David Stokes

World’s least sexy OnlyFans account.

[liel leibovitz @liel]

Remember when "progressives" cos-played The Handmaid's Tale by pretending Republicans will soon make women cover their hair, wear chaste clothes, and adhere to an oppressive religious ideology that sees them as subservient to men? Yeah, that was funny.

[Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg @UnderSecE]

Won't prejudge a case before the courts. But it’s not lost on anyone that France just watched its cities burn. Cars set ablaze. Schools torched. And a historic city hall in flames.

And the person under criminal investigation is a novelist. A vibrant free society polices its streets, not its novelists. And it owes its citizens one standard of justice — starting with the thugs who destroy the lives and livelihoods of working people.

[wanye @xwanyex]

One surprising effect of being really poor for a while in St. Louis is that it made me less sympathetic to people who lived in the worst parts of town. I would just think, like, what's going on there? I have nothing. I can afford almost nothing. And yet I figured out how to live in a "normal" poor-person apartment complex, not one where drugs and crime were omnipresent.

It's sort of like when you see a homeless person splayed out on 9th Ave in Manhattan and you're like, ah, right, this is a crazy person. If they were just down on their luck they wouldn't be on the sidewalk like *this*.

That's a lot of people in the ghetto.

[wanye @xwanyex]

It also matters if all the neighborhoods with cozy little worker's cottages are crime-ridden no-go zones

[Post-Left Watch (postleftwatch.bsky.social) @PostLeftWatch]

Panera Bread is a prime example of how private equity hollows out and destroys everything it touches

[Christie Jeff @MinorPebble]

@TipOfTheBanana Years ago the line at Panera was out the door from breakfast thru lunch. The food was really good. Now, they are empty, dirty, and the employees are aloof at best. Oh, and the food sucks.

[Dan McLaughlin @baseballcrank]

If I hear someone selling the Big Lie that Jews have been committing genocide in Gaza, I can be reliably certain that the person selling that is opposed as well to everything I love about my own country & civilization.

[Joseph Massey @jmasseypoet]

If you're shocked by the Houellebecq news, you should know that France has been persecuting people who tell the truth about Muslim immigration in France for decades.

Brigitte Bardot was tormented by French courts for telling the truth. I wrote about it after she passed away for @WSJFreeEx.

[倉田真由美 @kuratamagohan]

めちゃくちゃ治安が悪い国に行くのは注意するのに、めちゃくちゃ治安が悪い国から大量に人が入ってくることはOKって、意味が分からない。治安って、人なんだが。

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

They’re hoping these distressed rent-controlled properties will be seized by the state and NGOs and the apartments will be handed out to DSA apparatchiks and the other party faithful. That’s the explicit plan per housing ideologues like Cea Weaver.

[Bender @Benderxxx7]

At 16, Brian Banks was one of the best high school linebackers in America. USC had offered him a full scholarship. Pete Carroll personally called him.

One afternoon at school he made out with a classmate. Consensual. By the end of the day he was in jail, charged with kidnapping and rape.

She said he dragged her into a stairwell. It never happened.

The DNA came back negative. His mother sold her house and her car to pay for a lawyer.

He couldn’t make bail. He spent a year behind bars waiting for trial.

His lawyer told him: plead no contest, or risk 41 years in prison. He was 17. He took the deal.

He did 5 years in prison. Then 5 more on parole. Registered sex offender. GPS monitor on his ankle. Couldn’t go near schools or parks. No one would hire him.

Meanwhile, the girl and her mother sued the school district for not keeping her safe. They won $1.5 million.

In 2011, a Facebook friend request popped up on his screen.

It was her.

She wanted to “let bygones be bygones.”

Brian went to a private investigator. They hid cameras in the office and invited her to talk. She came by bus.

On tape, she admitted it. He never raped her. He never kidnapped her.

Then she said she still wouldn’t tell prosecutors the truth. Because she’d have to give back the money.

In May 2012, a judge cleared his name. The hearing took less than a minute.

10 years of his life. Gone in one lie. Erased in 60 seconds.

A few days later his phone rang. “I’m looking for a linebacker. You know where I can find one?”

It was Pete Carroll. The same coach who recruited him 10 years earlier.

He finally signed with the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. At 27. The dream he had at 16.

She was ordered to pay $2.6 million back.

What should happen to someone who steals 10 years of your life with one lie?

[Moses Kagan @moseskagan]

If you want to open a BBQ restaurant in Los Angeles, you're required to spend $$$ building a system for filtering your cooking exhaust.

Or you can just set up a grill on the corner.

[Anna Schneider @a_nnaschneider]

Dass Michel Houellebecq jetzt zum Opfer seiner eigenen Unterwerfungstheorie wird ist vermutlich wilder als jedes Buch, das er je schreiben könnte

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

Abolishing the electoral college would mean not knowing who won the presidency for 4 weeks while California keeps counting. No thanks.

[spiked @spikedonline]

Michel Houellebecq is facing prosecution – again – for daring to criticise Islam. This is ominous. It is the role of authors to provoke, to blaspheme and to say the unsayable. Free speech is dead in France, says Hugo Timms
https://t.co/gBYoiBMWT9

[Dan McLaughlin @baseballcrank]

Never take the uniqueness of our First Amendment for granted. Or forget what the suppression of speech is the opening wedge for.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

Man if people are this mad about the cost of living and the state of the economy right now, can you picture what things will look like if we end up with an *actually* bad economy? Because this economy is, largely speaking, fine. Not great but certainly not terrible.

[wanye @xwanyex]

One of the most revealing things people say when they hear about a new development is that, “they should build [some other thing] instead.”

What they? There’s no they! There’s only the private owner of the lot. If Walgreens owns the lot, then Walgreens is going to build a Walgreens. If a gas station company owns a lot, which they purchased to build a gas station, then they’re going to build a gas station. You can’t see the gas station going up and say, “you know what we really need there is a pool supply store.”

What in the world are you talking about?

People are natural central planners.

You have to take away their right to influence these kinds of decisions at all. You have to create the legal conditions under which they are not allowed to affect these decisions. Because if you let regular people weigh in, they will reveal that they have an insane theory of how the world should work.

They will see a Walgreens going up on a private lot owned by Walgreens and say out loud, “they should build apartments there instead” like scheming little Soviets.

[captive dreamer @captive_dreamer]

They’re sending a huge message with this one. Houellebecq is reasonably well known in the English world and certainly one of the few important living novelists - extremely eerie Soviet vibe to this - they’re making an example of anyone who voices concerns about mass migration.

[Corey Walker 🇺🇸 @CoreyWriting]

Another reason the public is routinely disappointed with our politicians is that our society is economically illiterate. Our politicians promise incoherent and impossible policy agendas for the sake of winning elections, but can't deliver on them because they literally make no sense.