If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage (Josephine Walker, 8/26/26, Axios)
Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night.
The Cruel Mercy of Truth (SEAN WALSH, 8/16/26, Country Squire)
The DEI machine has been running psychological operations against the public for decades now, using weaponry put together in the publicly funded but intellectually contaminated social science laboratories of our most respected universities. And we are not supposed to get to comment when the whole thing is shown to be fraudulent?
Addiction is much like this. It feeds off a need to recreate day-to-day fantasy vignettes, sometimes the more outlandish the better, because that way the agony that truth brings cannot prevail against it.
What happened to Arday was a kind of intervention. Those are brutal, harsh and painful and yet, when conducted in the right way and with love, purgative.
No one is more-ill-served by ideology than the adherents.
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Liberals and Conservatives Need a New Relationship with Minorities Like Jason Arday:
Both sides of the political spectrum have an unhealthy relationship with minorities. (Zaid Jilani, Aug 16, 2026, American Saga)
Conservatives obsessed with Arday’s case because they saw him as representative of negative trends in academia. Here was a black academic who specialized in racial theory who fudged his research. A story like that is crack-cocaine for the modern day British and American right. And where there’s demand, there’s coverage. There were hundreds of articles written in the British press about a singular academic and his misdeeds. While Arday’s behavior as an academic was clearly inappropriate, it’s hard to justify the disproportionate coverage of it. The man was being treated as if he was a supervillain. From his perspective, not only was his career finished but he was basically the Worst Man In the World.
But for conservatives, he was more than a man. He was a symbol of everything they’ve come to hate about Western culture. So he had to be made an example of. The fact he was clearly mentally unwell — we know, for instance, that he was on the autism spectrum — was not a consideration in the endless pile-on. Because for those who were crucifying Arday, the larger mission of winning the culture war was the ultimate goal.
(I don’t think it’s relevant to the accuracy of the charges against Arday, but an openly racist theorist, Nathan Cofnas, led the crusade against him.)
Yet we can’t let liberals off the hook here. Questions about the veracity of Arday’s work and his life story arose as early as 2023, shortly after his appointment to Cambridge as the university’s youngest black scholar ever. They were not taken seriously.
Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci: In the aftermath of pandemics, people either try to forget them or find others to blame for them. (Peter Wehner, 8/12/26, The Atlantic)
[T]he scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.
The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.
The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)
The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over.
Can the West Outgrow Its Enemies? (Claire Berlinski, Aug 11, 2026, The Cosmopolitan Globalist)
Our economic statecraft, argues Dalibor Roháč, is not strengthening us. To the contrary, on both sides of the Atlantic, the West is preparing for great-power competition by steadily weakening the qualities that once made it formidable: its open markets, technological dynamism, attractiveness to talent, scientific excellence, and its ability to build almost anything at tolerable cost. It is responding to the threat by becoming more like the closed, dirigiste systems it is trying to defeat—protectionist, suspicious of foreigners, preoccupied with national self-sufficiency, and increasingly willing to subordinate markets and institutions to executive power.
In his new book, Unshackled: How Economic Growth Can Defeat the World’s Dictators, Dalibor argues that this isn’t strategic realism. It’s strategic self-sabotage.
Gender-affirming care for insecure men: The Low-T call is coming from inside the Pentagon. (Brynn Tannehill, Jul 25, 2026, Public Notice)
Here’s a little secret: the testosterone Hegseth wants to give to cisgender troops is the same stuff they give to transgender men. And the estrogen tablets they give to transgender women are the exact same ones given to women who have had hysterectomies, menopause, perimenopause, or just want to stop their periods while they’re in the field. So, which is it: taking hormones renders you non-deployable and therefore unfit for military service, or they make you the perfect killing machine?
MAGA is obsessed with manliness because they lack it.
The GOP Is Warning About Socialism While Quietly Embracing It: Federal ownership of private companies has become routine. And it is happening on the right, even as conservatives point fingers at the left for its socialism. (Veronique de Rugy | 8.6.2026, reason)
A year ago, these deals looked like improvisation—one-offs stitched together under pressure with President Donald Trump’s fluid negotiating style. Now, the department announces them in batches. Federal ownership of private companies has become routine, and it is happening on the right even as members busily point fingers at the left for its socialism.
To be sure, this is not the abolition of private property that some in the DSA would love to see. But strip away the label and look at the mechanism. Socialism’s defining move is to put ownership and decision making in the same collective hands. A government equity stake does exactly that. Washington already regulates these firms, buys from them, and subsidizes them. Now, it owns pieces of them. Every lever it controls—tariffs, permits, contracts, the next tranche of subsidies—moves the value of its own holdings.
Bad enough he brought Protectionism, Isolationism and Nativism with him from his days as a Democrat…
The Architecture of a Lie (DOMINIC WIGHTMAN, 8/04/26, Country Life)
The argument that Speer was ‘eaten away by guilt’ in private is a generous one, but perhaps too generous. There is a profound distinction between guilt and the fear of being caught, between conscience and the anxiety of exposure. In private, the struggle was less with a moral reckoning than with the constant, exhausting labour of maintaining the fiction. His daughter Hilde was a persistent challenger, demanding in a 1953 letter to her incarcerated father: ‘How can an intelligent person have any part in something like this?’ Speer’s response, at just over 300 words in a letter that would be posthumously published, was a masterpiece of evasion. He could not bring himself to tell his own child the truth. Even his closest biographers, like Sereny and Joachim Fest, fell for his mendacious charm, only for subsequent historians to take a wrecking ball to his carefully constructed self-image.
The deepest psychological truth, however, lies not in the public performance, but in the private torment that must follow such elaborate deception. Speer, for all his lies, was haunted. He admitted to feeling a ‘continuing and tormenting awareness of guilt’. Pastor Georges Casalis, who visited him in Spandau, believed his spiritual wrestling was genuine, though he would later abandon his quest upon release for the adulation of wealth and fame. Speer told a Playboy interviewer that he had made a one-way trip to hell from which he had not yet returned. This was a man who could not sleep without the company of his own evasions.
What makes Speer’s case so psychologically vertiginous is the manner in which he weaponised sincerity itself. He understood, with the cold intuition of a master architect, that the most convincing confession is the one that withholds just enough. By admitting to a diffuse, almost aestheticised guilt — the guilt of having been seduced, of having looked away, of having been too ambitious — he constructed a confessional fortress that could withstand any assault on its foundations. The more he appeared to bare his soul, the more he concealed it. His memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, read not as a reckoning but as an alibi rendered in prose so elegant that it deceived even its author.
Speer’s tragedy was not that he felt no guilt, but that he could never truly face the source of it.
Pause From Doomscrolling — And Be Hopeful As MAGA And Trump Swirl The Toilet (Jared Bernstein, 8/03/26, National Memo)
Fauci’s COVID‑origins hearing shows how conspiracy theories became political weapons (Art Jipson, July 30, 2026, The Conversation)
In the years since the pandemic, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and others have accused Fauci of many things, but the central conspiracy accusation is that Fauci helped enable the COVID-19 pandemic through U.S.-funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, and then participated in a coordinated government-scientific cover-up, misleading Congress to conceal that connection and suppress the laboratory-leak explanation. Paul, a Republican, has repeatedly called for Fauci’s prosecution. […]
Conspiracy thinking is rarely isolated. For example, a person who comes to believe that public health officials are secretly manipulating information may be more receptive to claims that vaccines contain hidden dangers. Someone who distrusts pharmaceutical companies may be more receptive to claims that the pandemic was engineered for profit. Someone who believes powerful elites routinely operate in secret may be more receptive to broader conspiracy narratives such as QAnon.
These beliefs can reinforce one another, creating a broader worldview in which institutions, experts and government officials are presumed to be acting deceptively. […]
Claims were generated in online communities, repeated by political figures and amplified by media personalities, who injected these talking points back into supporters’ social media feeds. The repetition made the claims feel increasingly familiar – and familiarity can be mistaken for evidence. […]
The most consequential feature of conspiracy theories may be their ability to move from one group to another.
A claim can begin in an obscure online community and spread through social media to become a political weapon.
The Fauci hearing demonstrates the culmination of that process. These claims have moved into the formal machinery of government, where they are being amplified by elected officials and federal agencies. A theory’s credibility can increase simply because someone with greater institutional authority has repeated it.
…but people refuse the vaccine: not being terrified of things that humans don’t control.
Orwell Vindicated: Under Totalitarian Trump, Reality Itself Is A Communist Plot (Paul Krugman, July 30 | 2026, National Memo)
The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.
Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its two million square miles of boreal forest.
We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.
The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.
Trump won the 2020 election.
Communism is the greatest threat facing America.
The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.
What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality.