The Foundry.

Socialism is popular!

A Pew study reports that more than a third of American adults view it positively.

How is this possible?

Little has brought more misery—first in the Soviet Union, then in China, Cuba, Nicaragua, now Venezuela …

One reason young people support socialism is because their social media feeds show videos made by popular but economically illiterate people.

TikTok star Madeline Pendleton has 1.6 million subscribers. My new video shows her telling them: “Socialism is working better than capitalism 93% of the time!”

Where does she get 93%?

From a study published in 1986 by self-described Marxists in the Journal of Health Services.

The authors conveniently ignore the United States and other wealthy countries and compare socialist economies to “capitalist” countries like Uganda, Rwanda, and Somalia, some of which were at war.

UK Daily Mail.

Left-wing managers of a Paris theatre occupied by hundreds of homeless African migrants are set to abandon the building because of sex-related violence.

They say the crisis at the Gaîté Lyrique – one of the French capital’s most historic arts venues – is now ‘so explosive’ that retreat by this Friday is their only option.

Some 200 mainly young men moved in last December when the management gave them free tickets to a ‘Refugees Welcome in France’ conference.

Get Woke, Go Broke.

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Apparently there is some sort of Right To Receive Money From The Taxpayers of which were were ignorant. Who knew?

Ron Brownstein struggled with the idea that blue states could be on the wrong end of federal civil rights issues on Friday’s CNN This Morning as he claimed that the Trump Administration is trying to use “the power of the federal purse to rescind rights.”

Host Jessica Dean began by reading from Brownstein’s recent article on the subject, where he laid out what his definition of “rights” is, “Trump has threatened to cut off federal funds for states, cities, hospitals, and universities unless they adopt a wide range of conservative social policies, such as banning transgender girls from competing in high school sports and ending diversity programs in education and employment. Since most red states have already adopted these policies, the principal effect of Trump’s orders is to attempt to impose these ideas on Democratic-controlled states that have already considered them at the state level, and virtually without exception, spurned them.”

Covid prophet who predicted pandemic SEVEN YEARS before it spread reveals the terrifying next ‘big one’… and when it could hit (UK Daily Mail)

The next pandemic: COVID-19 showed us how we can fight the next global outbreak (UC Davis Health)

Lab Notes: Are we on the brink of another pandemic? (ABC News)

US Health Secretary Kennedy calls for end to deadly Texas measles outbreak (Reuters)

As Texas measles outbreak grows, here’s what to know about the disease, vaccines and response (NBC News)

As the Texas outbreak grows, how contagious is measles, really? (NPR)

Death of child from measles is an ominous sign (Washington Poop)

“Bat Lady” Research Team In Wuhan ‘Find’ COVID-Like Virus That Can Infect Humans

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If you think that regimes trying to control their people through suppressing expression the government doesn’t like only happens in “those” parts of the world, think again. From the U.K. and Canada to Australia, the powers that be are steadily promoting their agenda by censoring and punishing contrary views. And the censors are heading our way.

The rise of pervasive Wokeism has resulted in socialists being more willing to say the quiet part out loud.

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How a “scientific consensus” that “climate change is mostly human-caused” was forced by:
1) Shutting down funding for scientific research into natural causes.
2) Punishing scientists who continued this research anyway.

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Fifteen years hence, we now know much more. None of the scary scenarios originally predicted have actually come to pass, or at a minimum they were greatly exaggerated. Ten-year deadlines to “do something” about the “climate crisis” have come and gone… a few times. Even the IPCC (which only allows alarmist-leaning scientists to participate) has admitted it is unlikely we will experience significant changes in severe weather by the year 2100 that can be tied to increasing CO2.

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Ludwig von Mises called the universities of his day “nurseries of socialism” because of the inevitable socialist bias of all government-funded universities. He also said that there is always a remnant of students, however, that does not buy into the endless drumbeat about the alleged wonders of socialism and the “imperfections” of free-market capitalism. It is this remnant that the Mises Institute devotes so much effort to educating and inspiring in the Misesian/Rothbardian tradition.

The vast majority of today’s American universities have become incubators of socialism to a far greater extent than anything Mises experienced. They have produced generations of students who are well versed in all the left-wing platitudes about just about everything even if they lack the most elementary critical thinking skills. (So-called “critical theory,” invented by Marxist law professors, is not about critical thinking but criticizing the critics of socialism and all the institutions of Western civilization). The unique incentive systems in American universities have made this possible.

Almost all universities are either government funded state universities, or private nonprofit sector universities that receive significant amounts of government subsidies, making them de facto state universities. (Remember: He who takes the king’s shilling becomes the king’s man). As such, they have no real customers in a business sense. Students do not think of themselves as customers in the sense that they are customers of say, Starbucks or a pizza joint. They rarely pay the tuition bills for one thing; mom and dad or the taxpayers do, or the banks that extend to them student loans. Parents may pay the tuition bills but it is the children who receive the primary benefits of higher education, if such benefits even exist. Thus, consumer pressure that leads to consumer sovereignty is very weak.

ZMan explains it all to you.

An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

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Jessica Tarlov is the token Democrat talking head often appearing on the Fox News program The Five surrounded by four more level-headed center-right and conservative commentators including Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and often Dana Perino. It’s a thankless job but someone must do it. Typically, when Tarlov is unavailable, Harold Ford, Jr., a calmer and much saner thinker, takes the Democrat seat at the table.

Tarlov, the other day, made the point that even Republicans in red districts were not happy with Elon Musk and the DOGE effort to root out waste, fraud, and corruption in various government departments and agencies, and were raising their voices to object to the way that DOGE is going about its work. This seemed to be a Democrat talking point because other leftist commentators were aping this same story on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, etc. (not that identical, unified messaging has ever <cough, choke> been spewed on these networks).

There’s just one problem with the claim. According to The Washington Free Beacon:

Red-District DOGE Protests, Cited As Proof of Broad Musk ‘Backlash,’ Were Organized By Left-Wing Groups

Huh. Go figure. Who woulda thunk?

Newsbusters.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for a suspected sister-wife who may or may not have married her brother-husband to flee a Sharia society that would’ve stoned her for running her mouth to force that same authoritarianism on the people she claims to represent.

Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) believes Americans are stupid and blames our First Amendment right to free speech for allowing citizens to re-elect President Donald Trump. In an interview with her fellow terrorist sympathizer, Mehdi Hasan, Congresswoman Kaboom implied only their ilk are capable of “intellectual debate,” and should apparently be the gatekeepers of common sense.

Only someone who suffers a level of woefully unearned arrogance would have enough confidence to tell that to an ousted MSNBC host who recently stated “Make American Planes Crash Again” in a social media post, and then called Americans “Islamophobic” for reacting poorly to it.

But that’s an unsurprising attitude coming from a congresswoman who downplays the 9/11 terrorist attacks and seems to be an in-house mouthpiece for our nation’s enemies.

The American Mind.

To prevent national security failures and mitigate them when they occur, the U.S. has built a national security state unlike anything humanity has ever seen. The U.S. government has a network of security intelligence and operations agencies that spans the world, working through a web of domestic and foreign governmental, nonprofit, and corporate institutions.

We outsiders think this network runs through the CIA. Yet as we are learning, thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that is only partly true. In 2023, while the Intelligence Community, including the CIA, was appropriated $71.7 billion dollars, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an “independent” but supposedly State Department-guided agency, received about $40 billion. While USAID has the word “International” in its name, it has spent a lot of money not only spreading atheism in Nepal but also on woke dogma and censorship at home.

As true Communist believers can now barely be found outside of U.S. educational institutions, USAID and their web of partners have moved on to new missions. The most important of these is “countering threats to democracy,” especially “countering domestic extremism.” To those ends, every U.S. agency has been weaponized, and law has served as a shield for official excess as much as it has been used as a weapon against genuine bad actors outside of government.

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One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

Hence the prevalence on the Left of the New Hitler meme. (Notice how nobody ever accuses someone of being the New Stalin, or the New Mao.)

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BP’s green pivot has backfired spectacularly, hammering profits and leaving the company vulnerable to a hedge fund siege, writes Jonathan Leake in the Telegraph.

Get Woke, go broke. A universal truth.

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This post was inspired by Brian Watt’s post, A Helpful Guide to Cancelling “Mother”. Reading of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ proposal to replace “mother” with “inseminated person” made me wonder if there shouldn’t be some award akin to the popular Darwin Awards to be presented for torturing language for political ends. Something, say, called “Orwell Awards” — in honor of George Orwell’s NewSpeak Dictionary from his dystopian novel, 1984. But, it turns out that there is in fact an existing Orwell Award that, sadly, stands for exactly the opposite:

It is awarded annually to “writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.

The closest thing that comes to my conception is a Doublespeak Award presented by the same organization as the Orwell Award:

An ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.

But this doesn’t get quite to my meaning. The award I have in mind would be presented to persons who really embrace the spirit that George Orwell described.s

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A racist, former Survivor contestant and tobacco progressive sued the president claiming that unless we castrate the kids, they’ll die. And a judge ruled in front of a courtroom full of transgender activists cheering for child mutilation that banning castration wasn’t constitutional.

Where is child castration mentioned in the Constitution?

The closest that the matter came to the attention of the Founding Fathers was when Thomas Jefferson authored a Virginia state bill punishing rape with castration. What Jefferson thought fitting for rapists, modern day members of his party believe is fitting for young children.

The progressive child castration complex may be on the wrong side of history, sanity and decency, but so long as it has enough lawyers and judges, it will go on wielding the scalpel.

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“Oh, no! You mean I’ll have to pay back all that money I borrowed and spent on that shit degree in Grievance Studies? The taxpayers aren’t going to cover it? Oh, no!”

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While public-sector unions file lawsuits to block President Donald Trump’s reforms to the bureaucracy, federal government workers are getting paid by the taxpayer for time they spend doing work for those very same unions.

The little-known practice of “official time” allows bureaucrats to bill the taxpayer for hours they spend doing work for the union. Members of Congress have filed bills to ban the practice, but a budget expert suggests that taxing the practice instead might pose a smaller hurdle for getting it through Congress.

While most bills face a 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster and get through the Senate, senators could pass such a tax through a process known as budget reconciliation—a process by which bills only require a majority of senators’ votes to pass.

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The PBS News Hour, along with the rest of the liberal press, have certainly warmed up in recent years to the FBI, America’s chief domestic surveillance organization. Since Donald Trump came on the scene, a press eager to find criminal behavior within a loathed administration has behaved more like a present-day “Friends of the FBI” than the bulwark against government spying and surveillance it once fancied itself as being.

PBS has even run pro-FBI stories with a McCarthyite tinge, like one applauding the online liberal “sedition hunters” of January 6 scofflaws.

But the release from prison of an American Indian activist convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975 put the PBS News Hour in liberal reset mode on Tuesday evening. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz marked the occasion with a tone similar to hard-left groups like Amnesty International in celebrating the release of the infamous convicted killer Leonard Peltier. The now-80-year-old Peltier’s life sentence was commuted to home confinement by President Biden just hours before leaving office January 20.

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The transformer crisis is a direct result of the previous administration’s decision to prioritize ideological policies over practical energy infrastructure needs. While certain technologies were favored politically, they did not address the essential requirements of grid stability. Without immediate action to rectify the transformer shortage, the U.S. risks hindering economic growth and compromising energy security.

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Bird flu can be very confusing. This is true because, as is so often the case with our government, those who claim to be trying to solve the problem – our so-called “public health” and “pandemic preparedness” “experts” – are actually the ones who created the problem. What is worse, they are actively seeking to perpetuate it.

UPDATE: As measles outbreak rages in Texas, RFK Jr. pushes anti-vaccine message (Popular Information)

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The field of climate science has long been presented as an objective, data-driven discipline, immune to the biases and financial conflicts that plague other scientific domains. However, a recent preprint study by Jessica Weinkle et al, Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes, challenges this assumption, shedding light on an alarming lack of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures in climate research, particularly in studies linking hurricanes to climate change?. She also has an excellent write up of the study on her Substack, Conflicted.

The study’s findings reveal a disturbing trend: not a single one of the 331 authors analyzed disclosed any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest?. Moreover, the research found that funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was a significant predictor of studies reporting a positive association between climate change and hurricane behavior?.

The American Mind.

The Fighting Irish may soon be fighting in court rather than on the gridiron. Few universities have practiced affirmative action in hiring longer than Notre Dame, as I document in a new report. Notre Dame’s provost even recently announced that increasing “the number of women and underrepresented minorities” on the faculty is a goal “equally important” to hiring Catholic faculty.

Fifty years of efforts to increase diversity, however, are now clearly in conflict with President Trump’s Executive Order 14173, a bold plan for “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 4 of that order directs relevant government agencies, in a process overseen by the attorney general in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget, to identify the most egregious examples of “illegal DEI discrimination” happening at, among other places, “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.” The Department of Education could conduct up to nine investigations of around 80 institutions, a target rich environment. Notre Dame, whose endowment exceeds $20 billion, is one such institution that needs to be investigated.

Notre Dame has been practicing affirmative action since the late 1970s, when it established its Academic Affirmative Action Committee (AAAC). The school had long favored hiring faithful Catholics, relying on informal networks in earlier days, when more than 80% of the faculty were Catholic. But according to the AAAC, using informal networks made it more difficult to hire women and underrepresented minorities. Thus Notre Dame revolutionized its hiring process, shifting away from its historic religious affiliation to a new focus on diversity.

I was born in South Bend, and inherited my love of Notre Dame from my parents. My mother’s mother’s father was allegedly a bricklayer brought over from Ireland during the Famine, and family legend has it that his name is inscribed on the Golden Dome along with those of all the other workmen who helped build the campus. Fortunately I left the area before the rot set in.

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A Northwestern Law School clinic is providing free legal defense to a group of anti-Israel radicals who organized a blockade of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport that shut down travel last spring. One of the organizers is benefiting from that defense after repeatedly accusing Northwestern of “anti-Palestinian discrimination.”

Sheila Bedi, a Northwestern law professor who leads the school’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, is representing four of the blockade organizers, according to legal filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Her clinic and others like it at Northwestern use funding from the law school and its donors to offer legal services pro bono, according to attorneys familiar with the school.

The Washington, D.C.-based Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute filed a class action suit against the “anti-American” organizers in September, arguing that they should pay civil damages to travelers who missed their flights and were forced to walk miles with their luggage to access the airport.

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The Biden administration put in a lot hard at work inflating the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), using exaggerated agricultural damage estimates to justify sweeping climate policies. But in a new study, economist Ross McKitrick—one of the sharpest minds in climate policy skepticism—has taken apart the foundations of these inflated numbers, revealing what happens when climate alarmism meets real data.

The American Mind.

American life today is characterized in no small part by nearly ceaseless exposure to LGBTQ propaganda. Everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with “the message,” be it in grade schools, on college campuses, while watching television or movies, or at work. There are no “safe spaces” sheltered from the deluge—not even FEMA’s hurricane recovery efforts have been spared.

How did such a small “community” capture America’s institutions? The answer is complex, but a new database by The Project to Expose Corporate Activism (PECA) shines a light on a significant part of the story.

PECA’s database shows that corporations have become the vanguard of the LGBTQ movement, donating vast sums of money to prop up an equally vast network of activists. The database does not merely rehash well-known examples like Anheuser-Busch’s support for transgender TikTok influencers but rather furnishes evidence of 1,588 companies’ support for more than 2,300 LGBTQ causes. These causes on the whole are quite radical. They range from Camp Brave Trails—a queer summer camp that has children’s drag shows and a “clothing closet for exploring gender expression”—to NGOs like Immigration Equality that facilitate the illegal migration of transgender and HIV+ “asylum seekers.”