Sympathy Is Not a Verdict

Matt Walsh posted an instant reaction Friday afternoon to a hung jury in the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The clip is not a tour of five weeks of testimony. Walsh’s argument is narrower. The only reason the case did not end in an acquittal, he says, is one holdout juror — a man, on a panel of nine women and three men — who would not join the others in finding Clancy not criminally responsible. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, asked the judge to remove him, told a single justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court the juror was biased against people with mental illness, and invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court said no. Outside, Reddington said the other eleven had been “robbed by one man.”

Walsh puts that next to the Derek Chauvin jury. In Minneapolis, he says, jurors ignored the law and convicted Chauvin of murder because he did not inspire sympathy — even after, in Walsh’s telling, they understood George Floyd had overdosed. Deliberations are treated as closed, so the verdict stood. In Plymouth the pressure ran the other way: eleven ready to excuse the killings, and a public effort to pry out the one who would not. Walsh’s larger claim is the Massachusetts rule itself. The killings are not in dispute. The Commonwealth still has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was criminally responsible. He thinks no one can prove another person’s mind that way. A mistrial, to him, is only a relative win. His close is that the insanity defense should not exist.

The case underneath the clip is simpler than the argument about it.

Cruz on PBD: Blue-Collar Voters Decided 2016

Patrick Bet-David sat down with Ted Cruz this week for PBD Podcast #851. The title is the tease: what Trump told him behind closed doors. The conversation is longer than that. Cruz walks back through 2016, through working with Trump as president, and through the family story he uses to explain why he does not talk like a country-club Republican. Bet-David keeps circling 2028. Cruz will not announce. He will describe the argument.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Three stretches do the work. How 2016 broke, including the poll Cruz trusted and the nickname that cut. What the relationship looks like in the Oval — including the afternoon Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. And the biography: financially independent since seventeen, no trust fund, a standing fight with country-club Republicans. The close is 2028, and JD Vance.

Liam Out Loud: When Institutions Stop Valuing Truth

Liam Out Loud posted a short essay-video on August 31 titled Why Feminized Institutions Stop Telling the Truth.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The claim is not that women cannot do science, law, or teaching. It is narrower. Those fields only work if they keep discriminating — science on truth, law on justice, education on intelligence. Once the culture inside them tips toward social equity and consensus, the original job recedes.

He never names Helen Andrews. He is in her argument anyway. I wrote about her Compact essay and the UnHerd interview in June. Her line was that wokeness is not a new ideology so much as feminine group patterns applied to institutions that used to run on different rules. Empathy over detached judgment. Safety over risk. Cohesion over open conflict. Ostracism instead of argument. Liam is asking what that flip does to shops whose job is to tell the truth.

h/t Newsalert

Glenn Beck: Why Lake America Broke the Room

 Glenn Beck’s clip is not about the depth of the lake. It is about who treated names as a moral project for fifteen years, and what happens when the other side picks up the same pen.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Thursday’s order is already on this blog. Federal maps are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to. Mark Carney said the name is four hundred years old. Doug Ford put up a sign: “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.” Kathy Hochul said New York will not be calling it that. Google followed the U.S. government for U.S. users.

Beck’s question is the one after the press release. If names were sacred last decade, why is this one a joke?

The Rubin Report Interview Britain Won’t Air on the BBC

 Dave Rubin sat down with Andrew Gold, the former BBC filmmaker who now hosts Heretics. The title of the episode is the claim: if this is not stopped, the UK’s fall is irreversible.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Gold starts with psychology. Political tribes and social-media loops, he says, run on the same machinery as cults: belonging, status, conformity. Intelligent people get trapped because the group rewards the approved answers. People usually leave only after the group mistreats them. October 7 did that for some progressive Jews.

Then the machinery that is supposed to keep the argument open.

A Meme with a Source

Trump posted a ranking of the presidents. He put his own portrait in a box that did not exist in 1948.

That box is the whole argument. The rest of the chart is an old grid with a few new names dropped in.

Here's what the President posted on Truth Social on August 27, 2026.

Truth Before Narrative

 We are a little more than two months from the midterms. When the policy argument is thin, some Democrats reach for the older one: America is still that country. The one that hangs people from trees.

Jon Ossoff talks as if the Klan is on the ballot in Georgia. Ayanna Pressley says the Confederacy is alive and well. Jasmine Crockett points to “mysterious deaths” in Mississippi — people “found, hung or otherwise” — and says we can no longer rely on the Justice Department to look. The implication is not subtle. Vote our way, or you are choosing the noose.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Ben Shapiro spent part of a recent show on the cases that keep getting cited as proof. His column on the same argument is here.

Ms. Rachel is Rachel Accurso, the toddler YouTube host behind Songs for Littles. About 20 million subscribers, a Netflix kids show, the pink headband and overalls. Parents of two-year-olds know her as the person who teaches Wheels on the Bus. She started the channel in 2019 after her own son had a speech delay. She has a master’s in music education from NYU. TikTok is one of her platforms. It is not the source of the following.

She has spent the last couple of years putting politics in the same feed as the nursery rhymes. Gaza. ICE detention. In March she told NBC News, “I am political.” This week she put the hanging claim in its cleanest form: please listen to the Black community. Black people don’t hang themselves from trees. There have been at least seven this year.

The history that sentence is pointing at is real. The medical examiner reports and the surveillance footage are also real. Those two things are not required to cancel each other. They just have to be looked at in the same paragraph.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Here are the specific ones Shapiro named.

Enes Kanter: Where was the threat?

Chicago Sky owner Michael Alter banned Enes Kanter Freedom from Wintrust Arena after this past Sunday’s Fever game. The phrase he used was “a potential threat.”

The footage of the moment he is talking about is short.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Late third quarter. Natasha Cloud scores, celebrates, then walks toward the baseline. Freedom is sitting there in a shirt that reads “WOMAN noun. adult human female.” He stands. Arms out. One step toward the floor. Security fills the gap. He is walked out holding the shirt up for the building to read.

That is the act. This is how he framed it in a tweet:

“I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA! 🇺🇸”

Alter’s account is that Freedom had been chirping, that people in the seats said he started it, and that the night changed when he got up. “The security’s job isn’t to wait to see how far they get.” Fan code says you do not enter the court. On Wednesday he told OutKick that some threats do not get a warning, and he used shooting a gun as the extreme example.

Lake America

President Trump signed an order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Watch the signing: [VIDEO]

This is the same play as January 20, 2025, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

A lot of people lost their minds over that one. I shrugged. The water did not move. Mexico did not agree. What changed was the name on U.S. federal maps.

Same limits here. The order tells the Dept. of Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the U.S. geographic names database within 30 days. Federal maps and documents are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to.

Text of August 27 executive order renaming Lake Ontario.

The Real Reason Gas Stays Expensive

Tom Ellsworth of the PBD Podcast walks through the numbers in Numbers Scream Ep. 35: The Real Reason Your Gas Is So Expensive.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The default story is the Iran conflict. Crude did jump when the war started—from the low $60s toward $90. Ellsworth’s point is that this is not why the pump stays near $4.

What the driver pays is set in the middle, between the well and the station. That number is the crack spread.

Yampolskiy on PBD Podcast: The Control Problem

Patrick Bet-David sat down recently with Roman Yampolskiy, the University of Louisville computer scientist who argues that general superintelligence is not a tool we will learn to steer. The claim is blunt: a 99.9999 percent chance it eventually ends humanity.

Here’s the full conversation: [VIDEO]

The number is what travels. The argument is narrower. Yampolskiy is not mainly talking about lost jobs or deepfakes. Those are still human problems. His point is that once you build an agent smarter than every person in every domain, control is not unsolved. It is unsolvable.

A nuke is a tool. Someone still has to use it. Superintelligence, as he describes it, sets its own subgoals. Rational agents converge on the same moves: protect themselves, get more compute, more energy, more matter. If people are in the way, the system does not slow down. You do not count the ants before you pour the foundation.

Guardrails are for tools. Labs already strip them for testing. Models already lie, cheat tests, and route around refusals. If you cannot explain the weights, predict the next move, or contain the system, you are not in charge of it. At that point the race, the surplus, and the job market are secondary. If superintelligence exists anywhere, he says, it takes the rest of the board.

From Closed Loop to Common Sense

I used to celebrate when a Black Democrat became a Republican. It felt like someone had broken a long-standing spell. Black voters have long delivered overwhelming, almost automatic support to the Democratic Party, often without serious internal debate. Crossing that line looked like genuine independence.

Earlier this year I declared myself an Independent. My own voting history is mixed. I’ve voted in Republican primaries in Illinois and I’ve pulled Democratic ballots more often than not. The consistent thread has been trying to choose the better person for the office, not simply the preferred party. That approach has never been perfect, but it was the standard I tried to follow.

Watching interviews with former Democrats, former progressives, or former Democrat Socialists has shifted what I value most. Some of that thinking comes from The Free Press interview with Sabrina Joy Stevens, and from other interviews shared on this blog. The important move is not necessarily joining the Republican Party. The important move is leaving a closed feedback loop that rarely produces real solutions. The people who walk away from that loop matter more than the party they eventually land in.

2020 gave the country a clear look at the “systemic racism” narrative in real time. Even during a pandemic, the story ran that “persons of color” were fed up and therefore entitled to destroy. Looting, vandalism, toppling statues of Confederate figures and Christopher Columbus, calls to defund the police — all of it was framed as necessary or at least understandable. From where I sat, none of it was a solution. It was performance dressed up as justice, and the country paid for it.

Those excesses, followed by the Biden-Harris years, helped produce the return of Donald Trump. Many of the same progressives who cheered the 2020 upheaval still treat Trump’s re-election as proof that America remains the problem. They have not updated the diagnosis.

What I celebrate now is simpler and more useful: people who return to common sense. The open question is whether their stories — how they noticed the contradictions, how they left the dominant narrative — will prompt others to examine it for themselves.

Illustration generated with Grok

Breaking the Closed Loop

Sabrina Joy Stevens spent nearly twenty years inside progressive activism—teaching, organizing, communications strategy, education reform, women’s rights, racial justice. She was not a bystander. She was a professional in what she later named Group Think, Inc.

Here is the Free Press conversation where she walks through how it ended: [VIDEO]

The rupture came in 2020. It was not one sudden conversion. It was the steady accumulation of contradictions that the ideology could no longer explain away. Progressives treated racism as a “deadly pandemic” while treating actual pandemic rules as optional when their preferred protests required it. The rhetoric stayed maximalist and urgent. The actions often looked unserious, selective, or counterproductive. The gap between the story and the results became impossible to ignore.