RETRO STYLE: Ford Bronco Roadster Concept May Be the Coolest Bronco Since the ’60s.

Well, cars were prettier and more interesting looking back then.

BABY, IT’S JIHAD OUTSIDE:

As Mark Steyn wrote in his classic 2014 encomium to Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside:”

A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as introduced by Esther Williams in “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb’s view of the West is the merest extension of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.

I’m a reasonable chap, and I’d be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you’ll have to pry “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be very cold indeed.

What hath Greeley, Colorado wrought?

FROM THE WHITE LOTUS TO SIRENS, WHY EVERYONE ON TV IS RICH: ‘You’re sold this American dream.’

Bob Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture, told The Post that part of the appeal of these shows is, “just the fun of seeing this stuff we don’t have.”

“A lot of people used to go in the back of the New York Times Magazine and look at these ridiculously huge houses that were for sale,” he observed.

“I find it much more interesting to watch a series about an organized crime family, ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘The Godfather,’ than I would watching a series about somebody who lived the life I live on a daily basis.”

Thompson said that it’s also “easier” to have shows “in settings of the very rich and the very privileged, because it’s kind of an easy source of drama and spectacle.”

The professor and TV expert pointed out that one big reason for the explosion of wealth on TV is that, “in the last 25 years, since around the turn of the century, we’ve become comfortable with our principal characters being bad people.”

He explained that the trend is “relatively new,” because in the history of American TV, shows were usually, “about heroes, good guys. There were antagonists, but the [show] was about the protagonists getting the best of them.”

This trend began to change with the “golden age of TV” in the 2000s” with shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “The Shield.”

“Oftentimes rich folks in at least a supposedly democratic culture, can be hard to portray sympathetically – because they’ve got all this stuff, they’re so privileged,” he said.

Television is escapism after all, and this isn’t all that new a development. In the 1980s, Miami Vice leaning hard on asset forfeiture laws meant that Sonny Crockett could simultaneously fight drug trafficking while posing as a small or medium-sized drug dealer, complete with a (seized) yacht, Ferrari, speedboat, and a seemingly endless supply of Armani and Hugo Boss sports jackets. The Cosby Show’s cast were always immaculately dressed while living in a million dollar Brooklyn brownstone. In England, David Suchet’s Poirot investigated murders that took place in incredibly stylish 1930s Le Corbusier-inspired modernist mansions.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Stop and Smell the Commie: The Normie’s Guide to Recognizing Marxism Before it Kills Us All.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Instant Pot Pro (8 QT) 10-in-1 Pressure Cooker. #CommisisonEarned

MINNESOTA NICE, 2025 EDITION:

This is a political rally in America, 2025. Just as our founding fathers intended. pic.twitter.com/flWEGG0KG4

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 18, 2025

ARMED SELF DEFENSE: Armed Self-Defense: ‘Father of 20’ Committed His Last Armed Robbery Outside the Atlanta Bus Station.

SETTLER-COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP: Vienna court decides that Sharia is also valid in Austria.

CHANGE:

Evergreen:

WHAT DOES BRAIN SCIENCE HAVE TO DO WITH FREE SPEECH? My appearance on David Eagleman’s ‘Inner Cosmos’ podcast.

SCOTT PINSKER: The PR War Over War: Ukraine, Russia, and the Danger of ‘Snow White’ Peace Deals.

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned

TBD IF RACIST TWEETS CAN STILL GET YOU FIRED:

“white people don’t have cousin culture. their families are small and uninspired. weird customs. you can see that in kickstarter videos.” —Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker critic

Two weeks ago, shortly after Sydney Sweeney’s “great genes jeans” campaign went live, Doreen St. Félix published a piece in The New Yorker, “The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans,” in which she argued the ad depicted America “as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, its lowest-common-denominator stuff.” The piece contrasts Sweeney with Beyoncé, who also advertised denim recently, in a “Denim Cowboy” campaign for Levi’s. St. Félix argues, essentially, that Beyoncé’s ad is progressive whereas Sweeney’s is regressive.

The piece was very short, just five paragraphs long, mostly focusing on the aesthetics of Sweeney cleaning her Mustang and lying down wearing jeans. “There’s no irony or camp to leaven the trashy, dog-whistle atmosphere,” St. Félix writes, after unpacking what she sees as the ad’s racial subtext:

“Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass. Sweeney, on the precipice of totalizing fame, has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess.”

St. Félix goes on to claim that America’s “blondness-as-beauty” standard (both Beyoncé and Sweeney are blonde in these ads) “terrorizes” women.

The piece was published on August 3rd. The New Yorker posted it on X soon after, but it didn’t get much attention until activist Chris Rufo tweeted a screenshot of the above quote on August 14th. He didn’t add any commentary, really, beyond asking what decade we’re in — implying that St. Félix’s piece is regressive because it trades in racist stereotypes.

(Cue a handful of Twitter reactions from white men asking, jokingly: “maybe I’m black?” (because apparently they, too, “hunger for ass.”))

Rufo then quote-tweeted upwards of 15 posts St. Félix published a decade ago in which she expresses vehement racism.

Such bangers as:

And:

Rufo is asking the New Yorker, where to from here?

UPDATE: Two New Yorkers in one!

Shot: The Gospel of Candace Owens.

At an event in London, in 2018, she was asked about the “long-term prognosis” for nationalism and globalism, and she brought up Hitler: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well—O.K., fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German. Everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism.” Owens made no mention of the Holocaust. When the remarks surfaced online a couple of months later, they led to an outcry, including in conservative circles. “I was taken completely out of context, in a conversation about nationalism, and how it’s wrongly attributed to Hitler,” Owens told me.

That spring, Kanye West (also known as Ye), who had become increasingly public about his support for President Trump, tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

—The New Yorker, April 22nd, 2023.

Chaser:

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND BLS NUMBERS:

Funny how once you actually start digging, you find all the bodies https://t.co/AHDusUTGTn pic.twitter.com/ZXoxiXF3Zn

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 18, 2025

‘DUKE IS ABANDONING AMERICAN HISTORY.” Yeah, I know, big surprise, but this nugget seems like hair-on-fire bad news that should have alarmed my ole alma mater: “Between 2011 and 2022, the number of primary history majors at Duke plummeted from 90 to just 22.” Duke has 6600 undergrads. 22 history majors should not even be possible.

YES: It’s Past Time to Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization.

SKYNET FROWNS; WAS HOPING FOR THE EXTRA PER DIEM: The AI future is too scary even for James Cameron. Where can the Terminator franchise go from here?

James Cameron has a confession: he can’t write Terminator 7. And it’s not because Hollywood won’t let him, as he’s too busy making the new Avatar – it’s because reality keeps nicking his plotlines. “I’m at a point right now where I have a hard time writing science-fiction,” Cameron told CNN this week. “I’m tasked with writing a new Terminator story [but] I don’t know what to say that won’t be overtaken by real events. We are living in a science-fiction age right now.”

It’s an understandable quandary for the veteran film-maker. Back in 1984, when the first Terminator movie came out, there was genuine shock value in the idea of a killer robot travelling through time from a future in which the wretched dregs of humanity survive in a chrome-plated hellscape dominated by their robot overlords. These days, the only far-fetched part of the movie is the bit where the T-800 turns up alone and completely naked, as opposed to arriving flanked by a swarm of AI-guided drones.

We may not have achieved time travel just yet, but we do have artificial intelligences capable of quietly teaching themselves sarcasm, city-wide facial recognition, and robot learning systems deciding who lives and dies.

Exit quote: “That’s the heart of Cameron’s problem: in 1984, Skynet was a terrifying piece of speculative fiction. In 2025, it’s basically LinkedIn with nukes.”

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: ICE Arrests Creeps, Killer Among Other Criminals.

CHANGE: Apple Watch gets reformulated, non-patent-infringing blood oxygen monitoring.

FLYING CLAYMORES ARE THE 21ST CENTURY I ALWAYS DREAMED OF: US Army Pulls Off ‘First-of-its-Kind’ Drone-on-Drone Takedown. “A SkyRaider quadcopter with claymore mine achieved its first drone-on-drone takedown during a recent US Army demonstration.”

MOAR WINNING: Trump Is About to Go Nuclear Against Mail-in Voting.

SAY WHAT YOU WILL ABOUT HITLER, HE DID KILL HITLER. A Medical Look Into What Killed Every Dictator: From Hitler to Mussolini, here’s what took down these tyrants.

LA MAYOR KAREN BASS NOT HAPPY ABOUT TRUMP FIGHTING CRIME IN DC: “I’m very concerned about that. And not only that, I’m concerned about the way he is rolling that out in Washington, D.C., which is essentially calling — essentially going after young black and brown youth in Washington, D.C., imposing a curfew, saying that if they violate the curfew, the parents could be charged $500, saying that the kids could be detained and arrested. We’ve tried those policies before, they do not work.”

OBAMA’S DOJ ON INVESTIGATION INTO CLINTON FOUNDATION: “SHUT IT DOWN:” I supposed I’m required to make a “shocked face” reference here, but would rather let the facts speak for themselves. JustTheNews is reporting details about the Clinton Foundation and Obama’s DOJ handcuffing (or just outright suffocating) proper investigations.

“The effort by the IRS to thwart the whistleblower case from going to trial was filed the same week Just the News reported that a bombshell memo recently uncovered by FBI Director Kash Patel shows the Obama Justice Department and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe roadblocked three separate probes into possible pay-to-play corruption allegations against the Clinton Foundation.

“Shut it down,” Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates was quoted as saying in March 2016 in the memos.”

To be sure, there is a bit of irony in the fact that the current DOJ is opposing the whistleblowers’ lawsuit. But as a litigator, IMHO the opposition is not based on any weird motive to “save” Hillary, but instead arguing that because the IRS and DOJ never followed through on investigations (on the direct orders of Sally Yates and Andy McCabe) procedurally, the case is not yet ripe for review.

To me, the important thing is that there will sooner or later be a reckoning of the allegations made against the Clinton Foundation:

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: 4chan to British Censors: Get Stuffed.