anti-Islamic or anti-Muslim bias. That’s about 7 times more anti-Jewish hate crimes than anti-Muslim ones.
If you search the NYTimes.com archive, over the past year, “anti-Jewish” gives 1,089 results and “anti-Muslim” 1,012 results. Antisemitism yields 1,368 results and Islamophobia 704 results. Islamophobic yields 678 results; antisemitic, 1,202 results. Anti-Catholic gets 826 results in the last year, and Anti-Christian 1,051 results.
Ed: I reject the use of the word “Islamophobia” in the first instance. A phobia is an irrational fear that rises to a level of incapacitation in some degree. The Left keeps inventing words with “-phobia” in it to silence debate on legitimate topics, including “transphobia” as well as “Islamophobia.” Islamist terrorism inside and outside the US is a completely rational concern, especially when Islamist advocates like Hasan Piker suggest that Jews will get attacked if they speak out in their own defense or in support of Israel.
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El-Sayed has implied multiple times now that ICE should be abolished and replaced with INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) which was split up by Congress after 9/11 because they felt one agency handling immigration applications, border security, and deportations was too… https://t.co/MaIiqxKquT
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) August 25, 2026
… and deportations was too much on its plate and detrimental to national security.
As a result, CBP (border security), ICE (interior enforcement/deportations), and USCIS (naturalization/asylum etc) now operate as separate agencies under the same DHS umbrella.
But INS was still conducting immigration enforcement and deportations. So this would essentially be replacing ICE with….ICE.
Ed: In fairness, El-Sayed is not the only Democrat with this problem; practically all of them are incoherent on this point. A few of the radicals are at least consistent in that they don’t want borders secured or immigration laws enforced, but they don’t want ICE, which would then require replacing the existing agency with another agency with the exact same mission and resources. It’s just a renaming exercise.
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Chris McDaniel on Facebook: The pattern has become familiar. A longstanding social norm exists. Progressives challenge it and insist that the proposed change is limited. Conservatives resist and are told they’re overreacting. The change is adopted. Then the next demand arrives. The ground moves again. Eventually conservatives stop retreating, organize serious resistance, and announce that there are some things they simply won’t surrender.
At that point, the resistance itself is called radical.
That’s how political language gets turned upside down.
It’s true that today’s conservative movement is angrier than it was twenty years ago. It’s more skeptical of universities, corporations, federal agencies, the national press, and even the Republican establishment. But that skepticism didn’t materialize out of thin air. People watched institutions they once trusted become increasingly hostile to their values. They watched political leaders promise one thing at election time and do another once safely back in office. They watched every compromise become the starting point for the next demand. …
We aren’t asking America to commence upon some unprecedented social experiment. In most cases, we’re asking for things Americans took for granted within living memory: secure borders, equal treatment under the law, parental authority, recognition of biological reality, fiscal restraint, public safety, free speech, religious liberty, constitutional government, and a culture confident enough to defend its own inheritance.
Ed: McDaniels was a state senator in Mississippi until recently. A friend forwarded it to me today, and it’s worth reading in full. McDaniels isn’t the only one pointing this out today, either.
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Since 2016, mainstream news media, university professors, and Democratic politicians have argued that Trump and the Republicans grew extreme and that their extremism drove America’s polarization.
Ezra Klein, now a New York Times columnist, advanced this idea in his 2020 book,… pic.twitter.com/zipNTIyp4v
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 25, 2026
… In February, researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found the opposite of the conventional wisdom. “Right-leaning Americans have remained fairly stable in their positions for the last 35 years,” said senior author Lee de-Wit, who runs the lab, “and may feel left behind as half the country has shifted towards an ever more progressive outlook on many issues.”
Ed: Click through to read the rest, and then to Shellenberger’s Substack for more. McDaniels doesn’t cite data, but Shellenberger fills that gap ably.
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Natalie Winters: The recovered ads promoted COVID shots for children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers while a 247.7-million-message monitoring system shaped the campaign’s talking points.
The federal government funded an $80 million project that paid 496 social-media influencers to promote COVID vaccines.
The project’s own report disclosed the existence of these influencers, but it never named them.
I traced Instagram paid-partnership labels, #ad captions, reposts and archived advertising records to identify 57 accounts connected to apparently sponsored campaign content.
The recovered posts reveal what the government-funded vaccine push looked like inside people’s feeds…
Ed: Interesting. I doubt there was anything criminal about this set-up, but to the extent that these influencers hid the income and connection to the program, it would at least be unethical. That’s worth disclosing, even belatedly.
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There are four data centers within 10 minutes of your Burlington, VT home: ClearBearing, Tech Vault, TelJet, and FirstLight.
Your home’s assessed value has risen from $360,000 to $760,000 since they were built.
Keep yelling at the clouds, old man. https://t.co/Xa2MjncAhr
— Bad Hombre (@Badhombre) August 22, 2026
Ed: The anti-data-center hysteria overlooks how the construction of commercial facilities can improve real estate prices and values … among many other aspects of local commerce. Not to mention how data centers provide the supply to meet the insatiably growing demand for data resources, especially among the younger generations that seem most opposed to them, led by old socialist cranks like Sanders.
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Douglas Murray at The Free Press: Since this is a question of conscience, perhaps it is worth outlining my own moral views from the outset. I have always been deeply opposed to the death penalty. Rather than explain every reason I have for opposing it, I’ll just say that I agree with the argument Albert Camus makes in his 1957 essay “Reflections on the Guillotine.” The problem is not only the possibility of wrongful convictions, and not just the taking of a life, but something perhaps even more cruel: putting a human mind in the position of knowing the place and time of its ending. A change comes upon a society when it permits this ultimate sanction.
Yet despite my deep, instinctive opposition to the practice, I still believe that there are times when it may be legitimate. Few people would deny that the Allies had the right after World War II not just to try and convict but also to hang the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The world needed to demonstrate this ultimate expression of revulsion for the crimes of the Nazi high command. And the new world that was to follow, which was being built by Allied victors and Holocaust survivors, could not afford to remain haunted by living Nazi leaders, who would have sustained a glimmer of faith in their movement despite living in captivity. …
The same principle may well be applied to the several hundred terrorists belonging to Hamas’s most gruesome fighting unit, the Nukhba Force, who were captured alive after breaking into Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023. Each of these men invaded Israel in order to murder, rape, torture, and kidnap. They represent a special type of evil.
But there is an additional justification for the execution of these terrorists which too few people outside of Israel appreciate. It is the fact that Israel will someday face the temptation to use the several hundred terrorists currently held in its maximum-security prisons as bargaining chips.
Ed: Again, read it all. I have gone back and forth on the death penalty in the context of criminal law, and I’m still conflicted on it there. When it comes to war or terrorism, however, I am far less conflicted. Those who choose war and terrorism should be adjudicated under those contexts, and the death penalty is appropriate for the latter especially. This confusion between war and law enforcement is why the plotters of 9/11 are still drawing breath 25 years later.
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50 years ago today! One of the great debut albums in history. Tom Scholz’s Rockman is legendary in guitar innovation but oh the songs and sweet sounds of grand master vocalist Brad Delp. ❤️🫡 pic.twitter.com/4qF9WjkSbB
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) August 25, 2026
Ed: Wow. I feel old. This is a monster album, one I play occasionally but not often enough. If you get the chance, watch Rick Beato’s YouTube episode on “More Than a Feeling” to discover just how amazing a vocalist Delp truly was.
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The Atlantic: Last Tuesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei hosted a wake for his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Among the thousands who thronged Tehran’s biggest mosque were the country’s most prominent political figures and several of the elder Khamenei’s sons. One person was notably absent: Mojtaba, the event’s official host.
Almost six months since his anointment, Iran’s supreme leader has been entirely obscured from the public eye. Not a single contemporaneous picture, video, or audio recording of him has been released. Many of the country’s top political leaders admit that they haven’t seen him—among them Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister and a member of the National Security Council. IranWire, a London-based opposition outlet, reports that not a single cabinet member has met with Mojtaba since he became supreme leader.
Not even Mojtaba’s close friends and relatives have seen him. Fewer than five people have met with Mojtaba since his ascent to power, Mohammad Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official and a relative of Mojataba’s told me, “due to security precautions.”
Ed: The Cardboardatollah is dead, baby, deader than Zed.
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A message from the family of Dolly Parton. pic.twitter.com/9DNRgRx0uH
— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) August 25, 2026
Ed: Rest in peace, sweet lady, and thank you so much for all of your joy, kindness, grace, and entertainment for just about my entire life.
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If there was ever a civilian deserving of half-mast and a national period of mourning, it would be our Queen, Dolly the Great.
A great life, well lived, and lived well.
Thank you Mrs. Parton. https://t.co/h0Tgr5tSZY
— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) August 25, 2026
Ed: Amen.
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Last night’s lyric: “Born to Be Alive” by Patrick Hernandez.
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