Five Quick Things: Let’s You and Him Fight, Bernie

All right. No folderol today. Let’s just git ‘er done.

The Necessary Men begins in two weeks, by the way. I’m finalizing the manuscript this weekend, and then it’s a tweak here and a tweak there before the serialization begins here at The American Spectator.

And yes, if you get addicted to this thing and it smashes you into the site’s paywall and forces you to subscribe… well, that’s not an accident, is it? You should have already subscribed, you know.

Anyway…

1. Let Them Fight

For the life of me, I don’t understand why this didn’t happen a decade ago.

Sen. Fetterman unloads on Bernie Sanders over pushing Graham Platner — and says he’s hurting Dems’ chances of retaking majority by pushing El-Sayed. Says it’s about Sanders’ “ego.”
“Well, what’s in it for him? If it’s not anything more at this point — ego. You know, maybe sit a… pic.twitter.com/p8uufVYNZW
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 30, 2026

The problem that John Fetterman has is that Bernie Sanders isn’t wrong about this…

Sen. Bernie Sanders responds to Sen. Fetterman saying he was making it harder for Democrats to win the majority and should “sit a few out” regarding the primaries. pic.twitter.com/0Dbm4g7sMv
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 30, 2026

The Democrats in Pennsylvania don’t like him despite the fact he votes “correctly” according to his party registration more than 90 percent of the time. Basically, unless it’s an Israel vote, Fetterman is a slavishly loyal left-wing vote, but that isn’t good enough for them. (RELATED: Pennsylvania Primary Results Unpacked: Democrats Go Far Left, While GOP Centers)

Which is a commentary on what they’ve allowed themselves to become.

But is Fetterman wrong? No. From a Democrat perspective, should this fellow El-Sayed get their nomination in Michigan, he’ll be absolutely slaughtered by Mike Rogers in the general election for that open Senate seat, and they will have given away any real chance they have to win control of the Senate. He’s also not wrong that Bernie Sanders was a disaster for them in pimping Graham Platner in Maine, which may or may not have cost them that seat but certainly didn’t help.

I’ve gotten asked several times: “Hey, Scott, do you think Fetterman switches to the GOP?” My answer to the question is: why would you want that? You could run almost anybody against him, and they’ll win if his own party won’t vote for him, and that assumes Fetterman is even their nominee. He’ll almost certainly be primaried by one of Bernie Sanders’ DSA flying-monkey communists, and when that seat comes up in 2028 the odds are sensational that (1) DSA Flying Monkey will beat Fetterman in the primary, and (2) Joe Six-Pack Republican will spank DSA Flying Monkey in the general. Because Pennsylvania isn’t Queens or the Bronx; it’s a swing state. And while the evidence isn’t in on this, it’s starting to look like DSA Flying Monkeys — El-Sayed is one example; Francisca Hong, running for governor in Wisconsin, looks like another — are a really bad idea as their nominees for statewide races in swing states.

And that probably doesn’t wear very well with the voters over time.

But we’ll see. In the meantime, in the spirit of enjoying a healthy debate within the Democrats’ tent…

Ken Watanabe saying 'Let them fight' in a movie scene.

When the drama starts, and you’re just here to watch the showdown. Let them fight.

2. John Cleese: I Am Not a Racist. I Am a Culturalist. YES.

This is very well stated, and it’s interesting that it doesn’t come from a particularly consistent conservative voice — though John Cleese, like John Fetterman, does occasionally put forth statements which are incandescently true. (RELATED: The People Who Once Laughed With John Cleese Are Now His Punchlines)

The current example…

I see I am being ritually insulted for my support of this man
The uneducated call me a racist
I am not a racist
I am a culturalist
I believe that some cultures are better than others
I prefer cultures to do not advocate stoning, pederasty,
wife beating, female genital… https://t.co/dpzlIRrAoV
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) July 28, 2026

It should be entirely uncontroversial that some cultures are better than others. That is entirely the basis of our American system of immigration, for example. The famous “Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses, Yearning to Breathe Free” Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty is a cultural statement — it extolls the power of the American liberty culture to assimilate immigrants and turn them into Americans, and that’s explicitly better than what they were when they first showed up. (RELATED: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You))

And yet the same fools who throw that poem in everybody’s faces as a restatement of this as a “nation of immigrants” blow right past that cultural statement.

The reason people are reticent to bring in Somalis and Afghans and Syrians and Haitians is not that they’re racist. It’s that they recognize that people who come from cultures and experiences utterly alien to our own are going to be less assimilable than traditional immigrants will, and that leads to deleterious consequences. And it isn’t about skin color. Most people will look at the success Jamaicans and Nigerians have had here and not have much of a problem with Jamaican and Nigerian immigration, while being less sanguine about Haitian and Somali immigration.

Same color, different cultures.

They’ve utterly lost this plot in the U.K., and as a result Cleese is getting hammered for speaking out.

3. On Data Centers

Joseph Ford Cotto has a piece at The American Thinker pointing out that public sentiment on certain issues must sometimes be disregarded.

More than 70 percent of Americans now oppose local AI data centers. Coordinated protests hit 142 sites across 42 states. Activists call the projects an “unacceptable infringement on liberty.” At least 69 jurisdictions have imposed bans or one-year freezes. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than $130 billion in projects stalled.
A June poll found 63 percent of likely voters want a nationwide pause lasting at least a year. That includes 67 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of Independents, and 58 percent of Republicans. Over 800 groups in 49 states target roughly 1500 planned sites. Seventy-five projects were blocked or delayed in just three months. Bills seeking nationwide moratoriums have drawn sponsors from both parties.
The stated reasons sound practical: water and power use, noise, traffic, higher bills, and doubt that jobs will appear. A Gallup survey shows seven in 10 Americans reject AI data centers near their communities. Half of opponents cite resource demands like water, energy, and pollution. One in five worry about quality of life. Another fifth fear economic pain. The rest voice unease about artificial intelligence itself.
Deeper still lies the real driver: fear of software replacing humans. Workers aged 22 to 25 in highly exposed occupations already see employment fall by 3.8 percent each year. Overall AI-exposed jobs contracted while less-exposed roles still grew. Nearly two-thirds of Americans expect fewer jobs over the next two decades. Only five percent expect more.
That fear is understandable. It is also fatal, if allowed to become public policy.

Water and power use are the two biggest-ticket items people are howling about where data centers are concerned. But those two issues are the easiest to alleviate concerns. The water issue comes from the need to air-condition the server rooms, and the cheapest way to run HVAC for a data center is to employ an evaporative cooling system, which will run through a lot of water. But it isn’t prohibitive to use a different method, and a large data center will generally go through less water than does a golf course. (RELATED: The Backyard Problem of Data Centers)

As for the power use issue, President Trump has debuted a ratepayer protection pledge attached to the data center expansions, which simply means that the owners of these data centers team with the local utility to build power plants large enough to meet their needs. This is actually a great thing for the communities where the data centers are; building power capacity to exceed the needs of the data center could very easily bring overall rates down rather than up over time, especially if doing so involves natural gas or nuclear power instead of stupid and over-expensive “renewable energy” power. (RELATED: Nordic Hydro Solves Europe’s Data Center Dilemma)

Let’s also remember the millions and millions of dollars that China is spending attempting to gum up the works of American AI development so that China can win that race. We keep neglecting to clock the foreign influence on these things. A decade ago it was fracking, and that was Russia and Venezuela and some of the Middle East people doing everything they could to keep the shale revolution in check. The data center piece is no different.

4. The Wizard Hat Song

I could do more serious stuff, but I’m going a bit more cultural with the 5QT this week. And I’m including this, which is 100 percent AI from beginning to end with both the audio and video, as a fresh example of what’s coming.

I’m not saying you have to change your opinion about data centers because of funny music videos about bums with wizard hats. I am saying that Hollywood won’t let anybody produce content like this using legacy corporate media resources anymore, but there are lots of people out there who are creative enough to develop it, and AI is the bridge that gets us to a democratized media culture where we don’t have to go along with woke idiocy.

So, in the interest of that, here’s your highly-entertaining “AI slop” Instagram fix for the week…

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Dead Sun (@deadsun_0)

5. The Ella Langley Thing

This song has obviously generated a great deal of buzz. It’s Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.”

Ben Shapiro noted that it’s about as conventional a country music song as it’s possible to produce, and that’s about right. This sounds a lot like a standard 1980s country tune.

Why is it so popular? Shapiro says it’s because people are desperate for normal entertainment that speaks to normal life, and this does that.

I’d generally agree. I’d also say that for some reason, people — and particularly men who like country music — really want to like Ella Langley. It’s a heterosexuality thing; others may not understand.

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