Bjorn Lomborg at PragerU: Where Have All The Climate Alarmists Gone?

Universities Threaten Disciplinary Action Against Students Who Refuse to Use "Transgender" Newspeak

That is, if they use the actual name of a "transgender," or refer to that person using the correct pronouns.

"Trans" Newspeak calls these things "deadnaming" and "misgendering."

Eric Boehm: "I played a game simulating the outcome of the '28 election--here's how it went"

What a nightmare.

I'm still rooting for some kind of moderate health crisis to get Trump out of office.

Unfortunately, he seems healthy as a horse.

It's a long shot...but more likely than Trump suddenly becoming reasonable.

Although I see the left--which is playing the long game, and devoted to thought-control and its "Long March Through the Institutions"--as the greater threat, I think a spasm of violence and overt theft of the Presidency as more likely to come from the right.

"Why 'Woke 1' Failed Seems So Obvious Now"

These people are still cracked.

"Woke 1," you see, was land acknowledgements, nuking Thanksgiving, and spelling 'folks' folx...

Ha ha that was crazy!

Except it was all right...that is, correct...politically correct...it was just annoying and didn't go anywhere...the U.S. is still a genocidal shithole...but we can't do anything about it..

   Not mentioned by the author: gender ideology (women have penises, men have babies, brainwashing and sexually mutilating children, insane men in women's restrooms, locker rooms, sports, shelters, prisons...), critical race theory and its penumbra of lunacy (all whites are racist by definition, it is impossible for non-whites to be racist by definition, the U.S. is made of racism ("systemic," "structural," "institutional"...and, of course, definitional...) open borders + no enforcement of immigration laws once illegals are inside our borders, abolish ICE, etc., "depolicing," "decarceration," and "equity" in charging and conviction, yielding a racialized, two-tier "justice" system, rampant "cancellation," crushing of free speech, politicization of everything, DEI, DEI, DEI (preferential hiring, mandatory indoctrination sessions for everyone, etc.), "social constructionism" about everything, the politicization of all our institutions including academia, Lysenkoism, i.e. the subordination of science to leftist lunacy...and, in fact, the subordination of everything to leftist lunacy....just for starters.

   As Chris Bray has said, this is an attempt to effect some kind of reset without really admitting error...and without abandoning any of the most insane ideas and principles of the Cult.

"U.S. Universities are Sliding into Decline"

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I thought I was reading something from a decent source...but about 1/3 of the way through I realized it was pretty much crap...and realized it was from the Washington Monthly...

   It doesn't address the most important problems with academia--politicization, vocationalization, and lack of rigor. Cost is a big problem--though if universities actually delivered what they promise--or suggest that they're promising--it wouldn't be. If universities really did transform students for the better, they might be worth the cost. But they probably don't and they're probably not.

   Universities are eaten up with Woketarianism--which is the approximate intellectual and moral equivalent of Scientology. Grade inflation is rampant--largely because [a] student evaluations of instructors are rampant, easier grades mean easier eval scores, and hiring and promotion largely depend on such scores; and [b] high grades mean happy students, and happy students mean less work for the instructor. A colleague who went to grad school at Harvard told me that there giving 'A's was a conscious strategy among grad students--to some extent to get good evals, but mostly so that time didn't have to be wasted on grading. No student questions an 'A'...

   As for universities getting less federal funding: well, stop with the DEI and Woketarian indoctrination. Fact is, universities value those things more even than they value federal $$...which, lemme tell you, they value a lot.

   As for faculty looking to move to other countries: a lot of that is probably because they're leftists, and looking for lefty cred for pretending to flee from Trump. Lemme know if there's ever an actual wave of faculty emigration.

   But, then, I didn't sleep and I'm cranky.

Luther Ray Abel: The President is an Idiot

Ugh.

This is more and more difficult to deny.

I've had trouble reconciling his apparent stupidity with the fact that he's been right about so many things--and he's been right about many of them for a long, long time...

Maybe there's just no reconciling them.

Though it may be that he just can't stand to be opposed.

I dunno, man.

But I'm just sick to death of the guy.

Given one political wish, I might well use it to swap out Trump for Rubio.

David Strom: No, Jason Arday was Not Hounded to Death

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   As many (including me) have already said: to the extent that anyone but Arday is responsible for his death, it was the academic left and its DEI madness. Basically, the rules were suspended for him. He was credentialed and promoted far beyond his abilities because he was black. Oh, sorry: "Black." When it was discovered that he was a fraud, this was--eventually--widely reported. I'm sorry Arday killed himself. But he knew he was a fraud, and that he had no sound response to the evidence. Arday was put in this absurd position by leftist people, principles and policies that lower standards for blacks and other preferred minorities. In Arday's case, standards were basically thrown out the window. The left prefers: non-whites over whites, women over men, non-heterosexuals and other such people over heterosexuals. Demography is more important to them than merit. In fact, it's common on the academic left to claim that the very idea of merit is racist. Well, of course, everything is racist according to them.

   Matt Walsh makes a point in the post that many have made. It's an old point, and it's right...though I myself tend to avoid it: according to the principles of the left, only white men are really human. Humanity goes along with freedom and responsibility. But women and non-whites (except Jews!) tend to not be held responsible, hence are not really considered free. (It's a bit more complicated than that. White women are given preferred treatment over white men...but black men are preferred over white women... Black women are the best, of course... So freedom and responsibility are suspended selectively.) I avoid this point because--though correct--in a way it's saying: you're hurting blacks! But the left has to learn that not every reason must reduce to something about the welfare of blacks (or other preferred demographic groups). You might conceivably get them to concede the specific point via that argument...but it won't touch their fundamental confusions. They need to learn that blacks are not more important than whites, women are not more important than men, and non-heterosexuals (etc.) are not more important than heterosexuals. Blacks can be wrong. Whites can be right. Etc.

Fleccas: DSA "Women" Call for the Destruction of America

Tyler Austin Harper: Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Elite Academia [A Must-Read]

This dude is my new hero.

The Second Amendment Could Protect Owning Cannons, Heavily-Armed Ships

Now we're goddamn talkin'!

Alex Berenson on Jason Arday

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Colin Wright: How Many Girls on Testosterone is Too Many?

I was explaining to a progressive friend once that the number of unarmed black men per year killed by police was not in the tens of thousands, as many in her faction believed, but closer to 10. Her response: "one is too many"...

   There should be a name for this fallacy. The "one is too many" fallacy? Not exactly snappy?

   One is regrettable--but for almost any major type of phenomenon, it isn't "too many." Not in the sense that it's too many to continue doing things the way we are doing them, anyway. Unfortunately, almost now matter how rational and effective a way of doing things is, if you do it enough, some people will die from it. Some people die from exercising every year. That's regrettable. But it isn't "too many." Not too many for us to continue exercising, anyway... If we stopped doing everything that caused more than zero deaths, that would be the end of not only civilization, but human beings.

   However, we're not talking one case here.

   Rather: in Oregon, 1 out of 240 girls with health insurance is on testosterone.

   That, you see, is way too many.

   I'd say that 1 in 10,000 might possibly be defensible...but that's just based on...well, nothing, really. That's just the number I'd choose if I had to pick on out of thin air.

   And, of course, since I think this psychotic gender lunacy is the utterest bullshit...I guess I kinda do think one is too many in this case...

Brittany Berstein: How "Gender Transitions" for Minors Became a Lucrative Business

To the tune of about $120 million...

I guess I'm naive, but I've always been skeptical of the claim that medical transanity was about money. It seems to me that these people are true believers--they are passionately, ideologically, quasi-religiously devoted to this web of lunatic ideas.

There's No Such Thing as "Woke 2.0"

Just because the left declares something doesn't make it so.

And, of course: they have strategic reasons for declaring it.

My guess:

They want to basically declare by fiat that there's a sane version of Woketarianism...

...and that that's what they're advocating now.

So, see: they're not responsible for any of that crazy shit from the last decade...

....but they're not abandoning it, either...

Remember: Woketarianism is just political correctness + 35 years of extra crazy. It's more grounded in critical theory than in postmodernism. And it adds transanity to its obsession with non- and anti-heterosexuality. The PC holy trinity was race, sex, and class. The Woketarian trinity is race, "gender," and...I dunno, something else. Can't currently remember my own ranting points.

Hey, remember "dark woke"?

That was fun for like two weeks.

It was woke + cursing.

I'm trying to get "wokemaxxing" to catch on.

I don't really know what it would be...just sounds like regular woke (i.e. crazymaxxing) to me...

Longtime Dem Council and Strategist Julian Epstein: Why the Democrat Party has Gone to Hell: Postmodern Liberalism

Jason Arday Found Dead; "Unexpected but Not Suspicious"

link

I'm sorry for the guy.

I'm sure his loony lefty defenders will try to, as they say, "weaponize" this against his critics, and sane people generally.

But the fact is: he was not in any way qualified for the Cambridge position. And none of this would have happened if the DEI cult had not elevated him to a position that he could not possibly have maintained for long. An even minimally competent and objective mentor...or friend...or colleague...would have told him long ago that he was on a crash trajectory...

In a very real way, Jason Arday is dead because of his race. He wasn't really a scholar to the people who elevated him beyond the limits of his abilities. He wasn't really a person. He was just black. That's all they cared about.

Chris Bray on "Woke 1" / "Woke 2.0" Shenanigans

link

So I've warned many times that we thought we beat political correctness--i.e. Woke 0--back in the '90s...but, of course, we were wrong. It just retreated into universities until it had brainwashed enough students to then burst forth again ca. 2014, even crazier than it was before. But PC Phase 1 / Woke 0 had been mostly limited to campus...PC2 / "Woke 1" nearly took over the Western world...

   I've wondered here many times what the left's strategy would be for denying that they ever thought that women had penises--and that they had sexually mutilated children on the basis of gender pseudoscience... I still don't know what they'll do. Currently, they seem to be committed to just continuing to insist that the view is true, hoping that they'll be able to fend off the day of reckoning. They seem to think they can still win this--continuing to pretend that 2+2=5 forever...

   But I'm not sure I ever wondered how they would address this problem with Woketarianism generally.

   Well, they've launched a trial balloon. It looks like this:

Oh, woopsie! Ha ha ha! All that woke stuff was really just "woke 1"! So funny! Like those clothes we were wearing back in the '90s! Soooo embarrassing!...

   As Bray says, basically, the aim is to pretend that was all just a funny phase that didn't really do anything bad...and to suggest without saying it that there's a better version of Woketarianism that's serious and to be taken seriously and that can't be criticized for being, ya know, in-fucking-sane...

   PC/Woketarianism isn't dead. It's currently losing...but unless we continue to crush the life out of it, it'll just go on the offensive again. The "Woke 2.0" bullshit makes that clear--as if it wasn't before.

   And even if we eliminate all its gains--which is unlikely--it's just going to do what it did before--retreat into universities, fester, hone its lunatic rhetorical tricks, and emerge again (perhaps crazier than ever, perhaps in some more moderate guise) a few years hence.

   Also note that AOC only admits that the "rhetoric" of "woke 1" was defective. She doesn't admit that they were wrong about anything substantive...

Trump Orders Navy to Go Back to Steam Catapults

facepalm

Well, after a decade of the left insisting that Trump is literally Hitler...finally, an actual Hitlerian act: micromanaging military technology as if he actually knew something about it.

I disagree with Mark Kelly a lot--but this pretty much sums it up:

“I’ve launched off the front of aircraft carriers hundreds of times, have a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and am a test pilot, and even I wouldn’t suggest to the Navy how to engineer specific systems on its ships,” ...

And, look: I'm no expert, but seems to me that glitches are basically expected in new systems. You put up with them so that you find out how to eliminate them in future versions of the system.

Oh, wait--I forgot about the "Trump-class battleships"...so there's another, earlier example...

[To be perfectly clear: I'm not saying that Trump is wrong about catapults...I'm saying that he doesn't know enough to make the decision.]

"Protestors" Receive Decades-Long Sentences for ICE Facility "Clash"

Et tu, WSJ?

More accurate title:

Antifa Terrorists Receive Decades-Long Sentences in ICE Facility Attack

A quote, corrected:

Brissette said Morris and her his family were devastated by the 50-year sentence she he received for rioting and providing material support to terrorists, among other charges, and planned to appeal the decision.

Mr. Morris is a man pretending to be a woman.

I expect the rest of the MSM to distort its stories in order to kowtow to leftist Lysenkoism...but I expect better from WSJ...

Anonymous: How Working at a Los Angeles Homeless Shelter Drove Me Away From The Far Left

I've run into quite a few stories like this.

My current view is basically: scrap all such blue-team social programs.

It's a sledgehammer approach...but it's better than funneling our tax dollars to the leftist-industrial complex.

As I said with the Iraq war: better to put the money in a big pile and burn it.

Access Granted: Flying the 5EX Eagle

TFP: Former DSA Organizer Explains How Radical the DSA and the Rest of the Left Are

Yeah, I was just starting to write this post while I was still watching the video. He was saying that the DSA has a two-tiered structure, with radicals setting the agenda and running the show, and a far-less-radical majority that either doesn't realize or refuses to admit that the radicals run the show...

I was yelling at the screen: "That's the whole left! Not just the DSA!"

But almost immediately, Altman started making just that point--I could have just waited.

As Altman says--and I've said for years--that's the Democrat base now.

Jimmy Carter on the Need to Show ID to Vote

It's the same story over and over and over again: the left has moved farther and farther from reasonable centrism in my lifetime, rocketing off the edge of sanity over the course of the last decade or so. As others have said: conversations with progressives now consist largely in them pretending not to understand things that everyone understands. Thus we find ourselves trying to explain to them that women don't have penises, men can't have babies, children should not be indoctrinated with fetishistic sexual perversions, the USA is not composed entirely of racism, not all whites are racist, some nonwhites are racist, nations need borders, speech is not violence, words have meanings and you can't simply change them at will, some things are true and others are false...and on and on and on...:

Jimmy Carter in 2005 on voter ID: "It will not restrict people from voting."

He even described Voter ID as “a move forward in getting more people to vote."

Republicans need to share this video far and wide. Voter ID was bipartisan then. It should be bipartisan now. pic.twitter.com/szZarfscjw

— Jenn Pellegrino 🇺🇸 (@JennPellegrino) August 6, 2026

Aaron Brown: Oft-Cited Lancet USAID Study; the Math Doesn't Add Up

First locally-acquired case of Dengue fever in VA

link

First NBA Player Declares for the WNBA

Girl, get some. https://t.co/zNuINnOlHV

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) August 7, 2026

Strassel: Can Democrats Resist Socialism?

Well, they couldn't resist Woketarianism...which is far crazier than socialism...so...I'm not optimistic...

   I've long predicted that the Dems will revert to sanity...any day now!...any week!...

   Shows what the hell I know.

Strassel:

For more than a decade, the Democratic Party has been stuck in a reactive anti-Trump loop, made worse by its unwillingness to offend its extreme leftist base. So instead of offering a full-throated defense of traditional Democratic ideals and criticizing socialism, they sit silent as the left pulls the party ever further.

Yeah, well, the problem is that extreme leftist base.

   It's already absorbed most of the insane woke agenda. What's a little more crazy on top of it? Socialism is nuts...but about 1/10th as nuts as Woketarianism. Once you get your faction to believe--or pretend to believe--the women have penises...just about everything else is sane by comparison...

   The smart play for the Dems is probably to squash the DSA insurgents and proclaim a return to sanity and centrism...and hope people fall for it. That is: hope that you've moved the Overton Window enough that people fall for it...

   Of course we have to work to make sure that shit does. not. work.

   Going insane, then pretending to be sane again because you kicked some very-slightly-more-crazy people out of your party...no way, dude.

   The best thing that can happen to the Dems--and for the country--is for them to get absolutely crushed in '28. I don't see what else stands any chance of slapping sense back into them.