CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Washington’s new gun permit system moves ahead as one sheriff calls law ‘insane.’

“I think this is insane,” Raymond said in a phone interview Wednesday with The Center Square.

Raymond said he believes the new permit requirement is unconstitutional because law-abiding Americans already have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

His criticism centers on what he sees as another layer of government approval for people who have already passed existing background checks.

“It’s another level of control,” Raymond said.

The permit application itself will include fingerprints, proof of the required training and an application fee. The law allows the State Patrol to charge fees intended to cover the direct and indirect costs of administering the permit program. The Legislature’s bill report outlines the permit’s five-year validity and fee structure.

The new permit-to-purchase application will cost $126 — a $90 permit fee plus a $36 fingerprint-processing fee. Local law enforcement agencies may also charge an additional fee to collect fingerprints. The permit will be valid for five years.

Renewals will cost $90 if submitted before the permit expires. A renewal filed within 90 days after expiration will cost an additional $25 late fee.

Looks infringe-y.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Nikole Hannah-Jones Just Wrote the Best Case for School Choice She’ll Ever Publish.

The neighborhood school system in New York is atrocious. She knew this before sending her child to one. This is a mother who visited the cafeteria herself, who pulled fighting kids apart, who sat down and read through the ungraded homework page by page. She saw it happen, in real time, year after year. And she kept her child in that system anyway, all to make a point.

Middle school didn’t fix it. At Urban Assembly Unison, the school eliminated homework outright and adopted an “Algebra for All” policy that pushed advanced math onto students, Najya included, before they’d mastered the material underneath it. An outside tutor later found Najya hadn’t even mastered long division or fractions, the building blocks the algebra was supposed to rest on. Najya got A’s at Unison. She also, by her own account years later, “didn’t know anything.”

Hannah-Jones wants readers to see this as evidence of a broken, racially rigged system that owes her daughter something it never delivered. Some of what she documents is real: underfunded schools, high teacher turnover in high-poverty buildings, and the well-established fact that screened, selective public schools skew whiter and wealthier in a city like New York. That part of the argument isn’t fiction. It’s also not the part that determined what happened to Najya.

What determined what happened to Najya is that her parents, fully informed and financially able to choose otherwise, chose a demonstrably struggling school for seven consecutive years, and admit, in the mother’s own essay, to reading every warning sign along the way.

Then something remarkable happens in the piece, and it’s the part that should have led the article: as an eighth grader, Najya finally got the freedom to choose her own high school, guided by her own criteria rather than her mother’s cause. She picked a rigorous, selective school her mother had spent a career arguing against.

Related: Question asked and answered:

NHJ and her husband intentionally sent their daughter to a low-income black school.

When her daughter said something about it, NHJ first tried to say her school wasn’t that bad: pic.twitter.com/VXhdR5QqI1

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 20, 2026

HE WAS BETTER OFF STAYING ABOVE THE FRAY:

I've seen this one before. https://t.co/hLZixIo3LL pic.twitter.com/Af2fFJMf45

— 𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) September 20, 2026

SUNDAY SMILES:

Robbers Announce They Will Have To Leave San Francisco Because Everything’s Been Robbed https://t.co/aKg5jpEIaL

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 20, 2026

OH: Biden-era inspection reports expose Kennedy Center disrepair, safety hazards that Trump seeks to fix.

POKER WARS: Philip Guitar Talks ‘Poker Wars,’ the Bloody Battles that led to the World Series of Poker.

My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com. 

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

China is caught in a deflationary spiral
Russia is bogged down in an unwinnable war.
Panama has kicked china out.
Greenland just came under US control.
Iran has been defeated
Europe is broken and being invaded by illegals
The war in Gaza is over
South and Latin America has… https://t.co/GbKvI1Ornc

— unseen1 (@unseen1_unseen) September 19, 2026

OVERKILL OR NO? Man allegedly pepper sprays moviegoer for using phone in Burbank theater.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: ThermoMaven 0.5 Sec Professional Meat Thermometer Digital, ±0.5°F Accuracy. #CommissionEarned

BY THE TIME THEY COMPLETE THIS, SPACEX WILL BE THE INTERNET:

BREAKING: The FCC accepted SpaceX’s 100,000-satellite Starlink Gen3 application for filing.

Each V3 satellite is designed for up to 1 Tbps downlink, 160 Gbps uplink and six 400 Gbps space lasers. Starship launches will add ~20× the capacity of Falcon 9 launches of V2 satellites. pic.twitter.com/ICbkZcRg7I

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 19, 2026

Hyperbole… but maybe not by much.

SO THE RIAL HAS LOST ABOUT ANOTHER SEVENTH OF ITS VALUE IN JUST THE LAST FEW WEEKS: Iran’s currency slide pushes costs as household purchasing power falls. “The US dollar is currently trading at around 230,000 tomans, a sub-unit of Iran’s official rial currency, with one toman equal to 10 rials. The currency slide has pushed up import and raw-material costs, while declining purchasing power is increasingly forcing Iranian households to rely on instalment purchases and government support, according to an analysis published by the Iranian news outlet Iran News Wire, that reports from outside the country.”

EARLY BIG PRIME DEAL: roborock 2026 New Qrevo 2 Pro Robot Vacuum and Mop, 20,000Pa Suction. #CommissionEarned

$1,291 TO REGISTER A TWO-YEAR-OLD CYBERTRUCK IN CALIFORNIA:

This is your sign to stop voting Democrat

Keep in mind, DMV vehicle registration renewal fees like this are billed every year. There is no limit to how much California Democrats will steal from you

This should be illegal pic.twitter.com/snq6LqOVZW

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) September 19, 2026

Gooder and harder.

WELL, GOOD: Hormuz oil shipments hit 6-month high, US commander says.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: NYT op-ed’s wildly woke argument against SATs includes shocking admission that students struggle with ‘basic math.’

A New York Times writer came out swinging against the push to bring back admissions tests at the University of California — even as she admitted that students are struggling with “basic math.”

But all of that is worth it, Miriam Pawal argued, because the university is now more inclusive.

“Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote, hailing the “exceptional” university system for its “commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence.”

She buttressed her point with statistics about how around 40% of its students are the first in their families to attend college. “More than half qualify for free tuition,” she gushed.

“When the University of California eliminated the SAT requirement for admission in 2021, UCLA saw a significant jump in applications from high-achieving black and Latino students, for whom the standardized tests had been a barrier,” she said.

“The percentages of underrepresented students have crept up, through a variety of initiatives. The California Dream Act gave undocumented students access to financial aid, as well as in-state tuition.”

As always, do the opposite of what California does: Florida bans undocumented [sic] students from selective public universities.

MAYBE I SHOULD JUST PUT ORWELL’s 1984 QUOTE ABOUT YOUNG WOMEN ON A LOOP:

Man preaching from the Bible is accused of "homophobic and racist" remarks by two officers. They admit they don't know what he said. A third appears and says they are gathering evidence to determine if a hate crime or public order crime has been committed and that it doesn't…

— Retard Finder (@IfindRetards) September 19, 2026

Once more with feeling: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

UM… WHAT? Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God.

The industry already has had its fair share of brushes with ominously cult-like behavior, from OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever commissioning wooden effigies to represent “unaligned” AIs to a murder sect that wanted to save the world from killer AI.

As it turns out, Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is apparently no different. Just getting hired there requires prospective employees to pledge allegiance to AI safety and undergo a psychological profiling test, per The Information.

And according to a rumor that, per The Spectator‘s Sean Thomas, is running rampant in Silicon Valley these days, some Anthropic engineers are going as far as to “worship” the company’s AI model Claude.

“If true, it chimes with an old sci-fi prediction and with what we know of human nature,” Thomas wrote. “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it.”

Feeling a little smarter this morning for never having subscribed to Claude.

AT AMAZON, Shop Early Prime Big Day Deals. #CommissionEarned

THE GOVERNMENT HAS VOTED TO DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND IMPORT ANOTHER:

The situation in Ceuta is turning worse & worse. The Spanish government has been exposed lying to the people as it is obvious tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are still there. Perhaps more importantly the world is seeing what globalism & open borders really mean: invasion… https://t.co/mRwegHBkKI

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) September 19, 2026

CONRAD BLACK: Canada must mature as a nation. “Carney is pushing a “war” against the country to which we sell about 70 per cent of our exports, the country upon which we are completely dependent for our own military security. And Carney appears to be much more the continuator than the reformer of the helter-skelter immigration policies that have put terrible pressure on housing costs for Canadians of modest incomes. The fact that nearly 45 per cent of Canadians are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents heaps tremendous social costs on the country. Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world and we are the assisted suicide capital of the world with the beaming encouragement of our terribly inadequate public health-care system.”

Read the whole thing.

SOUNDS LIKE A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY, NOT JUST JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT:

Mike Davis @mrddmia confirmed this morning that Article III Project plans to file a judicial misconduct complaint related to the NYT article published yesterday profiling Judge Patrick Schiltz and including comments from 6 other federal judges:
https://t.co/BVfvtQmcmw

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) September 18, 2026

OPEN THREAD: You know what you’re doin’.

ANY EXCUSE TO GRAB THE GUNS WILL DO, NO MATTER HOW IGNORANT, STUPID, OR UNCONSTITUTIONAL:

This whole outrage reveals just how ignorant they are. Their rage is directed at:

1. Suppressors, which they are scared of because of Hollywood, not reality. For the most part, most suppressed guns are still quite loud, and suppressors are rarely used in crime anyway(as Giffords… https://t.co/dePAijaIrw

— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) September 19, 2026

GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY:

🚨 OMG. Stunning resurfaced footage shows Ugandan Mayor Mamdani saying the plan is to manipulate white leftists into electing 3rd worlders like him

Spoken in his 3rd world accent: "You need someone to be a validator, tell them to TRUST US."

🤯🤯

"Minority communities, because… pic.twitter.com/WE0heb9Ip3

— War Correspondent (@warDaniel47) September 18, 2026

BUT ALL MY LEFTY FRIENDS ASSURED ME THAT 10/7 WAS AN INSIDE JOB:

This is one of the Palestinians who shared this video.

He wrote in Arabic: “A thousand days like October 7th are too few for you, you pigs. We will eat your livers.”

These are the “innocent” Palestinians the world cries for. https://t.co/qlxDmVi2X5 pic.twitter.com/LTf566pjjF

— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) September 19, 2026