Surrender, surrender, but don't give your tabs away ...
The story is that a potential major presidential candidate couldn't speak a single coherent sentence about global security at a global security conference.
— Peter Laffin (@petermlaffin) February 17, 2026
Ed: Yes, that's the ACTUAL story. The New York Times wants to re-float the narrative that Ocasio-Cortez is "sharp as a tack," so to speak. Or totally Brat.
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Free Beacon: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) called a New York Times reporter from Berlin in an effort to clean up coverage of her Munich Security Conference speech after a series of foreign-policy missteps drew scrutiny, including a stumbling answer on Taiwan.
In the interview, published Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez tried to shift attention away from her meandering answers, arguing that speculation about a presidential run eclipsed the substance of her remarks. "This reporter came up to me and was like, 'Is Munich the new New Hampshire?'" she told the Times, dismissing the focus on 2028 chatter. She said viral clips of "any five-to-10-second thing" were meant to "distract from the substance of what I am saying."
Ed: Substance? What substance? AOC went to Munich as part of a plan to put herself into the leadership clique of the Democrat Party, and came back with egg all over her face because she couldn't do "substance." Ocasio-Cortez couldn't even troll successfully.
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Arrested Development VoiceOver: It was about her running for President. https://t.co/8XeEnUV8jq
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) February 17, 2026
Ed: Of course it was. And the New York Times still wants to salvage the project.
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Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO: Browning suggests that AOC went to Munich to insist that “wealthy world leaders must better provide for their working classes or risk their countries sliding toward authoritarianism.” Apparently, he considers this exonerative. In truth, though, that is the whole problem: AOC is a one-trick pony. What she says in America is what she says in Munich, because she doesn’t know how to say anything else. At some point in her life she became attracted to warmed-over democratic socialism, and since that point she has declined to learn anything more. She’s a meme, an avatar, a vibe. In her interview with Browning, she griped that the press had focused on “any five-to-10-second thing” from her remarks. But of course it did. She is a five-to-10-second thing. She is a limerick competing with a bunch of novels. What did she think was going to happen?
Elsewhere, AOC implies that the media’s interest in her potentially “running for president” has made it tough for her agenda to break through. But one must wonder why, if political drama is to blame, this did not apply to Marco Rubio, who is constantly depicted as being involved in a monumental power struggle with JD Vance, and yet managed to deliver a speech at the same conference that was widely regarded as masterly. As it happens, the explanation for this difference is simple: Marco Rubio went to Germany to make a discrete case to the Munich Security Conference, and AOC went to Germany to make yet another Instagram video about nothing. The results matched the aims.
Ed: This hits the nail on the head. Also, people run for president in order to promote agendas. Some candidates only flirt with a presidential run for that purpose. If AOC can't execute on that strategy, that also speaks to substance and intellect.
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AOC Condemns Spain For Stealing Mexico’s Language https://t.co/v8jYPJ6KKI pic.twitter.com/nbTq1gMV8x
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 17, 2026
Ed: Satire, or real life? It may only be a matter of calendar dates. Recently, though, there's been a suggestion – perhaps related to the Bad Bunny show at the Super Bowl – that Spanish is the language of decolonization in the Western Hemisphere. That's almost as funny as this joke from the Babylon Bee.
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Mediaite: Fetterman criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s position, saying, “You know, I’ve consistently—that’s part of the rot in the Democratic Party. You know why? If you have to pick a side, why would you pick the side or defend Hamas or defend Iran in a way? For me, stand with Israel. I’ll never vote for any kinds of restrictions on aid, whether it’s military, financial, or intelligence. There are ever to be any restrictions on that. And now, for here we are, we can have peace. Again, that’s become part of the serious problem in our party.”
Bartiromo followed up, “So are the Democrats standing in the way? Extremists like AOC—are they standing in the way of peace in the Middle East then?”
Fetterman replied, “Well, I’m saying I refuse to pander to the part of my Democratic Party that finds that there’s value in being anti-Israel. And that’s effectively—they use the word “anti-Zionism”—I mean, effectively what that’s really become on college campuses and places is just anti-Semitism. We have a problem here in our party, and I’m going to stand against that and always be an unapologetic supporter for Israel.”
Ed: It might have been interesting to see Fetterman in Munich. He clearly has more substance than AOC on foreign policy, so his dissents from the Trump administration on specifics might have made for an interesting contrast. Notice how the Protection Racket Media has done next to nothing to suggest that Fetterman could develop into leadership, though, while the NYT carries water for the inch-deep-mile-wide intellect of AOC.
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This Munich conference made it clear: America has just one adult political party right now, and it's the Republican Party.
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) February 17, 2026
Marco Rubio just gave the speech of a lifetime.
Dems sent their "brightest" in AOC and she CRAPPED THE BED in front of the world. pic.twitter.com/GbTXKqysSG
Ed: Indeed.
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Scott Pinsker at PJ Media: After all, the Trump surname is big business. Billions of dollars are shared within the Trump family. Given the accounting complexities of managing all that money, it’s impossible to know where one trust fund ends and the others begin.
Between all the stocks, bonds, wills, trusts, and backend ownerships, everything is almost certainly intermingled.
So, if it turned out that Trump’s family members had continued to correspond with Epstein and/or request favors AFTER his 2008 conviction for felony solicitation and procurement of underage prostitutes, there’d be hell to pay.
It’d be the lead story on every newscast!
Which is why the media’s silence over Gov. JB Pritzker's (D-Ill.) family involvement in the Epstein Files is so deafening: The media has gone out of its way to shield Gov. Pritzker from culpability.
Ed: It's only been a day, and perhaps this may percolate more as the week progresses. But yes, there has been no mad rush to demand answers from JB or Hyatt, not in the way that would have taken place had there been significant connections to anyone named Trump.
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"Sitting on their vast wealth," could also be phrased "investing their vast wealth in productive enterprises instead of throwing money to activist NGOs that are mostly scams." https://t.co/SDgwmo2dU5
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) February 17, 2026
Ed: Exactly, although we should extend the challenge here regarding Bezos. He not only isn't "sitting" on his wealth, he lost hundreds of millions of dollars keeping the Washington Post afloat for the Left. He subsidized the progressive narrative-policing platform until the losses got so bad as to be ridiculous, only to be reviled by the people he had been subsidizing with his wealth. The Left wants Bezos to treat the WaPo like an activist NGO; Bezos has realized belatedly that it actually was an activist NGO and a scam, in regard to its claim as a reporting platform.
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Axios: A Super Bowl ad for Amazon's Ring doorbell camera touting the ability of the device's new Search Party feature to locate lost dogs has spurred widespread backlash.
- But many viewers assumed the tool was also able to track and identify people who walk by their front doors.
- Customers posted about destroying their Ring doorbell cameras. Reddit users claimed they were requesting refunds from Amazon.
- Even a popular social media account that rates dog photos posted a video accusing the company of pushing a "lucrative mass surveillance network" that turns "private homes into surveillance outposts."
Ed: I wondered about that ad when it aired, too. It's a good thing to see that Americans are coming to grips with the potential dangers of a surveillance state.
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🚨 Among senior citizens, 77% believe LEGAL immigration is good for America and ILLEGAL immigration is bad.
— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) February 17, 2026
✅ Among young voters (under 35), just 50% make that important distinction.
✅ 29% of young voters favor open borders and 13% want to stop all immigration (both legal and… pic.twitter.com/eohjmFjbYi
✅ 29% of young voters favor open borders and 13% want to stop all immigration (both legal and illegal).
✅ Among seniors, 13% prefer open borders and 6% want to stop all immigration (both legal and illegal)
Ed: More at the link. I'm not surprised by these numbers, although I'm surprised that support for open borders among younger voters is as low as it is. I would have guessed higher, maybe even a majority.
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John Nolte at Breitbart: The far-left New York Times is as good as spreading disinformation by refusing to report that the alleged Rhode Island ice hockey shooter was a transsexual.
Although the Times story is nearly 800 words long, and five so-called reporters were needed, this obvious attempt to keep its readers ignorant of a vital fact is something beyond ham-handed. This is as close as the Times is willing to come: [I don’t link disinformation.]
At a later news conference on Monday night, Chief Goncalves said that the shooter’s birth name was Robert Dorgan, born in 1969. She added that the person also went by the name Roberta Esposito, but did not provide further explanation.
This is an outrageous and desperate lie of omission that the far-left Times is required to commit because the tail wags the dog over there. The “tail” is the Times subscriber base, which is made up mostly of intolerant leftists who will cancel their subscription should the Times begin to report truths that make them in any way uncomfortable.
Ed: Such as that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a vapid lightweight who got elected in a fluke and can't even troll competently. This particular example of narrative policing is more toxic, of course.
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The Final Boss of the Horseshoe https://t.co/sQBNiJC4XJ
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 17, 2026
Ed: The quote tweet is not displaying properly, but the link is here. The shooter turned out to be a trans male with an SS tattoo who was also a Nick Fuentes fan, according to his social media. Politics is a flat circle, not a spectrum. The extremes eventually meet each other.
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Um, I do not think you should do that https://t.co/cIIHhtT4jw
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 17, 2026
Ed: This should go without saying, but ... yeah.
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