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

New York Post.

The architect behind California’s controversial billionaire tax dismissed warnings the proposal is already driving wealthy residents out of the Golden State, calling the claims “entirely fabricated” even as a growing list of billionaires have reportedly relocated or are weighing an exit ahead of the November election.

Dave Regan, president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), said there is “absolutely no evidence” that wealthy Californians are fleeing because of the proposed one-time tax, pushing back against critics ranging from Gov. Gavin Newsom to business groups and Silicon Valley executives.

“There is absolutely no evidence that billionaires leave,” Regan told KCRA’s Ashley Zavala Sunday as the bill made it onto the November ballot.

Well, let’s ask Sergei Brin about that, in his new digs in Florida….

His comments come months after reports that at least six California billionaires had already severed their residency before Jan. 1 — the cutoff date written into the ballot measure to avoid the proposed tax.

Among those who have reportedly left or significantly shifted their residency are Google co-founder Larry Page, who has established a presence in Florida after purchasing more than $170 million worth of Miami-area real estate; Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has deepened his Florida ties and already votes there; and venture capitalist David Sacks, who relocated from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

Others have reportedly followed similar paths.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been linked to South Florida real estate while also relocating to Nevada’s Lake Tahoe region.

Why do progs lie so blatantly? Do they think that nobody reads the news?

The labor leader argued that similar predictions failed to materialize elsewhere.

Oh? Like where? A socialist country where people were trapped behind the border?

Read it.

California has achieved something almost impossible in the annals of bureaucratic absurdity: It has made citizenship easier to assert for voting than sexual orientation is to document for favored utility contracting.

To register to vote, a person fills out a form, signs an affidavit, and attests under penalty of perjury that he is a U.S. citizen and California resident. The state may check identifying information against databases, but it does not generally require a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate before letting him enter the electorate.

For something as grave as sovereignty—deciding taxes, judges, crime policy, schools, and the future of the state—citizenship is treated largely as an attestation.

But if a small business wants to qualify as LGBTQ+ owned under California’s utility supplier-diversity system, Sacramento suddenly discovers verification.

The applicant must prove the company is majority-owned and controlled by an LGBTQ+ person. How? Marriage or domestic-partnership records. Health insurance paperwork. Joint living arrangements. A letter from an LGBTQ+ chamber leader. Media coverage identifying the owner as LGBTQ+. A physician or attorney letter. Or, most absurdly, three personal-reference letters from people who have known the owner for more than a year and can attest to the owner’s LGBTQ+ status.

Citizenship is treated as an attestation. Sexual orientation is treated as a credential.

The Foundry.

The House Judiciary Committee is threatening to hold the Southern Poverty Law Center in contempt of Congress for failing to hand over documents related to the SPLC’s use of “field sources” inside extremist groups and its work with the Justice Department under President Joe Biden.

“The committee has made several good-faith efforts to work with your counsel to obtain documents responsive to the subpoena,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to SPLC’s incoming president and CEO, Ryan Haygood, first obtained by the Daily Signal. “To date, the committee has still not received any such documents. Therefore, the SPLC must promptly produce all materials responsive to the committee’s subpoena as soon as possible, but not later than 5:00 p.m. on July 9, 2026.”

“The committee is prepared to use available mechanisms to enforce its subpoena,” Jordan concluded.

Read it.

Did the humanities go woke because they went broke? That scenario has become one of the more persuasive explanations for the present crisis in the humanities. As their enrolments declined and federal funding shrank, and universities began sending money (and, thus, prestige) toward STEM and professional programs, the humanities went looking for support wherever they could find it. If serious funders wanted academic work to be framed in the language of social justice, then scholars were willing to adapt accordingly. Tyler Austin Harper recently made this case in The Atlantic, arguing that what looked like ideological capture may, in fact, be economic desperation.

The Antiplanner.

“Parking minimums are a waste of money and land,” planners argue, so they immediately turn around and impose parking maxima, saying that people will be happy to live without cars if they aren’t required to pay for parking. Many developers have learned to their sorrow that this isn’t true, the latest being Scape, a British developer that was persuaded to build a 23-story apartment tower on the edge of downtown San Jose. Calls the Fay, the building offers only one parking space for every three units and the developer was unable to fill units that didn’t come with parking spaces.

Read it.

The Anglican Church of Canada has taken a step that, until just a few years ago, would have been difficult to imagine even within the most progressive Christian denominations.

Its General Synod has authorized for “trial use” a specific liturgy intended to accompany people who have chosen euthanasia, known in Canada as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). The document includes prayers to be read immediately before the fatal drugs are administered, as well as prayers after the patient’s death.

The 66-page text goes far beyond offering pastoral guidance for terminally ill patients. It establishes a complete set of religious rites adapted to the moments before and after euthanasia: confession, the laying on of hands, anointing with oil, Holy Communion, blessings, and specific prayers for those who have chosen to end their lives through medical intervention.

Leaving Christianity is like bankruptcy: Slowly at first, and then quickly.

Not the Bee.

It’s always fun when liberal logic blows up in their faces.

Take this genius, for example, who sought to drum up sympathy for illegal immigrants in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that revoked temporary protected status for migrants.

The Other McCain.

Stacy McCain keeps up with this weird shit so that you don’t have to.

The Guardian, Mouthpiece of the Left.

The heatwave scorching western Europe is the most severe and widespread ever and is only possible due to the climate crisis driven by fossil fuel burning, scientists have said.

Scientists say! That proves it! Except for all of the other scientists who say the opposite. But you won’t read what they have to say in The Guardian, of course.

Almost half of Europe’s 850 largest cities are also enduring their worst ever heat stress, a combination of temperature and humidity, they found. Muggier conditions mean sweating is less effective at cooling the body, making heatwaves even more dangerous.

And they won’t allow air conditioning, because Climate Change.

The analysis comes as the UK recorded its hottest ever June temperature on Thursday, 36.7C (98.06F) in Somerset, and much of western Europe recorded a sharp rise in medical emergencies, including some deaths.

In Texas, we call that Thursday. Temperatures in Texas are commonly in the high-90s and low-100s through June, July, and August.

In summer 2022, more than 60,000 people died due to heat in Europe. The statistical analysis needed to assess the impact of the current heatwave will take time to complete. Nonetheless, the heatwave is certain to exact a heavy toll and is also disrupting lives and livelihoods, with schools closed, hospitals struggling and rail and air journeys cancelled across the continent.

And Europeans won’t use air conditioning, especially nowadays that climate alarmism is having local governments remove existing air conditioners.

BBC. a Voice of the Crust.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration can strip protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants which has allowed them to stay in the US for years.

Strip!

The 6-3 ruling overturned decisions by federal judges that had blocked the administration from terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

TPS is granted to individuals whose home countries are unable to accommodate them, due to war or natural disasters.

In a separate ruling, the court has said that migrants arriving at the border are not entitled to apply for asylum until they set foot on US soil, giving another win to the Trump administration.

Not yet tired of winning….

Quillette.

Here is a trivia question: which continent suffers the most heat-related deaths per capita? By a wide margin, the dubious prize goes to… Europe. In the summer of 2022 alone, more than 61,000 Europeans died as a result of the heat.

In case you feel geographically confused: no, the equator does not run through Brussels. Thanks to its northern latitude, Europe in fact endures fewer heat days than almost any other inhabited region on Earth. How, then, can it hold the record for heat mortality? Part of the story is of course demographic. Europe has one of the oldest populations in the world, and the elderly are far more vulnerable to high temperatures. But age explains only a sliver of the gap. The United States is greying too, and Japan is older still than both—yet the risk of dying from heat in either country is dramatically lower.

The real explanation comes down to two letters Europe stubbornly refuses to learn: A/C. Across the continent, only about a fifth of homes have air-conditioning, against nearly 90 percent in the United States and more than 90 percent in Japan.

Sometimes it surprises me that European countries even allow flush toilets.

Read it.

Budapest’s escalating flag war took another turn this week after dozens of Hungarian national flags appeared on Elisabeth Bridge, replacing the Pride banners that had flown there only days earlier.

The secret of the new flags was quickly revealed by El?d Novák, vice-president of the nationalist Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk), who said he and members of the party’s youth wing had placed a Hungarian flag in every pole holder on the bridge. They did this before the city’s mayor could replace the Pride flags that had previously flown there until they were thrown into the Danube by a protester.

“Budapest belongs to everyone,” Novák wrote on Facebook. “That’s why it’s unacceptable for it to be appropriated by any party or political movement, such as the LGBTQETC lobby with its flags.”

“Instead of a foreign ideology imported from abroad, we proclaim patriotism and that we Hungarians have plenty to be proud of,” the party added in a statement.

Read it.

With the fall of the Assad regime and the end of the Syrian civil war in December 2024, Syrian refugees have lost their legal basis for asylum and, therefore, their formal right to stay in Europe. In practice, however, most European countries have still not begun deporting them, and many of them don’t even want to.

Among them is Austria, where Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP/EPP) recently declared that large-scale remigration—a consistent demand of the national conservative FPÖ (PfE), Austria’s largest party—is unrealistic.

According to Karner, returning Austria’s 100,000-strong Syrian migrant community “is neither realistic nor reasonable, because I wonder how many hospitals would still be cleaned.”

Of course, this age-old argument about migrant labor is not only condescending to foreigners but can also be easily defeated by official statistics: only about 25% of Syrian refugees in Austria are employed, with full-time employment estimated to be as low as 15%.

Read it.

As did the old Soviet Union.

When proglodytes say ‘mental health’ they mean ‘mind control’. Orwell didn’t write about CrimeThink for fun.

Read it.

The publication of the “Draft Report on the findings and recommendations of the Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield” should have been a clarifying democratic moment. Here, after all, was a committee of elected representatives established to examine one of the most ambitious political projects now being advanced in Brussels: the construction of a European Democracy Shield. Its task ought to have been obvious. Ask what this Shield is really for. Ask who defines the threats. Ask who watches the watchers. Ask whether ‘democratic resilience’ is becoming a polite term for the management of public opinion. Ask whether defending democracy from manipulation itself might become a means of manipulating democracy.

But Brussels has a genius for turning scrutiny into liturgy.

The Special Committee’s draft report reads less like a warning about the dangers of democratic overreach than a devotional hymn to it. The Commission’s Democracy Shield, we are told, is a necessary initiative, but apparently too modest, too hesitant, too lacking in operational muscle. It needs more structure, more coordination, more funding, more legal clarity, more enforcement, more monitoring, more permanent capacity and more institutional ballast. In other words, the Shield must be shielded from the terrible possibility that it might remain merely a shield.

Whenever I hear the word ‘democracy’ I reach for my revolver….

Read it.

A fire at a 500,000-square-foot Los Angeles warehouse covered in solar panels has blanketed nearby communities with smoke for days, prompting residents to ask a simple question: What exactly are we breathing?

The frozen-food storage facility, operated by Michigan-based Lineage Logistics, has walls densely lined with insulation. According to firefighters, the insulation continued to smolder as the days went on, even after the initial flames subsided, making it more difficult to put the fire out.

Residents have questioned whether hazardous substances associated with industrial fires—including toxic metals such as lead, chromium, and arsenic—could have been carried into surrounding neighborhoods through the smoke.

The problem with ‘sustainable energy’ and ‘renewable energy’ is that it too often depends on fragile technology involving exotic materials. When things go wrong, they go very very wrong.

Read it.

Eight people were each sentenced to 30 to 100 years in prison on Tuesday in connection with violence at a Texas federal immigration facility last year that prosecutors called domestic terrorism.

In the incident on July 4, 2025, prosecutors said Antifa militants wearing black tactical gear opened fire on law enforcement officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, about 25 miles south of Fort Worth. A police officer was wounded.

“The sentences handed down today make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice,” said acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement.

Benjamin Song, who was convicted of attempted murder and who prosecutors said was the operation’s organizer, got the longest sentence of 100 years, according to court filings.

In hearings at U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, two judges announced sentences of 30 to 70 years for seven other defendants, most of whom were convicted in March on charges including rioting and supporting terrorism.

Read it.

Scotland’s gamekeepers have issued a stark warning: they will not endorse the Scottish Government’s new Muirburn Code, a decision they claim is born not of defiance, but of a desperate need to prevent catastrophic wildfires. They argue that the new regulations, designed to protect peatlands, will ironically create a tinderbox, stripping them of the very tools needed to manage fuel loads and keep communities safe. In an era of “red warnings” and severe summer heat, the outcome of this policy, they assert, will be a disaster waiting to happen.

At the heart of the matter is a centuries-old land management practice. Muirburn, the controlled burning of vegetation, is a traditional tool used by gamekeepers to create a patchwork of habitats for wildlife, improve grazing, and crucially, to prevent wildfires by reducing combustible material. The Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA), which represents these professionals, says that the new Code, set to accompany a licensing regime coming into place, makes the practice “almost impossible” to carry out.

Gamekeepers point to several specific provisions they say are unworkable and dangerous. The most contentious is the new requirement for licensing to burn on peatlands, defined in the Act as land where peat exceeds 40cm in depth. To apply for a licence, gamekeepers must first probe and measure peat depth across the area they intend to manage. The SGA claims the prescribed methodology from government advisers, NatureScot, is so complex that it could take up to 60 days to survey a single estate, at a vast financial cost, with no guarantee a licence will even be granted.

Government can’t touch anything without screwing it up.

I thank God I don’t live in Britain.

Not the Bee.

It happened again.

A boy named Louis was killed by a mob of savages.

That’s right: Louis was supposed to be under the protection of the state.

Instead, he was beaten to a pulp and left for dead by people who share zero heritage or respect for France or Western culture.

The attack happened Friday night around 7 p.m. in the town of Narbonne. A construction worker found him at 9 a.m. the following morning. Remarkably, he still had a pulse, but died in an induced coma 3 days after the attack.

Three minors and two adults were arrested for his death.

The Telegraph (UK).

Labour is poised to encourage farmers to give up beef production and plant lentils to help combat climate change.

On Wednesday, the Government’s long-awaited “farming roadmap” proposed helping landowners switch from high-emission farming – such as cattle – towards “growing oilseeds and pulses” to meet the increased demand for plant-based goods.

“Farmers will play a critical role in delivering this transition by adopting practices that reduce emissions while sustaining productive, commercially viable businesses,” the Government said.

The farming roadmap is intended to set out a long-term vision for British agriculture. It is seen as an attempt by the Government to win back support in the countryside after the family farm tax caused widespread rural unrest.

However, farmers criticised the move, saying the land used by cattle would be inappropriate for growing lentils because it was too wet.

The problem with a centrally planned economy is that when the planner are stupid or insane the entire country gets dragged along.

I thank God I don’t live in Britain.

The Telegraph (UK).

Homeowners are being forced to tear out air conditioning from their private properties under climate laws, despite rising temperatures.

Council planning officers ordered residents to remove air-con units over fears they produce too much carbon dioxide, stating they should only be used as a “last resort”.

The net zero clampdown is part of building regulations that state “active cooling” should only ever be allowed when all other means of “passive cooling”, such as opening windows or using fans, have been exhausted.

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

Read it.

unruly behavior. That was particularly the case in New York, following the Knicks’ June 13 clinching of the NBA championship. The parade that followed brought more chaos.

Following that victory over the San Antonio Spurs—the Knicks’ first title in 53 years—hooligans took to the streets, vandalizing as they went, including targeting and torching a school bus. Those in the crowd cheered. Police, meanwhile, could not visibly be seen.

As he showed footage of the chaos during Friday’s episode of “The Tony Kinnett Cast” on the Daily Signal, host Tony Kinnett noted how those burning the school bus were both white and black. And the bus driver begging the crowd to stop was black. “The point of the story is that it is not about the race, it is all about the culture,” Kinnett observed.

The revelry of the parade was marred by random gunshots fired into the air to “just cause chaos and panic because that is the celebratory nature that has come out of some of these events,” as Kinnett mentioned.

Meanwhile, New York isn’t doing much to stop lawlessness. “There’s no condemnation of this from the city level. There’s nothing. [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani is busy running around patting himself on the back and praising Islamic migrant stuff,” Kinnett said, also addressing how liberals excuse such behavior as how “it just happens.”

The New York Department of Sanitation unveiled commemorative garbage cans to celebrate the Knicks’ win. (They’re also available online for purchase.) Fans reacted by stealing them, dumping out trash onto the city sidewalk to do so. People could be heard cheering in the background.

During the parade, an individual appeared to be passed out from a drug overdose on the roof of a platform, as individuals sought to help. Kinnett observed that it took place with a “cop standing there, doing very little, ’cause this is just normal behavior in New York.”