Sep
8
2026

Instapundit is … Disappointing

I toyed with headlining "Instapundit is Garbage", but I'm not there yet. However, this post Ed Driscoll put up yesterday afternoon, MOVE ALONG CITIZEN, NOTHING TO SEE HERE:, is certainly disheartening. It consists only of an embedded tweet:

The X-truncated sentence at the end: "Paper ballots are the only way."

What's wrong with this? Merely that rudimentary Googling reveals that it is, in fact, utter bullshit.

  • It's presented as something that's just been uncovered. In fact, this particular claim (with the same video) was first promulgated in December 2020, about a month after the election. (Example.)

  • And it was near-immediately debunked back then.

  • The "Microsoft engineer" was never named, and perhaps never existed.

  • The Savannah "tabulation room" where this allegedly occurred was never identified. (Chatham County Georgia currently has 83 voting locations.)

  • No supporting evidence was ever put forth. Server logs, IP addresses, dates and times? Fuhgeddaboutit!

  • Oh, and although the tweet implies otherwise, Georgia did have paper ballots in the 2020 election. There were a couple of recounts. Vote changes were small. Biden still won.

  • Going into much more detail on this is Timothy Noah in the New Republic (July 2022): What Comic Genius Gave Us the Nest Thermostat Election Conspiracy?. He identifies the guy in the video as Russell Ramsland. Noah's article is full of partisan snark, but also full of fun facts, e.g.:

    Ramsland (who told the Post he had never spoken to Trump) is a piece of work. He is, for instance, on record saying the following: “George Soros [who was born in 1930] helped form the ‘Deep State’ in Nazi Germany in the 1930s along with George H.W. Bush’s father [Prescott Bush], the Muslim brotherhood, and ‘leftists.’” (At the risk of being pedantic: Soros is Jewish, the Nazi party was created 10 years before Soros was born, and Hitler came to power when Soros was 3.)

  • For (even) more on Ramsland, there's a May 2021 article in the WaPo: The making of a myth.

I came this close (imagine my thumb and index finger about 2 millimeters apart) to commenting at Instapundit. But dealing with election conspiracy advocates is pointless; they are poster children for confirmation bias. Example: see the comment thread on a January 2021 Granite Grok article on a different Georgia allegation: SHOCKING PROOF!!! CHINA CAUGHT Hacked Into Fulton County, GA Voting Machine. Rebuttal on these matters is treated as if it's a turd dropped into a punchbowl.

So I just blog about it here. And you'll notice I don't have a commenting feature.

And for the record:

  • Yes, paper ballots are a good idea; I plan to fill one out later today down at the American Legion Hall.
  • And (also yes), requiring voter ID is another good idea. It's already required in New Hampshire.

And now on to the usual hodgepodge...

  • $14 for a matinee ticket after my senior discount?! I'm with Kyle Smith: Hollywood, Heal Thyself.

    It’s nice to get paid more than you’re worth, but it isn’t so nice when your labor union is so strong that it creates an untenable cost structure for your employer. Management might be forced to shut down in the face of international competition, or move jobs overseas to avoid union costs.

    Everyone knows this is the way the U.S. economy runs, which is why only 5.9% of private-sector jobs are still unionized. Government, which can’t be outsourced, is heavily unionized at all levels.

    Hollywood is one of the most union-intensive businesses in America. Practically everybody on the set of a film, from the makeup lady to the centimillionaire titans like Ryan Reynolds and James Cameron, is a union member. But grim “Jurassic Park”-style rumblings of doom started to be heard in Southern California over the past 10 years. So what did the unions do? They went on strike for even higher wages.

    Kyle goes on to (convincingly) demonstrate that government bailouts/subsidies/incentives to the movie guys are a waste.

    And there's always the small detail that AI is gonna destroy traditional film-making. If it hasn't already. (Depends on when you're reading this.)

  • I love Lan Lam. But Elizabeth Nolan Brown goes a different way: RFK Jr.'s 'Real Food Show' is government propaganda but I kind of love it.

    We're now three episodes into The Real Food Show, a YouTube cooking class hosted by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And I'm hooked.

    Don't get me wrong: In principle, I hate it. The government has no place being in the business of making cooking shows. And this one is rife with propaganda, including thanking President Donald Trump for the new U.S. dietary guidelines and casual mentions of things like fisheries regulation or an executive order on regenerative agriculture. Even if you can put aside the ick-factor of HHS trying to sneak political content to viewers like some parents might hide broccoli in muffins, this just makes it a worse show. As a cultural or entertainment product, it would be better off without random references to the likes of the Magnuson-Stevenson Act.

    Besides, the presence of RFK Jr., who hosts each episode alongside a popular chef, doesn't add much. He spends most of each episode whisking eggs or doing some other sort of kitchen-helper task while the guest chef talks. Then he periodically bursts in with some propaganda while elbow-deep in chickpea salad.

    Puzzled by this item's header? Well: When I get the urge, I watch Lan Lam's Techniquely episodes on Netflix. They're short, interesting, occasionally funny, and she doesn't yammer about seed oils. Even though I'm unlikely to ever make anything she cooks up, it all looks delicious, and she's a lot easier on the eyes than RFKJr.

  • And now a word from the Plundercrats. Two of them, Austin Clemens and David Mitchell, take to the Hill with a headline that is only reassuring if you don't notice the word "wealth": Don’t panic about the national debt — the US has the wealth to handle it. They start out OK:

    The U.S. national debt recently passed $40 trillion, hitting this monstrous milestone months ahead of Congressional Budget Office projections, in part due to tariff refunds increasing the total deficit.

    In March, the federal debt held by the public reached the size of U.S. annual gross domestic product, nearing its all-time peak from more than 80 years ago, when we were paying off World War II.

    These headlines have renewed calls for austerity, but the truth is, America is nowhere near broke. On the contrary, the nation holds a staggering amount of wealth — far more than the debt it owes. The real question is not whether we have the resources to manage the debt, but whether we have the will to use them.

    Yes, it's a plea to tax wealth. Eventually, they start rattling off the possibilities:

    If the U.S> [sic] is willing to look at what it owns, versus only at what it earns, it would open up a new set of options for paying down the debt: taxes on wealth and property, and reforms to how inheritances and capital gains are taxed, among them. Of course, people will disagree about which, if any, to use. But ultimately, that is a debate about priorities and political will, not about whether we have the ability to pay off our debt. Because we do.

    Note the game-playing with the pronouns I've bolded. For example. the U.S. should look at what "it" owns. Smuggling in the idea that "it" owns all that wealth instead of … well, the people who actually own it. And "we" are entitled to as much of that wealth as "we" feel like expropriating.

    Well, the arguments against wealth taxation are well known, I've made a lot of them here, and I probably don't need to repeat them. But I will deploy that evergreen Bastiat quote:

    When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

    Folks, Austin and David are exactly who Bastiat was talking about back in 1848.


Last Modified 2026-09-08 12:48 PM EDT