Commentary Culture Investigations

Vince Bielski, RCI This RCI series reports on how misguided professional incentives have spurred a rise in research fraud and on the scientists pushing reforms to curb it.

Screenshot via Newsmax2/Snapstream

Hasan Piker is deeply envious of Charlie Kirk.The hard-left influencer debated Kirk in 2017 and was set to do so again before Kirk was murdered last year.Yet now Piker is going around mocking Kirk’s assassination, leading a crowd last weekend, during his live podcast tour, in a sarcastic singalong of an AI-generated song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.”“We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame. We’ll fight for the Gospel, we’ll honor his name,” Piker sang off-key, the crowd howling along, while the celebrity socialist’s co-hosts guffawed and waved their arms in the air.This wasn’t satirizing a political opponent — Kirk has been dead nearly a year.Why make him the subject of this derision?It’s because Piker knows his audience, and they’re not looking for thoughtful politics. They want a hatefest.Readers of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” might remember the totalitarian leftist party that runs the dystopian state in that novel regularly held events called a “Two Minutes Hate” to whip up hostility against the regime’s enemies.Piker has improved on that — his podcast and live events like this offer more than an hour’s hate.And nobody stirs the Piker crowd into a frenzy like Charlie Kirk.The slain Turning Point USA founder represents everything they’re against, and not just because he was a widely successful conservative organizer who won young Americans away from socialism on the unfriendly campuses where he spoke — and where he ultimately died for his beliefs.Kirk’s faith in God, his devotion to his family, his happiness all infuriated his enemies.His self-sacrifice did, too, and more than anything else:Kirk knew the risks he took by going where he wasn’t welcome and speaking truths the left didn’t want to hear — and was determined to prevent anyone else from hearing.Yet Kirk did it anyway, fearlessly, and put his life on the line because of the strength of his convictions.That’s what Piker’s mob hates most: Charlie Kirk shamed them by showing them how much better a human being could be.So Piker knew just how enthusiastic the response to his mockery would be.He could count on Kirk’s memory to incite a jeering frenzy.Yet there’s something more going on with Piker himself.Kirk was the man Piker can never be, and as the audience reaction shows, Kirk remains important, even to his enemies, in ways that Piker isn’t.People care deeply about Charlie Kirk’s memory, whether they cherish it or resent it.Piker, a guy who broadcasts his banal existence for up to eight hours a day on the streaming platform Twitch, craves the kind of attention Kirk still commands even in death, and even among his enemies.It’s not that Piker isn’t trying — he’s even resorted to animal cruelty, seemingly shocking his dog with an electric collar on camera, to get views.(Piker denies the collar was electric; he claims it was vibrate-only, and the dog yelped in pain for some totally other reason.)One place the firebrand leftist influencer does get the notice he wants is in the Democratic Party, though Democrats are starting to feel queasy about the attention they receive from campaigning with Piker.Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan Democrats’ nominee for the U.S. Senate, evidently feels embarrassed enough by his appearances with Piker during the primaries that he’s now issued a statement insisting Piker’s not an official campaign messenger: “Nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople.”But that’s a far cry from disavowing Piker outright, even after the streamer recently threatened, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”What might that mean coming from someone like Piker, who gets cheap laughs off the victim of a political murder?Piker has also said “America deserved 9/11,” a belief his buddy El-Sayed had to squirm away from on “Meet the Press” earlier this month.“I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement,” the Senate hopeful said — tellingly, trying to get not only himself but also Piker off the hook for the reprehensible remark.El-Sayed isn’t the only Democrat who’s campaigned alongside Piker and welcomed his support.The Piker audience is a Democratic audience, and the party wants his support, even if Democratic candidates don’t want to take responsibility for what Piker and his followers actually believe.But it’s all on open display — on the Twitch stream and on stage.Hasan Piker is exactly the opposite of Charlie Kirk:He’s not an apostle bringing reasoned argument to audiences who disagree with him; he’s a man who trades on resentment, vitriol and not just the prospect of political violence but its lethal reality.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.

President Trump placed a 90-day tariff relief on ground beef, allowing up to 300,000 metric tons of beef from importers. Trump has also indicated that the imported beef will be sold at 25 percent below market prices, noting that the price of ground beef reached a record average $6.89 per pound this year. (READ MORE: Is the US Already in a Recession?) 
The Spectacle Podcast hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay discuss Trump’s beef policy and the broader issue of America’s struggling economy. They cover how the rising costs of gas, cars, housing, and maintenance point back to terrible policies enacted by Democrats. (RELATED: The Right Goal, the Wrong Tool) 
Tune in to hear their discussion!

Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify.
Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.
 

MS NOW/SnapStream

On Wednesday, Morning Joe reacted to an ABC Good Morning America interview with the family of Alex Pretti and continued to decry ICE in the lead-up to the midterms. In the show’s return to the Minneapolis unrest discussion, host Joe Scarborough decided to make a historical comparison and compared the shooting’s aftermath to “what happened in the Jim Crow South when a Black man would be shot.”Scabrorough began: “There are a lot of people in Minneapolis, a lot of people across America, a lot of people across the world who saw what happened on that videotape and believe he was murdered, believe he was shot for no reason, execution style.”He added that Pretti did “what we would want our children to do” because “He was trying to help a woman up, pick a woman up who had been knocked down by these thugs, these untrained thugs, knocked down in the snow.” On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough compared the aftermath of the Alex Pretti shooting amid the unrest against ICE in Minnesota to “what happened in the Jim Crow South when a Black man would be shot.” pic.twitter.com/IWs9T0gRA8— Nick (@nspin310) August 26, 2026 Scarborough then showed his desire for criminal prosecutions: “Why are these men that shot him execution style not in prison today?”Co-host Willie Geist, who was one of the rare employees after the Versant divorce to still work for both NBC and MS NOW, then stated the ICE agents were “being protected by the Trump Administration.” He added, “ICE can’t run from this. We saw what he did. He raced like we would hope our sons would do, Joe, to step in to a woman who was being pushed down and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don’t push somebody down like that.’ And for that, he was on his knees and shot in the head. And after that, he was called a domestic terrorist without evidence.”Scabrorough jumped in to make his own historical comparison to the events, and compared it to coverups in the Jim Crow South:You know, Willie, this is what happened in Jim Crow South when a Black man would be shot. Like in another lifetime, justice would not be served. You know, we saw this happen to civil rights workers. We saw this happen to Black men. We saw this happen time and again where somebody would be shot dead, and no justice would follow, or a jury would acquit. That’s now happening in 2026? That’s now happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota, because the Trump Administration is trying to protect people that gunned down an American citizen in the streets of America.Scarborough continued as he posed a question to Geist: “Willie, this is a perverse throwback to an uglier, horrible time in this country where certain people can be gunned down and shot, killed, and no justice follows. Justice has to follow here, Willie, doesn’t it?”Geist responded and said, “And the difference is, back then they could do those things under the cover of darkness. Today we have video.” Then, Geist worried about a potential uptick in immigration enforcement: “There is an ongoing and maybe enhanced push for ICE to be more aggressive, to get the numbers up, to meet the quotas, to get people out of this country. Hopefully not to the point where they’re shooting peaceful protesters in the head. But this has maybe restrained ICE to some degree for a while, but it’s clear that the mission continues.”The Morning Joe crew, especially Scarborough, have really liked to make historical comparisons of ICE actions and many Trump Administration-related events to the KKK, Nazis, and the Soviet Union.The transcript is below. Click “expand”:MS NOW’s Morning JoeAugust 26, 20266:11:27 AM Eastern(…)JOE SCARBOROUGH: There are a lot of people in Minneapolis, a lot of people across America, a lot of people across the world who saw what happened on that videotape and believe he was murdered, believe he was shot for no reason, execution style. And Alex Pretti’s mom asks, what did my son do? What did he do? Well, Willie, what he was doing was doing what we would want our children to do. He was trying to help a woman up, pick a woman up who had been knocked down by these thugs, these untrained thugs, knocked down in the snow. And he went away from the police officers toward the woman to pick her up after she had been brutally knocked down in the snow. And for that, he’s pulled back out, and he is shot in what looks like execution style in America, in the streets of America, and still no justice for those who shot him, who the mother said murdered him, who a lot of us look and say, looks like got shot execution style for helping a woman out of the snow.Why are these men that shot him execution style not in prison today?WILLIE GEIST: Yeah. These masked men, who are masked for a reason so that they can’t be identified, and in a case like this, they’re not – they’re being protected by the federal government. They’re being protected by the Trump administration. The FBI finally did share information with Hennepin County. Keith Ellison, the attorney general in Minnesota, says that’s a good development. At least we’re beginning to get the evidence we need to pursue this case. But as Miss Pretti said in those heartbreaking words, it’s been seven months, and they’re not getting any comfort from the government when their son was shot in the head in the streets by a federal agent. They’re not getting any information from the government after that happened. And I’m glad you pointed out the full video. We’ve all seen it. ICE can’t run from this. We saw what he did. He raced like we would hope our sons would do, Joe, to step in to a woman who was being pushed down and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don’t push somebody down like that.’ And for that, he was on his knees and shot in the head. And after that, he was called a domestic terrorist without evidence. The attorney general now, Todd Blanche, has backed off that, saying there’s no evidence he was a domestic terrorist. But just think the first reflex to watching a man shot in the head by federal agents in a video, the whole world saw, is to say it was his fault. He was a domestic terrorist, which he clearly was not.SCARBOROUGH: You know, Willie, this is what happened in Jim Crow South when a black man would be shot. Like in another lifetime, justice would not be served. You know, we saw this happen to civil rights workers. We saw this happen to Black men. We saw this happen time and again where somebody would be shot dead and no justice would follow, or a jury would acquit. That’s now happening in 2026? That’s now happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota, because the Trump Administration is trying to protect people that gunned down an American citizen in the streets of America.Willie, this is a perverse throwback to an uglier, horrible time in this country where certain people can be gunned down and shot, killed, and no justice follows. Justice has to follow here, Willie, doesn’t it?GEIST: Yeah. And the difference is, back then they could do those things under the cover of darkness. Today we have video.MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.We watched Renee Good get shot in the face. We watched Alex get shot in the head. And, Jonathan Lemire, there’s got to be justice for Alex Pretti as his family is now publicly asking. But, as you’ve been reporting, there is an ongoing and maybe enhanced push for ICE to be more aggressive, to get the numbers up, to meet the quotas, to get people out of this country. Hopefully not to the point where they’re shooting peaceful protesters in the head. But this has maybe restrained ICE to some degree for a while, but it’s clear that the mission continues.(…)

Staff, New York Times Part 1: How the AI Fuse Was LitPart 2: One Year of ChatGPT

Washington Post Staff Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed to deliver its expected punch and secure a decisive breakthrough, generating friction between Washington and Kyiv.

Maggie Prosser et al., Dallas Morning News “Deadly Fake” is a special project from The Dallas Morning News that chronicles the impact of fentanyl on North Texas across 30 days in September 2023.

The Rest Is History podcast’s series on the Troubles is commendable.

What people don’t like is uninvited commentary from strangers on how to economize.