IT’S FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2026
CONTENT WARNING: This newsletter contains graphic images that some readers may find unsettling. Please take care, and enjoy!
Hasan Piker deserved 8/11.
Francesca Hong was on track to become the second left-wing crank in as many weeks to win a statewide primary after sharing a stage with the anti-American influencer, who has amassed an undistinguished following—and a slew of glossy profiles—by glorifying terror attacks, CEO assassinations, and Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward from his posh bungalow in Los Angeles.
Alas, the Democratic establishment prevailed (just barely). Hong lost the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, and Piker responded by throwing a tantrum in his bedroom. Wearing semi-formal attire that almost surely cost more than your first car, Piker lashed out at “the fucking national media” and “the median American voter” for sabotaging Hong’s campaign. “Fuck them and fuck Thanksgiving,” he quipped.
Indeed, Hong’s (half-heartedly disavowed) support for canceling Thanksgiving because it celebrates “colonialism” may have played a role in her defeat. Not to mention her use of the phrase “Indegenous [sic] folx.” Or invoking her biracial son as evidence of her (trauma-inducing) “proximity to whiteness.” Or being the sort of person who hosts a six-course dinner party “inspired by menstruation.”
Hong joins the relatively short list of left-wing cranks that Democratic primary voters have deemed too crazy to nominate in 2026. Clearly, her past support for defunding the police and abolishing prisons was not a dealbreaker. A Nazi tattoo would have been fine, so long as she lied about knowing what it meant. Also acceptable: partying with Hezbollah fanboys who blame the Jews for killing John F. Kennedy.
The boundaries of acceptable lunacy are somewhat difficult to discern. If she didn’t hate America so much and everything it stands for, you’d almost feel sorry for her.
Read more: You Must Be This Crazy To Lose a Democratic Primary in 2026
Palate soiler: Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Here are some pictures from the Hong campaign’s party on election night.
It’s Wisconsin, so of course the crowd is mostly white. The “hotties” in these photos all voted for Hong, who once fled a restaurant after an “anxiety attack” caused by “too many old white people.”
IVORY TERROR
You gotta hand it to the Khmer Rouge.
To be sure, Pol Pot was a bad hombre. “Greatest Monsters of the 20th Century” is a competitive category, but he’s definitely in the running. I’ve been to the Killing Fields, and it’s grim as hell. So is the vibe in Phnom Penh, a charming French-colonial metropolis inhabited by Western perverts and weary locals still bearing the scars of communist terror.
Having said all that, I think we can all agree that Pol Pot was directionally right about academia and its corrosive effect on the social order. His intellectual descendants often talk about abolishing the institutions they don’t like. Pol Pot actually got it done.
Mass murder aside, the Khmer Rouge policy prescription—clear out the universities and put the eggheads to work in the fields—was not without merit. In fact, replicating it here in the United States would do more to advance the common good and restore cultural sanity than any reform currently under consideration.
If you haven’t already, read Tyler Austin Harper’s harrowing article in the Atlantic, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” The socialist academic recounts how the insufferably woke overlords at Bates College in Maine drove him to abandon a coveted tenure-track gig.
In 2022, when the Academic Affair Council sought to require every major discipline to offer at least one course on “race, power, privilege, colonialism, and their consequences,” Harper pushed back in defense of academic freedom. They even dismissed his suggestion that minority students would be “harmed” by out-of-their-depth science professors attempting to explain why math is white supremacy.
A professor on the council countered that this could be avoided by fostering a “culture of repair” in the classroom. Harper recalls: “She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out ‘oops’ or ‘ouch’ if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck.”
Speaking of toddlers, the University of Michigan is poised to eliminate traditional letter grades for first-semester freshmen in favor of a pass/fail system. It’s supposed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college” and “curb the mental health crisis” among young people rich enough to go to college.
What demands, though? In 2022, almost 75 percent of the undergraduate grades given out at Michigan were A’s, up from 58 percent in 2012. It’s the same at every university. The academics in charge do everything they can to coddle their students from the tyranny of “demands,” which is a great way to ensure an even bigger mental health crisis when they graduate and encounter actual demands for the first time.
Psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert said it best, telling the New York Times that students should learn sooner rather than later that “feeling bad” about getting a B-plus “isn’t the same thing as being unwell.”
You know things have gone horribly wrong when Harvard is the voice of reason. The university will soon limit the number of A’s awarded in a given course. Students are already freaking out, which is promising. They’re flocking to easy nonsense classes on the “politics of food” and “dangerous encounters with otherworldly beings in folklore.”
This was “so sad,” one Harvard student told Bloomberg, because the people who go to Harvard “like to be challenged.” Others are concerned that “ambitious” students will be discouraged from pursuing “difficult majors.” Good. If they’re painfully discouraged by a B-plus, they probably aren’t cut out for the hard stuff.
They’ll do just fine as college administrators.
WOKESIE DAISY
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants us to forget about all that. “Woke 1 was crazy,” she said on national television. The (rabidly deranged) rhetoric being thrown around during the pandemic, she added, is “not rhetoric that we would use today.”
Woke 1 was crazy. Acknowledging the problem is the first step to recovery. In an ideal world, that would entail never holding elected office for the rest of your life. Alas, there are plenty of lunatics who are mad at AOC for dissing the Great Awokening without specifying “exactly what was so crazy about it.”
OK, fine. Here are a few insane examples (of which there are thousands):
• A professor at the University of Southern California was placed on leave after using a Chinese word that sounded vaguely like the n-word.
• A trivia host was fired after mispronouncing Nicaragua.
• Until last year, fraternity parties at Stanford were vetted by a special committee and required attendees to recite a land acknowledgment before entering.
• The official social media account of Oreo cookies proclaiming that “Trans people exist,” followed by the official Nilla Wafers account affirming that they “not only exist, but are valued and loved by Nilla Wafers.”
• Gushers, the fruit snack for children, posted the following: “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voice. We’re working with @fruitbythefoot on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you.”
• Scientific experts torched their credibility for generations by denouncing the most logical COVID theory (Chinese lab leak) as racist, and arguing that protesting white supremacy was the only acceptable reason to go outside. That was kind of a big one.
• Roald Dahl’s estate and publisher teamed up with Inclusive Minds, described as a “collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature,” to gender-neutralize the Oompa Loompas, remove problematic words such as “fat,” and insert new lines explaining, for example, that in addition to being a witch, there were “plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
• A criminology professor (and many others) condemned PAW Patrol, the wildly popular children’s cartoon about a group of friendly dogs who save the day, for promoting “complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities.”
AOC’s commentary, however glib, is helpful in the sense that it raises a number of urgent questions. Namely: What the f— is Woke 2? When did it start? And how do we stop it?
SAY THE QUIET PART LESS LOUD
“There is policy you campaign on and then there is policy you just quietly pursue once you win,” writes Jordan Weissmann. “Dealing with climate is pretty clearly the latter.” He was responding to polling data that shows voters have basically stopped caring about so-called climate change. You know, that thing Democrats have repeatedly described as the single greatest threat to human civilization.
Who is Jordan Weissmann? He’s a “recovering journalist” who spent the last 20 years as a reporter and editor for mainstream outlets—the Atlantic, Slate, Semafor, and Yahoo Finance, among others. Earlier this year, he seamlessly transitioned to a new gig as editorial director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democrat-aligned think tank. It’s basically the media equivalent of a professional athlete retiring to become a coach.
He isn’t wrong. Telling voters they’re all going to die if they don’t let you raise their taxes to fund Green New Deal boondoggles that will make energy more expensive and may never achieve tangible results (See: California High-Speed Rail) is not a particularly compelling message. Best to spring that on them after getting elected on a platform of “coming together to bring down costs with common-sense solutions.” Or better yet, pursue it “quietly” without telling anyone. They’ll thank you later.
Just ask Joe Biden. Well, not him, obviously. Dr. Jill, perhaps, or whoever was running the country during his “presidency.” Remember the Inflation Reduction Act? At least that’s what it was called in 2022, when Americans were fed up with rising costs and being told that, actually, the economy is doing great according to this chart compiled by experts. In her post-election memoir, Kamala Harris called it “the most consequential climate bill ever enacted into law,” referring to the $370 billion in new spending on clean-energy projects.
Democrats aren’t the only ones who have figured this out. Donald Trump didn’t advertise his plans to build a massive ballroom at the White House and superglue a bunch of gold trinkets to the walls. He just did it.
It’s something to bear in mind when you hear Democrats talk about how crazy it was to support defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and canceling Thanksgiving. They learned their lesson about keeping that nonsense to themselves. A chilling thought, considering what even the “establishment” Dems are willing to say out loud.
PALATE CLEANSER
Some Hasan Piker-related content for your enjoyment. This will make you question everything you thought you knew about why Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow are never in the same room.
And here’s a short clip of a revved-up Irish boxer known as “The Candyman” threatening to pay a visit to Piker’s posh LA bungalow. It’s a real video from 2022, and it would make more sense if you knew the context, but life’s too short. Just watch and enjoy.
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND
Email: stiles@freebeacon.com
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