All right, let’s wrap this up quickly. We’ve all got a weekend to get to.
1. The NAACP Goes Full Blazing Saddles
In perhaps the greatest movie ever made, Mel Brooks’ seminal classic satirical Western Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little plays a newly appointed sheriff of a frontier town whose skin color shocks and dismays the simple-minded locals whose racial views are less than enlightened. It turns out, however, that Little’s character is quick on the uptake and devises a foolproof strategy to keep from being lynched by the townsfolk upon his arrival (warning to the unwashed — a certain word appears here that is only acceptable to say in a rap track)…
I’m assuming that the people heading up the NAACP these days are big Cleavon Little/Blazing Saddles fans, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for this:
(The Center Square) – Black athletes in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina at public universities are being encouraged to join the NAACP’s Out of Bounds campaign and boycott athletic programs.
Power 4 conference schools in the Southeastern Conference, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 could be impacted. The request is in response to the Supreme Court ruling announced April 29, striking down a congressional map in Louisiana it says relied too heavily on race.
“Black athletes should not be asked to generate wealth, prestige and power for state institutions while those same states strip political power from Black communities,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A day earlier, the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to NCAA President Charlie Baker and leaders of the SEC and ACC advising its members would be in opposition to the SCORE Act. The legislation unifies athletes’ contracting rights nationwide.
So black kids should turn down the millions of dollars in NIL swag schools like LSU, Bama, Georgia, and Texas A&M are offering because of congressional politics?
Don’t draw Steve Cohen out of his district of Rick Barnes’ basketball Volunteers end up white like Casper?
The funny thing about that is that the big college basketball programs are already camping out in Europe and doing their best to land Euroleague pros as their big stars.
But even funnier is the fact that if you talk to elite athletes in a private setting, and perhaps not black athletes in particular but not because they’re an exception, what you’ll find is they skew a LOT more conservative than regular Americans do. They tend to be more religious, though not necessarily more socially conservative (the baseball players are usually super-conservative socially, football players a little less so, and the basketball players are generally pretty libertine), and when it comes to taxes and economics, they’re as far-right as it gets.
For an obvious reason. They’ve got a generally small window of 15 years or so where they have the opportunity to amass generational wealth, and then that opportunity largely passes. Obviously the investments they make with what they earn while playing ball can keep them comfortable, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make $6 million a year, or perhaps much more, when the game passes them by.
So those dollars are precious. They want to put away as many as they can. And leftist redistributionist politics fly hard in the face of that objective.
That 19-year-old kid who has the opportunity to sign a $3 million NIL deal at Auburn, which means his mom gets to live in a nice house rather than whatever Section 8 shack she’s had to raise him and his brothers and sisters in, when Auburn is driving distance away and she can come to all of his games, has zero figs to give for what Derrick Johnson says.
This is actually a great thing. When it has absolutely no impact whatsoever on college sports recruiting, it will demonstrate how little influence the NAACP has inside the black community — or at least within one very visible, very prominent sliver of that community that is important enough to merit Johnson’s messaging here.
Fans, boosters, and politicians in SEC states are not as gullible as the citizens of Rock Ridge. And Derrick Johnson isn’t quite as wily as Cleavon’s character. Otherwise? Bold strategy, Cotton!
2. No, We Don’t Need More Bombing in Iran
President Trump keeps talking about how he almost sent in the Tomahawks and the jets to blow up stuff in Iran and how he might still do it.
And he probably should keep mentioning it, if for no other reason than to goose the negotiations with those Iranians willing to negotiate.
Though those Iranians don’t seem to be the ones in charge. The ones in charge appear to have a special penchant for provocative attacks designed to make a mockery of the ceasefire and suck Trump back into an open conflict, in the hopes of one day shooting down a plane and capturing the pilots, or achieving some other propaganda war victory amid all the kinetic destruction they’re bringing down on their country.
Meanwhile, there is the blockade of Iran’s ports that is slowly strangling the regime as it bleeds out financially. This will ultimately gain the result everyone by now understands is necessary, which is that the Iranians take back their government from the insane Stone Age barbarians who’ve ruled the place for the last 47 years.
But what evidence is there that this is about to happen? I can’t say I have much. I did see one interesting item this week, though:
🚨 Armed clashes between the Iranian Army and the IRGC are reportedly erupting inside Iran.
According to Alhurra, citing informed military and political sources inside Iran, tensions between the regular Army and the IRGC have escalated into armed confrontations in Tehran,… pic.twitter.com/8YI94oHByP
— The Iran Watcher 🇮🇷 (@TheIranWatcher) May 20, 2026
The Artesh (Iran’s regular army) is a LOT larger than the Sepah (the IRGC). It’s poorly paid and poorly armed, but it’s the sleeping giant whose awakening would be the end of that regime. If Artesh soldiers have begun shooting at the IRGC, it’s the game-changer we’re looking for.
Keep the blockade going and let it play out. We don’t need a fresh round of kinetic action, at least not now. We can afford to be patient; let’s just be smart enough to leverage that fact.
3. Ace of Spades on the DNC’s Autopsy
I was going to write something on this, and then I read what Ace said. And I said to myself, “Self, don’t try to reinvent this wheel. It’s perfect as is.”
A taste, though you should go there and read the whole thing:
You don’t need an autopsy to know why the Democrats lost in 2024. No one does.
The Democrats know as well. The problem is, they are beholden to their extreme left wing, and they’re beholden to the extreme left wing because the extreme left wing in the majority of the Democrat Party.
Democrats now know — if they didn’t before — that transgender “science” is a propaganda lie spun up by WPATH, an organization funded by J.B. Pritzker’s transgender brother “Jennifer” Pritzker. It was never true that “gender affirming surgery” reduces suicide — and multiple studies now prove that beyond doubt. It was never true that “gender affirming” “medicine” improves mental health or well-being.
And on top that: The politics of it are horrible. It’s a 20-80 issue.
But the Democrats cannot admit this because the 20% that is gonzo for gay and transgender extremism is the core of the activist class.
Likewise, the Democrats know that Obama’s and then Biden’s open border policy is absolutely toxic political poison. It’s another 20-80 issue.
But the Democrats cannot admit this because the 20% that supports the Great Replacement is the core of the most partisan Democrat voters.
And they know they foisted a brain-damaged demented fool and corrupt grafter on the country in the form of Joe Biden. But they can’t admit that because most of the Democrat Party — and the media — is in legal jeopardy should the entirety of their massive conspiracy be revealed.
So the “autopsy” is a sham. They never bothered to complete it and left most the issues that actually caused the loss entirely unmentioned.
Not underplayed. Not under-analyzed.
Unmentioned entirely.
The only fake conclusion the sham “autopsy” is certain of…?
Democrats and their media allies didn’t go negative enough on the man they claimed was Hitler on a mission to destroy America and resurrect the Third Reich.
Trump got off so easy you guys!
The DNC’s chairman Ken Martin announced that this ridiculous document was actually produced late last year and he suppressed it, because it didn’t meet his standards. I don’t know if that means he disagrees with the conclusions that the trans piece was a killer, or some of the other obvious takeaways the autopsy offers, or what.
But it’s like I’ve said: they chased excellence out of their party, so how can they expect to commission it?
4. Stephen Miller Is Not Wrong
This will undoubtedly turn into a left-wing outrage that he would say such “divisive” and “mean-spirited” things, but Stephen Miller isn’t at all wrong about the modern Left and the way it operates.
He’s talking about the glorification of violence that seems to be spiraling coming out of activist Democrats, particularly in the wake of Callais and the flurry of Southern redistricting and some of the other recent political developments, and of course the latest attempt on Miller’s boss Donald Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. And in classic Millerian tones, he pulls no punches…
🚨 WOW! Stephen Miller just exposed it:
“Some people might not like what I’m about to say, but it has to be said. You have the Left continue in its professional associations like nursing and doctors and education — people who casually CHEER ASSASSINATIONS.”
“Their conversation… pic.twitter.com/Ai6xEHGMJm
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 21, 2026
5. The Coming Republican Era?
There’s a very interesting think piece by Clayton Wood at his From Chaos to Clarity Substack that talks about how a host of developments are likely to lock in Republican dominance for some time to come, specifically once the 2030 Census is held and its report is published, and the resulting redistricting maps are drawn.
Wood names four developments as layering on top of each other to create a real problem for the Democrats.
The first is the 2020 Census, and the recognition, which hasn’t gotten as much media play as it probably should have, that its numbers were way, way off — so much so that you’d say it was fraudulently conducted:
Start with what is not in dispute. The Census Bureau’s own post-enumeration survey, released after the 2020 count, found statistically significant overcounts in eight states and undercounts in six others. The overcounted states were Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah. Seven of those eight voted for Joe Biden. The undercounted states were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. Five of those six voted Republican.
The numbers behind those findings are not rounding errors. Florida was undercounted by approximately 750,000 people. Texas by more than 500,000. Tennessee by roughly 340,000, representing nearly 5 percent of the state’s actual population. On the other side, New York was overcounted by approximately 670,000. Minnesota was overcounted by more than 216,000.
The upshot there is we’re living in something of a false political reality in which red states have been given less representation than they deserve, and this plays into not only the balance of House seats but in the Electoral College (which the Democrats magically want to eliminate).
Then he notes the massive internal migration from blue states to red states, which is only going to accentuate the migration of House apportionment and electoral votes to the GOP.
Wood then brings up the Callais case and its aftermath, in which red states are now free to draw the districts they want to draw — in ways they were prevented from doing prior to Callais while blue states gerrymandered with impunity. So now you’ve got growing red states, with larger electoral footprints, getting more aggressive in drawing red districts where either there were none or where there were blue districts.
And then finally, he hits on a subject I’ve been musing on for a while — which is that an Obama-style Black Swan event that changes the game is almost locked out of the realm of possibility. Why? Because Barack Obama was a novelty who promised the kind of racial reconciliation Americans yearned for, and that was enough for many “crossover” voters to throw caution to the wind and give him a chance.
Except Obama burned those crossover voters. They won’t be back. And Obama also so radicalized the Democrats that their party is incapable of nominating the kinds of candidates who can win in competitive states and districts.
You can quibble with Wood’s construction. But it’s generally correct. As he notes, he’s simply listening to the Democrats’ own consultants:
James Carville told you the Democratic strategic answer to this analysis on a podcast, and he was honest enough to say explicitly that the answer had to be hidden from voters. Grant statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico for four reliable Democratic Senate seats. Pack the Supreme Court to neutralize the judicial branch. Reopen the border and grant mass amnesty to reshape the eligible electorate before the 2030 census locks the map for a generation. His advice to Democratic politicians: do not run on it, do not talk about it, just do it.
Do not run on it. Do not talk about it. Just do it.
That sentence is the tell. When your plan requires hiding it from the voters you claim to represent, you already know the voters would not choose it. And it confirms that the structural analysis in this essay is correct, because people who believe they are winning do not need to hide their strategy. They announce it.
It’s a really good piece. It isn’t a Pollyanna diatribe; he builds in ample caveats and notes that with all the manifest problems the country has to solve, being the party in power for a while might actually be a curse rather than a blessing. And what Wood leaves unsaid is today’s Democrats have no intellectual or emotional template for loyal opposition; once they realize the current system won’t afford them political power, they might well become a chaotic revolutionary army rather than a political faction.
And that isn’t Pollyanna at all.
I do think Wood has a good measure of our future. What’s worth discussing is what kind of Republican Party we can construct to wield the power that future will offer, because the Bill Cassidy–Thom Tillis–Brian Kemp model we’re doing away with certainly isn’t it, and there is going to have to be some sort of unifying tractor beam present when Donald Trump exits the scene in a couple of years.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
Grifters, Activism, and Thomas Massie
The Bell Tolls for Keir Starmer