Read it.

Last week I wrote that Zohran Mamdani is a f***ing moron has proposed a new estate tax that is not really aimed at billionaires but at ordinary New Yorkers whose so called wealth is largely tied up in the homes they spent decades paying off.

That argument may have sounded abstract to some readers, like a warning about unintended consequences that might or might not materialize. But we do not have to speculate about how these kinds of burdensome taxation policies play out. Other than the Laffer Curve, which exists for a reason and has existed for 50 years now, we have another real world example, and it is happening in a state that shares many of New York’s political instincts and fiscal habits.

Massachusetts recently implemented a new 4% surtax on income above one million dollars after voters approved the measure in 2022. Supporters framed it as a targeted, reasonable way to raise revenue from top earners in order to fund public priorities like education and transportation. In theory, it was precisely the kind of policy that politicians like Mamdani claim will generate large sums of money without broader economic consequences.

But, of course, the early data tells a more complicated and far less comforting story.

In 2023, the first year the surtax took effect, Massachusetts experienced a net outflow of $4.2 billion in adjusted gross income. That number increased eight percent from the prior year. This was not driven by a sudden collapse in population or some unrelated shock. It reflects a steady and measurable movement of income and the people who earn it out of the state. Even more telling is that this shift occurred despite the fact that overall migration patterns did not dramatically worsen. In other words, fewer people may have left, but those who did leave took significantly more income with them.

Read it.

In Sweden, a Christian couple is going through a nightmare that captures the growing bias and targeting of religious families in Europe. Daniel and Bianca Samson have been fighting to regain custody of their daughters since 2022 after the government cited their regular church attendance and faith as warranting their removal.

The parents, with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom International, were delivered another blow after the European Court of Human Rights refused to accept their appeal as “inadmissible.”

This saga began when their eldest daughter had a fight with her parents over being denied a smartphone and makeup.

She contacted police and made a false report of abuse.

However, Sara, quickly retracted the allegation and police found no evidence of abuse.

Nevertheless, the state took both girls — aged 10 and 11 at the time –and refused to allow them to return home.

The government alleged that they found evidence of “religious extremism” and, according to ADF, cited the family’s habit of attending church three times a week.

It also cited strict religious upbringing in the home.

Funny how Muslim kids never get taken away from their parents for ‘strict religious upbringing in the home.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Macmillan Cancer Support will prioritise access to its welfare advice for gay, transgender and ethnic minority cancer patients, and those with existing health problems, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Under a new model, the charity’s benefits advisers would target ongoing financial and wellbeing support at groups it would deem most vulnerable, including LGBTQ+ people, ethnic minorities and those already unwell before their cancer diagnosis.

Staff will also be asked to prioritise those with caring responsibilities.

Apparently some animals are more equal than others.

The Telegraph (UK).

An “anti-Semitic” art exhibition with drawings allegedly showing Jewish people eating babies was seemingly promoted by a Labour council.

The Drawings Against Genocide exhibition at an independent gallery in Margate, Kent, features hundreds of crudely-drawn pictures that critics claim contain anti-Semitic tropes.

It is the work of Matthew Collings, 70, formerly one of the country’s leading art critics, who said the art was “about raising consciousness about hell” and that “Israel is the pure encapsulation of it” through its actions in Gaza.

The Telegraph (UK).

A Labour council has said it is wrong to claim that migrants come from “cultures that don’t respect women”.

Although that seems pretty obvious.

In an online “myth-buster” addressing asylum and immigration, Liverpool city council said that blaming foreign cultures for violence against women and girls “reinforces harmful stereotypes”.

Much like the daily news.

The myth-buster said there was “no causal link between asylum seeker populations and increased levels of violence against women and girls”.

Which, of course, they can’t know—but the statistical correlation is pretty solid.

Last year, analysis by the Centre for Migration Control found that foreign nationals were three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as British citizens.

LA LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU….

Read it.

The head of a left-wing nonprofit, reportedly linked to a Marxist propaganda network connected to a China-based billionaire, flew first class while her supporters traveled in coach to Cuba. This appears to be an effort aimed at disrupting U.S. foreign policy operations in the Caribbean.

“NOW we’re on our way to Cuba!” Code Pink wrote on X on Friday.

Never a Stinger missile around when you need one….

Newsbusters.

With the return of President Donald Trump to the White House, panicked liberals fearful of a Fascism that never seems to happen outside of their fervid imaginations are seeking an escape route via obtaining foreign citizenship. Also key to their escape from Orange Man Bad is getting foreign passports as chronicled on Monday in the New Yorker by Lauren Markham, “Seeking a Second Passport.”

For decades proglodytes have been whining that if so-and-so is elected President (or Governor or whatever) they would leave the country. And then they still stay. It’s gratifying to know that Trump is the incentive they need to get out for real. (Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.)

The Foundry.

I would have put it a little more bluntly.

New York’s desperate governor is turning to a well-known practice in New York City: aggressive begging.

While speaking at Politico’s “New York Agenda: Albany Summit” last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, admitted that the state’s tax base has eroded and that it faces a deepening fiscal crisis.

She then put out a call for wealthy, former New Yorkers to come back to the state so they can be robbed again by beneficent government overlords.

Read it.

On Tuesday’s Fox & Friends, the show gave coverage to the story of how anti-ICE agitators blocked ICE agents from arresting a sexual predator in Boston, leading it to take a month to finally catch him.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt set up the segment by recalling that Fox reporter Bill Melugin was informed by an ICE agent about the incident that happened in Boston. Reading from Melugin’s post on X, co-host Brian Kilmeade filled in viewers.

Read it.

The authoritarian COVID lockdowns and stay-at-home orders sold as life-saving measures have been unmasked once again as a deadly failure of big government overreach.

A new UK Covid-19 Inquiry report has concluded that the relentless “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” messaging likely cost thousands of lives by convincing people they could not get access to health services.

The inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett, slammed the slogan created by Cabinet Office officials without input from health leaders. It “led some people to feel they must avoid burdening the NHS” and “may have inadvertently sent the message that healthcare was closed,” contributing to a sharp decline in A&E attendances for life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks.

Read it.

The Department of Homeland Security shutdown entered its 36th day on Saturday after Senate Democrats blocked yet another funding bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and other federal agencies, triggering weeks of chaos at airports nationwide, including long TSA checkpoint lines during the peak of the spring break travel season.

Early Saturday morning, Elon Musk, closely tracking the DHS funding lapse, wrote on X that he would personally pay the salaries of TSA agents to get them back to airports and help avert further chaos.

“I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country,” Musk said.

Pay attention, all of you Democrat billionaires who keep screaming that you want your taxes raised: All you have to do is write a check. Alex Soros—ball’s in your court.

On the other hand, the Airline Gestapo TSA is one of the ugliest manifestations of the Security Theater State soaking up taxpayer dollars. How about we Defund the TSA? Sounds like a win-win!

Read it.

Radical leftists want a new Department of Migration to push open borders propaganda in schools and fast-track voting rights, free housing and citizenship for illegals.

A leaked Green Party dossier has blown the lid off plans to brainwash British schoolchildren into believing they have a ‘moral duty’ to embrace endless immigration.

The document, hidden behind a password-locked policy archive normally only accessible to party members, calls for a new Department of Migration to work hand in glove with education chiefs. Its stated goal is to “disseminate knowledge” about immigrants directly into classrooms.

Progressivism Green in Hoof and Mouth.

Read it.

“Europe’s own regulatory architecture turned off Europe’s own energy supply. And America. . . on the other side of the Atlantic with a full tank of gas, watched it happen.”

– Jeff Childers

Let’s pause for a moment amid all the excitement to address an abiding mystery of these times: why does the news media seem to be rooting for American failure in the Iran operation? Or more generally, how did the media become handmaiden to the Lefty-left and all its ancillaries? How were they lured into their Cloward-Piven bunker of crypto-Marxian “resistance”?

The New Neo.

I think many “high net worth” people are immune to Hochul’s guilt-tripping. If you make taxes too high for the wealthy, a significant number will leave. They are rich, and it’s relatively easy for them to do. Why not try to attract them instead? It might even raise more revenue if you more of them at a lower tax rate rather than fewer at a higher tax rate.

Bloomberg, a Voice of the Crust.

Residents exiting Massachusetts took a net of $4.2 billion in adjusted gross income with them in 2023, one of the largest totals in the country, after a tax on millionaires took effect.

FA, FO.

Read it.

The Orwellian horror of Hochul’s New York led directly to an unprecedented flight of intelligent citizens and wealthy business owners. NY experienced a net lost of nearly 1 million residents from 2020 to 2023. But it didn’t stop there.

Draconian pandemic mandates were not the only reason for the exodus. The state’s crushing tax requirements post-covid have also inspired another 250,000 net loss of citizens from 2024 through 2025. The state taxes are nearly three times higher than the national average. Property taxes are 45% higher and the cost of living is around 50% higher than the national average.

Furthermore, depending on the market sector, taxes on businesses run 50% to 100% higher than the national average. On top of all this, Democrats in the legislature have consistently pushed for a wealth tax or “millionaires tax”; an action which Hochul opposes, but only because she sees the writing on the wall and is a bit smarter compared to fanatical socialists like Zohran Mamdani.

During a Q&A last week at Politico’s New York Agenda: Albany Summit, the Governor surprised with a rare moment of clarity (or honesty) when she admitted that the state’s tax base had been eroded. She essentially begged for wealthy taxpayers to come back from red states like Florida and support New York’s social welfare programs. Recent data shows that NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person in 2025 – That’s higher that the annual income of 65% of all hard working NYC residents.

Hochul also lamented the fact that high income taxpayers are “no longer captive” and are able to relocate with ease.

Read it.

A British Physical Education teacher has been indefinitely banned from the classroom after daring to state that migrants should respect Britain’s laws, culture, and way of life — or leave.

Sam Everett taught at Haughton Academy in Darlington for two years. Someone identified his X account, reported him to the school, and triggered an investigation into his political views.

The independent Teaching Regulation Agency panel that heard the case cleared him of racism and sexism, praised his unblemished teaching record, noted colleague endorsements, and recommended he keep his job. Publication of the findings alone would suffice as punishment, they ruled.

Read it.

She is, of course, a Woman of Color. And a Democrat, naturally.

Read it.

The surreal case of an Albanian criminal who tried to dodge removal from the UK in part by claiming his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets—yes, really—reached its inevitable conclusion this week, when he won the right to stay in Britain.

Klevis Disha entered the country illegally under a false name, lied in his asylum claim, and was later jailed for two years after being caught with £250,000, known to be proceeds of crime.

An immigration tribunal previously said it was “unduly harsh” for the lawbreaker’s son—named in legal documents only as ‘C’—to be forced to move to Albania because of sensory issues. The case was then overturned on appeal, which ruled: “We can only see in the decision a single example of why C could not go to Albania: C will not eat the type of chicken nuggets available abroad.”

Read it.

When the Biden administration turned its attention to concerned parents in the fall of 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency drafted a memo warning about white racial extremists recruiting women for “traditional motherhood” and “homemaking.”

The CIA produced an intelligence assessment focused on “women advancing white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist radicalization and recruitment” on Oct. 6, 2021.

The Trump administration released a redacted version of the document in February.

Read it.

An Oregon high school principal placed on leave for celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been sentenced to five years in prison for possession of child abuse material.

Jeremy P. Williams, former head of Rainier Junior-Senior High School, now joins a disturbing list of leftists in education and politics whose public anti-conservative rage masked far darker realities threatening children.

Williams pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing sexually explicit images of minors. He was initially hit with 13 counts after the Cowlitz County Sheriff’s Office received tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on Aug. 28.

The Telegraph (UK).

In my clinical practice, one pattern has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Among a subset of patients on the political Left, hostility toward political opponents goes beyond dislike or even hatred.

It sometimes takes the form of moralised fantasies about an opponent’s death, disappointment that Donald Trump’s shooter did not have better aim, or statements that certain public figures “deserve” to be eliminated for the greater good. These remarks are rarely presented as literal intent. But they nevertheless offer a revealing glimpse into emotional regulation and psychological wellbeing.

What stands out is not only the content of these expressions, but their tone. They are often delivered with intense anger and no shame, as though such thoughts are an understandable or even justified response to the political moment. At no point does the patient see these reactions as excessive or out of control.

Read it.

A bill to establish a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall advanced out of the House Committee on Administration on Wednesday, sparking partisan disagreement over its scope and language.

The legislation, introduced by Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., passed the committee in a 7-4 vote split along party lines, with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed.

The bill, formally known as H.R. 1329, would authorize the transfer of federal land for the construction of a new Smithsonian museum dedicated to women’s history.

Supporters argue that the museum would serve as a long-overdue recognition of women’s contributions to American history and culture.

However, the legislation became controversial for Democrats after an amendment was adopted specifying that the museum would feature exhibits focused exclusively on biological women.

The Trans vs TERF divide is a line of cleavage in the Democrat Coalition of the Fringes that stupid Republicans aren’t doing enough to exploit.

Read it.

There appears to be no cure for tax greed. Once politicians have set their eyes on any kind of wealth tax, they are willing to defy both experience and common sense in their pursuit of what they see as a goose that lays golden eggs.

No, they’re not doing it to raise money, although if that happens they will be happy to profit from it. They’re doing it to make rich people into poor people, a product of both congenital envy and of socialist politics, which requires the destruction of property rights in general.

In what can only be rationalized as a desperate pursuit of voters on the far-left fringe, incumbent prime minister Mette Frederiksen has made the reintroduction of the wealth tax a top priority. If she gets it her way and keeps her job after the March 24th election, the new tax will be exactly as draconian as a wealth tax can be.

Any Dane who sticks around waiting to be robbed deserves it. The others will al move to another country—and move their wealth with them. Good luck paying for the comprehensive welfare state then.

Read it.

A diversity hiring policy affecting the recruitment of judges and public prosecutors in Berlin has come under renewed scrutiny after the city’s justice senator warned that the system may conflict with Germany’s constitutional requirement that public offices be filled strictly on merit.

The policy, introduced in 2021 under then justice senator Dirk Behrendt of the Green Party, stems from amendments to the Law to Promote Participation in a Migration Society, known as the PartMigG. The legislation was adopted by Berlin’s House of Representatives with support from the then-governing coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens, and the Left.

Under the law, recruitment procedures must ensure that applicants with a migration background are invited to interviews in numbers reflecting their share of the population. In Berlin, around 40 percent of residents fall into that category, defined by the Federal Statistical Office as individuals who themselves, or at least one parent, were not born with German citizenship.

Import Turd World people, get Turd World problems.

Read it.

Yup, the “elderly parole board” in Governor Hair Gel’s California has decided that 27 years is plenty of time for SERIAL CHILD PREDATOR Gregory Vogelsangto, 57, to “reflect” on kidnapping and molesting multiple young boys.

Dude had a 355-year sentence for “30 counts of kidnapping and molesting multiple children between the ages of five and 11,” but California thought, Meh, he deserves to be out.

Time to leave.

Read it.

A group of 16 Democrat state attorneys general sued to block the Trump administration’s policy on fair housing.

The coalition led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul filed the lawsuit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division.

Last September, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity issued funding guidance for the Fair Housing Assistance Program. The guidance barred funding for state and local agencies promoting gender ideology, and further withheld funding for state or local agencies that fund abortions, issue disparate impact studies, or promote or facilitate illegal immigration.

The Democrats’ lawsuit alleges the guidelines threatened to defund state and local agencies that enforce fair housing beyond what is specified in the seven protected classes under federal law.

Read it.

iologist Paul Ehrlich died on Friday, March 13, 2026, at the age of 93.

His famous 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” changed the world. He famously predicted that human “overpopulation” would soon outstrip food supplies, leading to catastrophic famines, and societal collapse. He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, that India would be unable to feed its population by 1980, and that major countries like England would no longer exist by the year 2000.

The New York Times tactfully wrote that, “his predictions proved premature.”

When Ehrlich wrote his book, in 1968, the world’s human population was between 3.5 and 3.6 billion people. Today it is over 8 billion. Yet famine deaths, which were common when Ehrlich wrote his book, have become rare, as population and CO2 levels have risen.

ALSO: Anti-human doomsayer Paul Ehrlich is dead. Here are a few of the MANY predictions he got 100% wrong.

Read it.

Transgender surgeries and cross-sex hormones represent downstream effects of a basic failure in therapy that sets patients up for long-term harm, warns a former trauma clinician who now crafts policy to protect people from these experimental “treatments.”

Therapists who try to treat people with gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex—often recommend patients undergo medical interventions to make a man appear female or vice versa. This represents a lack of hope, Dr. Jennifer Bauwens told The Daily Signal.

The decision to “medicalize” a patient, rather than trying to treat underlying psychological trauma, traces back to a therapist’s lack of faith in his or her own abilities.

The American Mind.

The much-vaunted Cuban revolutionary model is on the verge of unceremonious collapse: the economy is in shambles, the electric grid is only occasionally functional, and the supposed achievements of the Cuban Revolution have culminated in near-universal penury and misery. As of 2024, 89% of Cubans lived in poverty, sometimes of an abject kind—and things have only gotten worse over the last two years. Revolutionary Cuba is a model only of what is to be avoided.

In Cuba, growing crowds denounce Communism and the dictatorship that has enslaved the island nation since 1959. Anti-regime voices bang pots and pans in public demonstrations, demanding freedom for Cuba for the first time in 66 years. Yet, Western leftists continue to express solidarity with the Cuban people’s oppressors and blame Cuba’s problems on an American embargo that is often flouted. More absurdly, they insist that the oil embargo imposed by the Trump Administration after its defenestration of the Maduro dictatorship at the beginning of this year is the cause of Cuba’s present discontents. Somehow, the administration is responsible for the deep-seated structural problems that confront a Cuba immiserated by decades of unaccountable Communist rule.

The dark empirical realities about Cuban Communism are finally making the revolutionary mirage look like the delusory wish-to-believe—or outright lie—that it has always been. A 2024 report from the Madrid-based Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, along with a useful summary published at VOZ News, made clear just how far the Cuban dictatorship has impoverished the Cuban people. As of the summer of 2024, 72% faced significant food shortages, with “seven of 10 Cubans” having “stopped eating breakfast, lunch or dinner due to lack of money or food shortages.” Western progressives (most egregiously and pathetically, the leftist propagandist Michael Moore) praise the Cuban health care system to the hilt even as 89% of Cubans “view Cuba’s public health system negatively.”

Read it.

Irish President Catherine Connolly marked her first St. Patrick’s Day in office with a message that reframed Ireland’s patron saint as a symbol for open borders and ‘global citizenship’, urging the Irish to embrace migrants amid ongoing surges in arrivals that have sparked nationwide tensions.

The last time Ireland had ‘open borders’, it led to 700 years of English occupation and oppression. No, thanks.

Read it.

There is something rather uncomfortable about the Hunger Games aesthetics of Hollywood and the Oscars these days. The pomp is tinged and the glamour faded. The glitter and velvet curtains no longer hide the stinking rot that hides underneath. The fact that a bunch of washed-up and histrionic celebrities are still swimming in the fantasy that they matter is simultaneously alarming and hilarious.

Most of the world is celebrating the ongoing demise of Tinseltown, certainly after a long decade of endless woke propaganda. This includes blatant attempts to indoctrinate children with LGBT ideology. Bombarding the public with insufferable feminist prattle and “girl boss” delusions. Open discrimination against white people through DEI policies and race swaps of almost every significant white character in every franchise imaginable.

As a result, Hollywood is dying. According to recent numbers, Hollywood productions have imploded by 50% or more since 2023. Even covid was not able to destroy the movie industry the way wokeness did. In fact, it was the pandemic that allowed Hollywood to dismiss their dwindling numbers through 2023, but that scapegoat is now gone.

Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.

Peter Thiel isn’t just skeptical of The Giving Pledge—he’s been actively working to dismantle it from within, telling signatories to walk away from their commitments and calling the organization an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”

Silly, of course, but effective with the portion of the population that has Epstein! on the brain, which has (as you might expect) a significant overlap with the portion of the population who has hatred for rich people on the brain—using the latter term loosely, of course.

In an interview with The New York Times, Thiel claimed The Giving Pledge, or the philanthropic campaign to get the world’s wealthiest to commit to giving away 50% or more of their wealth, has fallen out of style. “They got an incredible number of people to sign up those first four or five years, and it somehow has really run out of energy,” he said. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.”

They plucked all of the low-hanging fruit (rich people who are also Democrats).

The U.S. wealth divide has progressed to new extremes, with the top 10% of households holding more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. The majority of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of older generations. And the wealth accumulation has hollowed out the middle class over the last few decades.

Welcome to the Narrative, in which Fortune is a willing accessory. What has ‘hollowed out the middle class’ is taxes and government regulations that make housing unaffordable and one-income traditional families impossible.

Philanthropy has long acted as a de facto realization of trickle-down economic theory.

Welcome to the Narrative. ‘Trickle-down economic theory’ is a myth pushed by people who hate wealth accumulation and can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that wealth accumulation is necessary for investment and jobs and progress. Philanthropy is merely the expression of the common human impulse to help other people, which The Usual Suspects think ought to be the job of the government (under their political control, naturally) rather than something done by people who might not have the right Woke views.

A shift away from that philanthropic framework—and one of the most organized efforts in modern history to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the country’s richest—could signal that the money spigot is tightening.

Not all wealthy people are stupid enough to be progressives.

The Telegraph (UK).

Corner shops are being forced to impose an 11p “crime tax” on every sale, to combat a shoplifting epidemic.

Shopkeepers spent a record £313m to keep their stock secure and their staff safe in the past year, up from £265m in 2024.

Many have had to put up prices to fund CCTV, security tagging, protective screens, facial recognition cameras and AI store monitoring, while also covering the losses they suffer from theft.

Socialist governments make no effort to prevent ‘property crimes’ because they don’t believe that people ought to have a right to private property, much less private property used in business.

Read it.

The exodus of Silicon Valley titans from California is gaining momentum as the state weighs a proposed wealth tax aimed at billionaires, including potential levies on unrealized gains, a measure that has stirred significant concern in the tech sector.

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick revealed this week that he relocated from California to Texas last winter.

Time to leave.

The Telegraph (UK).

Britain has one of the harshest inheritance tax regimes in the Western world, research claims.

Rachel Reeves is being urged to scrap the levy after a new report found the UK’s system is “far more punishing” than it looks on the surface.

In Britain, inheritance tax is set at 40 per cent on all assets above a certain threshold, regardless of who they are left to.

You will note that the U.S. is considered even worse.

Read it.

Lawyers representing alleged Antifa members who set off fireworks outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas and who later shot a police officer tried to discredit an anti-Antifa witness by citing a group that carries water for Antifa.

Federal prosecutors have charged nine defendants with various crimes for their July 4, 2025, riot outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. A federal grand jury convicted eight of them on the charge of riot and providing material support to terrorists on Friday. While most charges did not rely on the claim that rioters were part of Antifa, the indictment describes the defendants as an “Antifa Cell.”

During the trial, prosecutors brought in Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, as an expert witness on Antifa. Defense lawyers objected, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left activist group that has carried water for Antifa, to delegitimize his testimony.

Read it.

Republican-led states are moving more aggressively to cut or eliminate personal income taxes, while Democratic-controlled states are pressing to raise taxes on top earners.

The disparity has widened a divide that is reshaping state budgets, economic strategy, and the political fight over who should bear more of the tax burden.

The split has accelerated in recent years.

Read it.

On his native country’s 250th anniversary, Pope Leo XIV will visit Lampedusa, an Italian sovereign territory off the North African coast that has long been a destination for migrants seeking to enter Europe. In 2013, Pope Francis made it his first papal destination outside Rome. Publication of Pope Leo’s official calendar recalled Vice President JD Vance’s personal invitation to the United States for the anniversary festivities, an invitation the pope seems to have declined. Adding fuel to the fire, unconfirmed Spanish media reports soon thereafter claimed that Pope Leo “warned the [Spanish] bishops that his greatest concern in Spain is the far right that is trying to ‘instrumentalize the Church.’”

To be sure, any conceivable U.S. administration in this political climate would make such an anniversary uncomfortable for a pope—even more so now than when the Vatican released this schedule a couple weeks ago. Pope Leo is probably wise to skip the transatlantic voyage in July. The Lampedusa symbolism, though, is unmistakable as it is deeply misplaced. It also has sparked comparisons to French Catholic writer Jean Raspail’s dystopian 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.

The novel describes a grotesque armada of one million migrants from the Ganges that sails to the French Riviera. It is a searing indictment of the Western cultural institutions that have grown too nihilistic and narcissistic to perpetuate their civilization. Among the characters is a South American pope more concerned with social justice PR stunts than shepherding the Church. (Interestingly, this “red bishop of Bahia” is named Benedict XVI: “It goes without saying that the pope mentioned in this fictional account is in no way to be taken for Our Very Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, to whom I pledge my trust and my respect,” clarified Raspail in 2006.) “He was a pope in tune with the times, and this was much appreciated by the media,” asserts Raspail’s narrator.

You can find Camp of the Saints on Amazon. I encourage you to buy it and read it. (No, you won’t find it in your local public library.) Then ponder the fact that it was published fifty years ago. At the time, everybody was saying “Nah, this is just exaggeration for the sake of effect.” Little did we know….

The Telegraph (UK).

Left-wing activists have started a shoplifting spree across Britain in protest against “billionaires hoarding wealth”.

The people on the left side of the IQ bell-curve seem to have this mistaken notion that ‘billionaires’ keep all of their ‘wealth’ in a giant money bin, like Scrooge McDuck, just because they can. In truth, ‘billionaires’ are wealthy because they invest what they have, providing products and services that make life better for everybody and, not incidentally, provide employment for a whole shitload of people.

Members of Take Back Power, which is viewed as the successor to Just Stop Oil, stole food from supermarkets in four cities on Saturday morning and donated it to food banks.

The activists claimed “liberating” produce from the branches of Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Tesco was “non-violent action to resist the super-rich”.

Police have made no arrests in response to the shoplifting, a spokesman for the activists said.

And that’s why Britain is going to shit.

Read it.

For years Democrats argued that “Antifa” is not a real organization; rather, they claim it is a set of ideals with no concrete membership. This illusory definition of the movement is quite deliberate in that it is designed to protect Antifa members from being defined as terrorists or facing direct consequences for their actions.

Legal questions have been growing over the use of federal terrorism laws against leftist activists. Democrats claim they’re engaging in constitutionally protected civil protest – rationale used justify attacks on ICE agents during the execution of deportations. It was also used extensively as legal grounds for violence and property destruction during the BLM riots.

Now, there’s been a conviction.

On Friday, nine defendants accused of being part of a North Texas “Antifa Cell” were convicted by a federal jury in Fort Worth. The incident in question took place on July 4th, 2025, at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas – where anti-ICE protests functioned as cover for the vandalization of government property (vehicles, guard shack, security cameras), the use if exploding fireworks at the facility, and the shooting of a police officer.

If everyone were allowed to shoot anyone wearing a hammer-and-sickle or swastika, a lot of our problems would go away.

Read it.

Except for criminals, of course.

Gun control advocates do not just oppose civilian gun ownership; they also argue that guns in the hands of police make people less safe.

In January, a Border Patrol agent in Portland shot and wounded two Venezuelan nationals who belonged to the violent Tren de Aragua gang after they allegedly tried to run agents over with their vehicle. In response, Kris Brown, president of Brady United, tweeted the following:

“We don’t know the details behind the shootings of 2 people by a Border Patrol agent in Portland. But I know one thing for certain: whether in the hands of federal officers or everyday Americans, guns do not make us safer. Yet Trump is reshaping our country based on this lie.”

What were the Border Patrol agents supposed to do when an illegal alien with a criminal record tries to run over an agent? How are unarmed agents supposed to apprehend and detain violent gang members?

Currently on its website, Brady United explains: “Why Police violence is gun violence … As we work to tackle the gun violence epidemic in America, we cannot ignore police violence or its devastating effects.”

The same claim is made repeatedly by other gun control groups.

Read it.

When an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good after she allegedly obstructed immigration authorities with her vehicle, disobeyed their commands, and attempted to flee – drawing fatal fire from an officer nearly struck by the vehicle – politicians and pundits decried her death as murder. They called it particularly unjust because she was not acting as a protester but a legal observer.

The legal term is ‘accessory’. It is also a crime.

After federal agents arrested Don Lemon for allegedly disrupting a St. Paul church service in protest of the same Twin Cities immigration enforcement surge Good had opposed. His lawyer defended the former CNN anchor as a journalist, persecuted by the Trump administration for having carried out “constitutionally protected work” in violation of his First Amendment rights. So too did myriad media organizations ranging from the National Association of Black Journalists to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

While Good’s shooting presents a distinct issue, her case and Lemon’s highlight the complex legal issues surrounding those who claim to be chronicling protests. Legal observers and journalists have long worked on the frontlines of civil unrest, the former documenting instances of alleged police misconduct in violation of constitutional rights to peaceably assemble, and the latter chronicling the assemblies. Their efforts have brought transparency and accountability. But what happens when legal observers and journalists act, or are seen by authorities as unlawful protestors rather than the neutral parties they are supposed to be? To what degree do their titles afford them special protections from prosecution in a court of law?

 

NPR, the chief propaganda organ of the Crust.

Call me when the number of U.S. war dead exceeds that of the average trans-perpetrated mass shooting.

Johnathan Turley.

There has been an ongoing struggle between district court judges and the Trump Administration over a variety of policies. In the first year, some district court judges issued nationwide injunctions that were largely rejected by the Supreme Court and appellate courts. These conflicts have continued and the intracourt tensions have increased. That was evident with the recent decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which delivered a virtual haymaker in reversing Judge Sara Ellis, an Obama nominee.

The panel criticized Ellis for limiting the operation of federal officers in Chicago, saying that she “effectively established the district court as the supervisor of all Executive Branch activity in the city of Chicago.”

Protesters and journalists went to Ellis to restrain “Operation Midway Blitz.” They challenged the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the First and Fourth Amendments, specifically raising the use of tear gas and other chemical agents. Judge Ellis issued a preliminary injunction described by the panel as “sweeping”: “It enjoined all law enforcement o?cers in the Northern District of Illinois, as well as federal agencies and the Secretary of the DHS, from using certain crowd control tactics and tools. It also required the defendants to regularly inform the court of its e?orts at implementing the injunction.”

Read it.

Seattle, which is home to Amazon and Microsoft, currently employs some 193,000 well-compensated Washingtonians working in the tech sector. One major reason that Seattle emerged as the first big tech hub outside of California is obvious: It is the only West Coast state with no state income tax. Its state constitution forbids an income tax. High wage workers and entrepreneurs seeking a piece of the relatively laid back, outdoors-focused Pacific Northwest lifestyle can move to Washington without taking a state-mandated pay cut.

For the progressive Democrats who dominate state politics in the Pacific Northwest, money in the pockets of anyone other than the government and its political allies is wasted. To grab more of it, legislative Democrats in Washington are pushing through an income tax in the guise of a “millionaire’s tax” that would levy a 9.9% tax on incomes over $1 million. Just yesterday, as the “millionaire’s tax” neared the finish line in the Washington legislature, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced he and his wife have relocated from Seattle, where they lived for 47 years, to Miami. Florida has neither a state income tax nor a state income tax masquerading as a “millionaire’s tax.”

The constitutionality of the bill rests on progressives’ expectation that the Washington Supreme Court will completely abandon decades of precedent deeming income taxes unconstitutional. The expectation may not be unfounded: Five of nine justices were appointed by Democratic governors. Democrats also voted down an amendment to forbid applying an income tax to lower income levels, signaling the “millionaire’s tax” is likely to become a “thousandaire’s tax” if Democrats get their way.

A Constitution protects rights only when the judiciary agrees. Look at what the U.S. Supreme Court did when draftees challenged conscription for World War I on the grounds that it violated the 13th Amendment, which it obviously does.

What makes this proposed tax truly egregious, however, is its attempt to stop voters from having any say in it. The Democrats’ tax bill includes a necessity clause that precludes a voter referendum that could overturn the new income tax. So long as the majority-progressive-appointed state Supreme Court goes along, progressives will have upended 90 years of constitutionally prohibited income taxes while shielding it from a vote of the people.

Democrats are the most un-democratic group of people in the country.

The Telegraph (UK).

The central principle of democracy is that power is vested in the people and expressed by their elected representatives. We expect that governments will seek to align themselves with the views and opinions of the people, while protecting the views and opinions of minorities. Yet Britain is currently demonstrating a different phenomenon: at times, and under the right circumstances, governments are seeking to align themselves with the views and opinions of minorities while failing to protect the views and opinions of the people.

Take this Labour Government, which at present appears to be in a blind panic. With local elections approaching, Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues are desperate to win back the approval of Muslim voters they had long taken for granted. The results of this risk going beyond pure politics – shaping Britain and British society for years to come.

This week, the ramifications were plain for all to see: a highly-contentious definition of anti-Muslim hostility being proposed despite vocal opposition from other minority faiths and the majority, and policy on the war in Iran driven by torturous attempts to balance maintaining the special relationship with America and winning over Muslim voters. There was also much agonising about whether to ban a march whose organiser has previously met Iran’s late ayatollah Ali Khamenei to hand him a dossier complaining of anti-Muslim hatred in Britain. The march will go ahead on Sunday as a “static protest”.

The Telegraph (UK).

Volunteers have been left “beyond angry” after flower bulbs they planted were mowed over by a Green Party-led council.

More than 70 volunteers planted almost 30,000 bulbs in St George Park in Bristol on Saturday after raising thousands of pounds to fund the initiative.

But thousands of the bulbs were “shredded” days later when council workers mowed the grass of the park.

Read it.

Now that Rohan has been thoroughly pillaged and the hordes of Mordor are approaching Minas Tirith, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is leaving the shores of Middle Earth.

Ardern rose to fame for her totalitarian lockdown measures during Covid. Her government essentially locked the island nation down for two years. The tourism industry – huge in New Zealand – was devastated. The economy stagnated.

Almost two years into the lockdowns, Ardern finally gave citizens permission to visit their friends and joked about letting them use their friends’ bathrooms.

A 2022 study looked at the mental health effects on New Zealand due to New Zealand’s isolation from the rest of the world combined with these strict policies, “considered amongst the most stringent response to the pandemic globally.”

Like many other places, the closure of schools and businesses led to depression and suicide that killed many more young people than the virus ever would. It delayed learning and social skills for an entire generation and destroyed social cohesion and trust in government.

None of these measures stopped the spread of Covid.

Read it.

Here in the United Kingdom, there is a phrase that is increasingly being used among an educated public in periodic attempts to define the very odd form of regime that’s emerged principally since the prime ministerial office of Sir Keir Starmer began: ‘anarcho-tyranny.’ This term denotes a state of affairs in which the government habitually fails to enforce the basic laws against criminals that makes the ordinary members of society feel safe and secure, whilst enforcing increasingly stringent regulations against those ordinary members of society.

In turn, those living in such a society begin to feel that they live under a tyranny, but not a typical tyranny of the citizenry by the state, at least not directly. Rather, it is a tyranny of the ordinary member of society by bad members of that same society, from which the state absolves itself of the duty to protect them. If tyranny is the worst form of government, anarcho-tyranny is arguably the worst form of tyranny.

What, though, has been emerging in the UK—and for some time now—is perhaps something even worse than anarcho-tyranny as defined above. For it is not simply that basic laws against criminals are not enforced while the state imposes strict regulations against society’s ordinary members, but rather that the state goes a step further in actively rewarding those people who either are or should be deemed miscreants.