Read it.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but an illegal alien … from India … with a California commercial driver’s license … just made the news.

Read it.

If you want to know where a good deal of the modern rise of socialism is coming from, look no further than 90 miles off the coast of Florida, to Cuba.

That’s certainly where American leftists have been looking for a long time.

The State Department released a thorough and perhaps, to many, startling report on Monday highlighting how the authoritarian Cuban regime founded by Fidel Castro has been a prime mover of leftist activism and violence for more than half a century and poses a significant threat to the United States.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” explained how the seemingly small Marxist gadfly has effectively made leftist ideology its chief export, which sets it apart from other, more militarily and economically powerful regimes hostile to the United States.

The report argued that Cuba has leaned into a unique brand of Marxism, what it calls “Third Worldism,” to deconstruct Western civilization and bring about a global communist revolution.

From this ideology sprang forth a variety of causes often associated with the American college campus New Left.

Read it.

Of course he does. That’s what socialism is all about.

Thank you, toxic feminism.

Not the Bee.

‘Assault weapon’ is, of course, not a thing, except in the fever dreams of the Wokerati.

To the extent that it means anything, it means ‘guns the Left find scary and want to stigmatize’, but of course they can’t say that, so they have to come up with a smear-term (like ‘price gouging’ and ‘black market’) to scare the people on the left side of the IQ curve.

They are attempting to conflate ‘assault weapons’ with ‘assault rifles’, a term invented by Adolf Hitler for what is now the standard configuration for a military longarm—which term they can’t use without looking like retards because ‘assault rifle’ refers to a fully automatic weapon, which is not what they are trying to ban.

The Telegraph (UK).

Scotland Yard is assessing claims that Labour banned fox hunting in return for a £1m donation from an animal rights group.

The Metropolitan Police is looking into new allegations that Lord Mandelson and another senior Labour figure suggested that the party introduced the ban in 2004 in return for the £1m donation from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

Brian Basham, a former Labour fundraiser, said he had “known for many years” that Labour’s Hunting Act 2004 was “bought and paid for by a political donation” from IFAW in 1996.

Watch it.

I get all my news from Tim Pool.

Read it.

Professional associations drive progressive bias into college classrooms, and this needs to stop. Accreditation is not just a tiresome administrative routine. It’s a seal of approval that drives access to student loans, official diplomas, and occupational licenses. The Trump administration’s work to reform accreditation should give lawmakers new energy to challenge progressive orthodoxy.

Start with the American Psychological Association. The APA is the professional organization representing clinicians and educators in the field. Yet it also accredits university psychology departments. Most states require psychologists to have a degree from an accredited program.

The APA’s accreditation standards push diversity, equity, and inclusion into the classroom. In 2025, the Trump administration began putting accreditors under pressure to stop abusing their power, and the APA announced it was suspending the worst of its DEI standards. But while the organization froze the use of racial preferences in admissions, it kept the rest.

Even worse, specialist divisions within the APA are still pushing DEI in the form of racial preferences and even antisemitism. For example, the president of Division 39, the APA section representing psychoanalysis and psychologists, graduate students, and allied mental health professionals, openly advocates for intersectionality, a Marxist theory of victimhood that underpins DEI.

Not the Bee.

Even for Trump, this is pretty freakin’ Trump.

Trump doesn’t mess around.

Weep not for the Woke lawyer. He has made friends with the Mammon of Iniquity, and they will welcome him into their luxurious houses. Not to shabby for less than a day’s work.

New York Post.

Hypergamy Watch;

Gender stereotypes have come a long way, but that isn’t to say that in 2026, some women are just fine giving up their careers to marry rich to never work another day in their lives.

In the r/GirlDinnerDiaries forum on Reddit, one 20-year-old decided to do just that. She described herself as an ambitious person who was studying to become a dentist, yet had recently had a change of heart and decided that life is too short to spend it stressed and working.

So instead, she’d rather give it all up and marry a man with money to live a life of luxury.

Hard to pretend that you’re a princess with your fingers in somebody’s mouth … unless it’s on your OnlyFans page.

“… until I turned 19, I was very ambitious and passion-driven, I wanted to establish a stable career and become financially independent asap, but in the last two years of my life, I’ve experienced a sudden and dynamic shift in my way of thinking and being,” she wrote.

“I’ve realized that it’s quite literally impossible for me to achieve all the things I wish to, at least in this lifetime alone. My time here is limited, I can’t build a career, buy a house, afford basic necessities and also travel the world, buy designer and do as I please while also being under 30. Those things take a lifetime,” the original poster wrote.

As a result of having this ephiphany, she declared that she now wants to marry rich, have kids and “do as I please without working again a day in my life.”

So let some schmuck beta male do all of the heavy lifting and bill-paying. So much for feminism.

OH NOES WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.

But we never actually do.

The Other McCain.

Sometimes I have to remind people that I actually knew Sam Francis who, in recent years, has been recognized as a sort of prophet who foresaw the rise of what has become known as the MAGA movement.

Most of Sam’s younger admirers, knowing of his long battle against neoconservatives — which came into focus with his criticism of the 1991 Iraq war — are not exactly friends of Israel. What many of them may not realize is that Sam made a remarkable contribution to an understanding of the Middle East conflict, which his neoconservative opponents sought to erase from memory once he fell out with them during the first Bush presidency. Good luck finding an online copy of Sam Francis’s 1981 policy paper, “The Soviet Strategy of Terror,” which had an enormous influence on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Sam was at one point a research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, which published that paper, but once he was cast out for being too politically incorrect, Heritage effectively “de-published” it, removing it from their website, a deliberate insult they have not repented more than 20 years after Sam Francis died.

Read it.

Amnesty International UK is under growing pressure after experiencing pushback from a number of organisations it smeared for their alleged ‘anti-trans’ or ‘transphobic’ outlook.

A Growing Threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK was published on July 8th, 2026, and removed just two days later. The hasty response—from an organisation which took two yearsto acknowledge the Hamas October 7th atrocities—was prompted by a backlash from many of the groups the report berated for being part of an “anti-rights” movement. Past donors also raised concern about Amnesty’s capture by gender ideology.

The most pressing threat to Amnesty came from Beira’s Place, a women-only women’s refuge set up by J.K. Rowling. Lawyers acting for the charity accused Amnesty of defaming the organisation and have threatened legal action. Rowling has invited those on the “blacklist”—from the LGB Alliance to a now-defunct group dedicated to keeping men out of women’s prisons—to apply to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund to help with legal costs.

A Growing Threat claims that a key UK Supreme Court ruling, that ‘sex’ in Section 10 of the Equalities Act means is defined biologically, has led to discrimination (and worse) against ‘trans’ people, mostly crossdressing men who claim to be female. Amnesty now claims to ‘regret’ compiling the list, and its head was urged to quit over the report and related documentation. It has now reported itself to the Charities Commission for investigation.

Read it.

Italian prosecutors are investigating the captain of the ship Sea-Watch 5 for possible aggravated complicity in illegal immigration after aerial footage recorded by Frontex showed the German NGO vessel receiving migrants directly from a boat apparently operated by smugglers.

The footage, recorded on May 11th, approximately 45 miles northeast of Tripoli, shows five masked men supervising the transfer of 90 people using several smaller boats. Once the transfer is completed, the men wave to the crew and head back at high speed towards the Libyan coast. The following day, other videos show another vessel approaching the Sea-Watch 5 without any visible signs of damage or distress.

The ship later disembarked 166 people in Brindisi, Italy. Most of the illegal immigrants are Bangladeshi nationals, reports say. Italian police searched the vessel, copied its navigation data and seized several logbooks.

Sea-Watch denies that any prior rendezvous took place and maintains that its crew was fulfilling its international obligation to assist people in danger. The organisation also alleges that a Libyan patrol boat fired at and threatened the vessel during the operation.

Here’s how this scam works:

1. ‘Smugglers’ put migrants in a boat and travel outside of the source territorial waters.
2. NGO Pro-immigrant ‘rescue boat’ swoops in to ‘rescue’ the puir wee distressed migrants.
3. NGO ‘rescue boat’ takes migrants to European territory, where the promptly claim asylum upon landing.
4. Pro-immigrant bureaucrats start the Dance of Eternal Paperwork.
5. ‘Migrants’ disappear into the sunset, never to be seen again.

The Telegraph (UK).

Andy Burnham is planning to hand billions of pounds of income tax to Labour mayors.

The incoming prime minister is expected to accelerate plans to give more power to mayors to fund economic growth projects as part of his devolution strategy.

The Telegraph understands that Treasury officials have worked up a plan for “income tax sharing” to be presented to Mr Burnham in his first days in office.

Gee, Democrats have been doing that for years; so much so that when Trump cuts them off they sue.

The Telegraph (UK).

My, what a surprise.

Not the Bee.

Gee, who could have predicted that?

Not the Bee.

Details have yet to be released here, but I’m guessing it involved one of the blue-haired trantifa types.

I love the term ‘trantifa’ and intend to add it to my vocabulary.

Liberal women are already storming buildings because they are upset that the foreign criminal was shot while attempting to mow down officers:

As they do.

Not the Bee.

How unexpected.

Read it.

Britain’s Labour government is under pressure to pause its new prisons’ early release scheme. On Tuesday night, July 7th, Labour MPs in parliament abstained on a vote drafted to prevent the release of child sex offenders—including grooming gang members, paedophiles, and rapists—before the end of their sentences.

Now, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales and the domestic abuse commissioner have joined forces to call on the government to pause its new early release scheme.

Read it.

Drama requires uncertainty.

But there is a creeping challenge across our film and television dramaturgy; progressive ideology, in which we’re told that certain groups are inherently more oppressed, and thus more moral than others.

This sits uneasily with dramatic storytelling, particularly in mixed-race casts, for a simple reason:

Unlike drama, which requires uncertainty, progressive ideology requires moral certainty based around people’s identities.

We all know the moral totem pole that progressive ideology has constructed, with cis white hetero able bodied men at the bottom, and a trans black disabled woman at the top.

,,,

I once attended a lecture by a brilliant black professor on the power of the Wire, one of the most diverse shows in history at the time. She said that the great achievement of the Wire was that there was a broad range of black characters, so no one character carried the moral weight of representing blackness.

Read it.

I have a question for Bernie, AOC, the DSA, and all the Ivy League professors who are convinced 21st century America is the optimum time and place for “real” socialism to be tried.

When Marx wrote his rant, industry was in the Age of Machinery. Should the workers take over the Means of Production at that time, they would have little or no trouble keeping the factory running. Any shop foreman had all the technical knowledge needed. We were still in the Age of Machinery in 1918 when Lenin took over the Means of Production. Even in the Age of Machinery, however, socialism can’t innovate. But, change did not come fast in the Age of Machinery. The U.S.S.R. strategy of relying on copying Western innovations was a tolerable strategy. The U.S.S.R. was always behind the West, but the gap was not too big.

After WWII, America began to leave the Age of Machinery and transition into the Age of Computers. The pace of innovation increased, and the gap between the West and the U.S.S.R. increased. Reagan pushed for a huge technological advance in Defense. The U.S.S.R. strained to respond, and collapsed.

Since the collapse of the world’s most advanced socialist country, the pace of change has steadily accelerated. The Age of Machinery exists only in museums. The shop foreman with good mechanical talent still exists, but he is ill equipped to run the factory full of robots. In 21st century America, the most important Means of Production are not factories. Microsoft is a collection of highly trained, and highly rewarded, coders. Apple has its factories overseas. Apple in America is a collection of highly trained, and highly rewarded, engineers forever devoted to designing something better than they designed the year before.

A socialist takeover of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, or any other of America’s top companies, ends in instant disaster. The common worker couldn’t take over squat. The highly paid elite engineer or programmer is essential and not replaceable. These folks are all very big winners under Capitalism. They will not start saying Comrade to everyone and continue working under socialism.

Marx was convinced factory workers were woefully underpaid. Therefore, a worker revolt would result in higher wages. Essential workers in 21st century America are not underpaid. A worker revolt, today, would do nothing more than piss off the workers.

Read it.

British policing has reached new depths of absurdity and authoritarianism. Officers are inventing pre-crimes, harassing citizens for lawful filming or standing in public, and deploying to pubs to warn people off tweeting about councillors.

Read it.

Democrats are at a crossroads as Democratic Socialists of America candidates win primaries, even unseating incumbents. Particularly vexed are well-off Democrat politicians as the DSA engages in its war against the wealthy.

Two prime examples: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Rep. Ro Khanna. Pritzker is a billionaire in a party that demonizes wealth. Khanna, who is also very wealthy, has been the face of going after the rich.

Read it.

A senior adviser in the far-left French party La France Insoumise (LFI) has spoken bluntly about the party’s desire to create a “New France,” a society reflecting the country’s demographic and cultural realities—a vision that the French right has described as a push for population replacement.

Imane El Hamzaoui, a senior national coordinator within LFI who oversees the party’s anti-racism campaign and youth mobilisation, delivered the speech to party members on Sunday, July 5th as part of a presentation on the concept of a “New France.”

The New Neo.

I’ve written many many posts on this topic over the years. I don’t know when the first one was published, but it was probably at least as far back as Obama’s campaign in 2008 (see this, for example). But right now it seems especially appropriate.

By 2018 and 2019 – the years AOC first became prominent – I was writing about the topic more often, and especially noting how popular socialism had become among the young.

It’s no surprise that young people are comfortable with socialism—they’ve lived under it all their lives. Mom & dad control all of the household property and money and the way you get something is by wheedling. Transferring this attitude to government feels natural.

The Telegraph (UK).

At least five county cricket clubs are in danger of having their funding cut because their boards are not diverse enough.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) threatened to withhold critical funding from first-class domestic cricket clubs that have not appointed an ethnically diverse director and achieved 40 per cent female representation on their boards.

The affirmative action has been described as an overreach on behalf of the national governing body, which critics say has become too powerful.

The Foundry.

continue to work. Some families in low-income neighborhoods turn to Head Start, a program whose very name suggests children should expect to finish their time at one of these centers better prepared for school. But today, after more than 60 years and over $240 billion in spending, the program has fallen well short of that goal.

A new Heritage Foundation report reveals a harsh reality: Head Start centers are overregulated, unsafe, expensive, and fail to deliver lasting results for children.

Head Start sits under a thick, strict set of rules. A recent analysis compared federal Head Start rules with state childcare rules. It found that nearly all Head Start settings are stricter than state settings.

Moreover, the program is also burdened with bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to help children and families. The second Trump administration is trying to help. In May 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services released a notice of proposed rulemaking to scrap burdensome wage and benefit rules from the Biden administration.

Read it.

Political orientation has been shown to correlate with fertility, raising the possibility that demographic processes contribute to long-term ideological change. Using data from the US General Social Survey, we analyze completed fertility across 17 birth cohorts (1898–1982) to examine how political orientation has contributed to fertility decline in the United States and whether emerging selective forces can be detected. Earlier cohorts show little difference in fertility by political orientation. From the 1943–1947 birth cohort onward, however, a pronounced divergence emerges: individuals with right-wing political orientations maintain fertility at or above replacement level, whereas fertility among left-wing individuals declines sharply to well below replacement. Applying Lande–Arnold selection gradient analyses, we find increasing directional selection that may favor right-wing political orientation over time, while education shows consistent negative associations with fertility and religiosity positive but weaker effects. Separate analysis of Black and White Americans reveals, however, that the increasingly stronger association between political orientation and fertility in more recent cohorts holds only true for whites but not for blacks. Nonetheless, these findings suggest that recent fertility decline in the United States is driven disproportionately by left-leaning individuals and point to contemporary demographic processes that may gradually shift the ideological composition of populations.

Evolution acts to weed stupidity out of the gene pool. It’s slow, but it’s sure.

Read it.

One way our nation’s most “prestigious” newspapers show they’re Democratic Party propaganda sheets is when their fashion critics apply all of their tawdry partisan biases to their evaluations of the clothes of politicians (or their spouses).

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post was a transparent Democrat, and so is Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times. A white pantsuit worn by Hillary Clinton, as well as the feminist Democrats at the State of the Union, was very chic. But when Tulsi Gabbard wore one while she criticized Hillary at a Democrat debate in 2019, it suddenly carried “connotations of the fringe” and displayed “somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders).”

When Kamala Harris lost in 2024, Friedman invested great meaning in the cravat she wore to her concession speech, that it represented “the idea that some fights were long. That this one had been going on for decades (even centuries) and would continue afterward. It was, in that way, a symbol of both a promise and a lament.” Feminism lost. Women were shortchanged again.

Not the Bee.

I thank God that I don’t live in Britain.

Not the Bee.

Oh, look, another trans person plotting a mass shooting.

The Telegraph (UK).

From the banks of the river Trent, the ruined stone walls of Newark Castle should be the iconic backdrop to this historic Nottinghamshire market town. But all that’s actually visible on a humid July afternoon is traffic backed up along its famous Great North Road, battling its way to and from the A46. It’s been this way for decades now.

So when National Highways announced “critical investment” to improve the A46 Newark Bypass in February 2022, it wasn’t just the people of Newark breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was seen as a nationally significant trade and export route too. As Heidi Alexander, Secretary of State for Transport, said less than four months ago, upgrading the A46 at Newark “will support sectors such as logistics and manufacturing which are dominant in the local economy and reliant on roads for growth, as well as improving access to Humber ports”.

But then, with one dismissive wave of Keir Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan this week, the £297m project was abruptly shelved. It wasn’t the only roads project immediately mothballed; the A38 Derby Junctions project – also in the East Midlands – was earmarked for “potential cancellation”.

Read it.

When the socialist-communist government of Pedro Sánchez first announced he was going to begin the mass legalization of migrants in his country, his government claimed this would amount to 500,000 people. Now, twice as many people are being legalized than first claimed, and importantly for the rdest of Europe, those migrants now have the right to freely move through the Schengen zone.

Due to his mass amnesty, The New York Times has now labeled Spain a “beacon of the global left.”

In April, the socialist-communist government in Madrid first issue the decree, giving illegal migrants three months to submit their application.

According to the New York Times, more than 1 million applications had already been submitted by illegal immigrants.

Vox party leader Santiago Abascal has accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of taking the long-term move of naturalizing millions of foreigners to give himself and left-wing parties an electoral advantage in upcoming elections.

“Pedro Sánchez is willing to rob us of the next general elections by manipulating the census and handing out Spanish nationality,” wrote Abascal. “And it is necessary for us to mobilize to prevent him, after everything he has stolen, from also stealing the elections from us.”

Read it.

The goals of Progressivism are “continually receding ones”, which is, to paraphrase Mussolini, “like a trodden road leading on and on to the land of heart’s desire, which though it grows closer and closer, will never be reached”.

To advance towards the mirage, progress must convince. Indeed, one needs to emancipate oneself from the past and its many thorns. Complexity, you see, slows down progress. Data, when it is used, must tell an irrefutable story. Whatever our current situation, we are, it is said, materially better off now than we were then. We are admonished to look straight ahead, not to see what we have lost. To reminisce is, in a way, to conspire.

Proglodytes want progress, and progress is never final. Therefore, progressives need change, because without change, progress won’t happen. That is why they are never satisfied. That is why they are always changing things just for the sake of change, because without change there is no progress, and without progress progressives are failures.

The Telegraph (UK).

White British students are a minority in almost one in five universities, analysis by The Telegraph has found.

In the 2024-25 academic year, white UK-domiciled students comprised less than 50 per cent of the student population at more than two dozen universities across the UK.

Yet almost a dozen of these institutions continue to exclude white students from diversity scholarships that target students from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

The Guardian, Voice of Socialism in Britain.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called for a national “billionaires tax” on Friday as he fights a ballot measure targeting the ultra-wealthy in his home state.

Rules are for thee but not for me.

Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, published his proposal the day after California officials certified a ballot measure to levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1bn. The initiative, called the California Billionaire Tax Act, was brought by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) and would fund the state’s healthcare, education and food assistance programs.

Proglodyte never run out of ideas for spending YOUR money.

The initiative received more than 1.6m signatures – one of the highest in California history and something organizers point to as testament to the ballot measure’s popularity. But it also spurred intense pushback from some of the state’s richest Silicon Valley residents as well as several other prominent labor unions.

“The dangerous wealth tax directly threatens vital funding for education and schools, healthcare and clinics, public safety, and infrastructure projects by making California’s revenue even more volatile,” a coalition of unions including the California Medical Association, California Primary Care Association and the California School Boards Association said in a joint statement on Thursday.

Read it.

Dutch farmers’ organisations have warned of a summer of protests if the government presses ahead with proposed nitrogen restrictions that they say could put many farms out of business.

The warning came as parliament debated Agriculture Minister Jaimi Van Essen’s plans on Wednesday. Farmer representatives met for crisis talks in Nijkerk while farmers gathered outside with tractors to protest the proposals.

The organisations—including Agractie, the Dutch Dairy Farmers Union (NMV), the Dutch Poultry Farmers Union (NVP), Farmers Defence Force (FDF), and LTO Nederland—oppose plans to introduce wider buffer zones around Natura 2000 protected areas and tougher livestock emissions limits, arguing they would make farming in some regions virtually impossible.

Read it.

White working-class students are effectively locked out of almost every race-based diversity scholarship at Oxford and Cambridge despite being among the most educationally disadvantaged groups in England, according to a new analysis.

The investigation, published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, found that more than a dozen scholarships, bursaries and outreach schemes at the two elite universities prioritise applicants from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, while offering little or no equivalent support to poor white British students. The findings have reignited criticism that Britain’s diversity agenda rewards race over genuine disadvantage.

According to the analysis, Oxford and Cambridge together offer at least 15 scholarships or financial aid schemes aimed specifically at BAME students, alongside at least 15 outreach programmes including residential visits, taster days, and webinars. White working-class men appear eligible for just one of those diversity schemes, while white working-class women qualify for only two.

Quillette.

For neo-decolonial activists, Western civilisation reflects all of the things they regard as oppression: capitalism, Zionism, borders, prisons, police, property, universities, legal systems, national sovereignty, and the ordinary habits of middle class life.

To call for our civilisation’s “total eradication” is to demand a revolutionary unmaking of the world that Western people inhabit. It is a politics of purification. It’s hard to view this as anything other than naked destructivism. They are talking about dismantling our whole society.

Western civilisation is a lot of things beyond simplistic labels like “capitalist”. Western civilisation is the assumption that government is limited by law; that a person can speak, worship, publish, own property, marry, dissent, sue, vote, and be judged as an individual. Western civilisation means the various habits of argument, self-criticism, contracts, due process, scientific inquiry, and voluntary association that make modern life possible. It is the system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide.

During the George Floyd protests, when another user asked whether there was a better slogan than “defund the police,” Chevalier reportedly replied: “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.” When someone suggested that abolition meant ending policing “as we know it,” she corrected them: “No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”

Not the Bee.

The Left tells us that if we just submit to government medicine and allowed the entire medical industry to become socialist, everything will be okay.

Meanwhile, as The Guardian reports, the reality is somewhat different.

It’s absolutely horrible.

The Telegraph (UK).

One 20-year-old student says barriers he faces in education and employment because of his race have left him wanting to leave the UK.

And who could blame him?

The Telegraph (UK).

White working-class students are excluded from almost all Oxbridge diversity scholarships, an analysis by The Telegraph has found.

More than a dozen scholarships, bursaries and financial aid schemes are available to Oxford and Cambridge university students based on their ethnicity and not their socioeconomic backgrounds.

While all of the schemes can be used by students from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, they almost entirely exclude white working-class students, who are one of the most under-represented groups in higher education.

The Antiplanner.

An urbanist named Devon Zuegel compares an aerial photo of the city center of Siena, Italy with a Houston freeway interchange (specifically, the eastern intersection of I-10 and I-610). Both occupy about the same amount of land, she says, but one is home to 30,000 people.

And don’t get me started on the sewage situation….

Read it.

Barbara Boyd discusses three Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani winning upset victories in New York congressional primaries, framing the results as part of a long-term cultural project rather than a purely economic platform. She argues the DSA’s internal education centers on communist theorist Antonio Gramsci and his strategy of revolution through cultural “hegemony,” citing a deleted Instagram post from a group tied to one winner that called for the “total eradication of Western Civilization.”

Boyd highlights a newly published DSA platform proposing major constitutional changes, then links Gramsci to the Council on Foreign Relations’ “post-Trump world” series, noting CFR fellow Charles Kupchan opens with a Gramsci quote and attacks reindustrialization and tariffs. She claims British imperial networks historically sponsored Marx and later Gramsci, using communism and counterculture against rivals, and urges promoting Trump’s “American System” economics and an optimistic national culture ahead of the midterms.

Not the Bee.

You’ve probably never met Tlaleng Mofokeng, Special Rapporteur on the right to health at the UN. But there’s no time like the present.

Sorry, but I don’t take health advice from the morbidly obese.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A closely watched Colorado primary on Tuesday could see attorney Melat Kiros join a growing class of democratic socialists and staunch Israel critics headed to Congress.

Kiros, a Democratic Socialists of America member, is looking to unseat incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, in a district that covers nearly all of Denver. The race comes one week after a slate of progressives won their Democratic primaries in New York City, energizing left-wing advocates who are looking for additional victories around the country.

A number of Jewish leaders and groups in Colorado have voiced concerns about Kiros, who drew criticism after calling Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack “inevitable” and declining to refer to the Boulder firebombing attack as antisemitic.

Kiros has made her sharp criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States a central part of her campaign. Her platform includes a complete arms embargo on Israel and ending military subsidies to the Jewish state.

“Democratic Socialist” is an oxymoron. Socialism is inherently statist and therefore cannot be ‘democratic’.

Watch it.

The podcast Idea Theory explains it all better than I could.

The politics have changed. The 2016 calculation was “Don’t anger the Chinese government.” But the 2026 calculation is “Demonstrate diversity to the right audiences.” But the underlying practice is the same. The role isn’t being cast in any deeply artistic sense. It’s being solved for against a  political backdrop by a marketing department. Once again, the actor is the variable. Once again, the politics are the function. And it turns out what we are looking at is a marketing department using actors as semaphore flags to signal political alignment. But what you can’t do, and what no functioning art form has been able to do for very long, is treat your actors as semaphore flags, because once the actor becomes a flag, the work stops being about what the actor is doing on-screen, and starts being about what the actor represents off it. And what you have at that point isn’t really art so much as advertising for an ideology. And then there’s the hypocrisy of how all this gets justified. If suddently we’re told that Helen is mythic, and that mythic figures can be anyone, and that no Greek queen has a fixed ethnicity anyway, the Helen of 2026 turns out to be infinitely flexible in a way that the Tibetan monk of 2016 was not.

sd