WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026
Also, an apparent ongoing decline: Dear persons! This site covers the mainstream press corps' various organs. Nathan Pemberton, late of the New York Times, "writes about influence and the new right."
In a new guest essay for the Times, Pemberton describes the world's oldest obsession as displayed by the online right. Angry boys and boy-men have never been so happy, he says.
Headline included, his essay starts like this:
I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy
The online right has that old spring in its step. The infighting brought on by President Trump’s chaotic second-term agenda has settled down, and the anonymous accounts have been posting at a furious clip. What is the source of this newfound unity? The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on.
The social media celebrities and talking heads of the right have jumped at the chance to pick apart Jane Doe’s allegations of a gang rape—labeling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Jane Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners.
Her most hostile critics on the right have sought to portray Jane Doe as a kind of out-of-control sexual fiend or “super slut,” as the conspiracist Alex Jones has labeled her. Not content to simply degrade her, Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist streamer and self-proclaimed virgin, has used the Cornell case as an opportunity to espouse his vision of male dominance by suggesting not only that Jane Doe should be “put in jail” but that he would “absolutely beat” a woman who behaved like her.
And so on from there.
As a general matter, we don't follow those celebrities and talking heads ourselves. Sadly, we don't find it hard to believe Pemberton's observations.
(Also, brace yourselves, then help yourselves to Megyn Kelly's analysis of the Cornell matter, as excerpted by Mediaite. Don't forget to brace yourselves before you see what she wrote.)
On the presidential end, the apparent cognitive decline seems to be more obvious than ever—almost, it seems, on a daily basis. At Mediaite, Kathryn Wilkens starts a new report like this:
Trump Explains Sizing Up ‘Ass’ of Republican Senator: ‘I’m Studying His Body’
President Donald Trump offered an eyebrow-raising explanation for why he was examining the “ass” of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), insisting he was “studying his body.”
Trump’s first reference to Husted’s “ass” came during a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, last week, when he gleefully told the crowd he had begun “examining” Husted’s body after recently learning that the senator was a former All-American defensive back at the University of Dayton.
“I looked, and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass, and I looked at the whole– and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws,” the president marveled on Oct. 12.
The comments about Senator Husted's physical person have traveled with Trump to other states in the week since then. As reported by Wilkens, here's what he told a rally gathering yesterday, this time in North Carolina:
So, he’s over here. I’m over here, and I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it—of course. [laughs] I always precede it by saying, “Nothing wrong,” but it’s never been my thing, to be honest with you.
But I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs. I said, “His ass, sh*t, it’s like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Then I looked at his legs, and I said, “Man, his feet are big.” Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel. I said, “This guy’s a monster!”
In this way, he hoped to help the Republican Party win the North Carolina Senate race.
As we always tell you, serious cognitive decline is a human tragedy. It's a tragic loss of human capability which can hit friend or foe, loved one or rank stranger.
In this case, the sitting president's powerful position would make some such decline a major societal danger.
We wait and we wait, then we wait and we wait, for some major journalist or major news org to interview major medical specialists about the apparent change in capacity which seems to be right there before us.
What will it take before our major Blue American orgs choose to serve—before they choose to report, in a serious way, on the apparent state of the world?
