Read it.

The Democratic mayors of three sanctuary cities, Chicago, New York City, and Denver, warned their metro areas are quickly approaching a breaking point due to the ongoing surge of illegals bussed up from the southern border this year.

“We cannot allow buses with people needing our help to arrive without warning at any hour of day and night,” NYC Mayor Adams said during a virtual news conference with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.

Adams warned: “For many months, we were able to keep the visualization of this crisis from hitting our streets, but we have reached a breaking point.”

“We are no longer able to do that because of the volume and numbers,” he added.

The fix is simple: close the border. They’re like mimes trapped in an invisible box.

Read it.

An attack on Christians in Nigeria over Christmas has left nearly 200 people dead. While Muslim herders are thought to be behind the violence, some major media outlets have blamed climate change for the killings, appearing to downplay existing religious conflicts.

The massacre took place on Christmas Eve in 26 different villages across the central Plateau state in the country’s interior. Locals said that bands of men armed with guns and machetes attacked villagers, killing 198 and wounding a further 300 in some of the worst anti-Christian violence seen in Nigeria in years, according to the Catholic News Agency.

Read it.

“What we are seeing right now is the all-out assault on democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold claimed in 2021.

“Everything we do every single day to ensure the American people can elect, freely choose their election officials,” the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State held forth in 2022. “We believe that democracy literally is on the ballot.”

In 2023, democracy is no longer on the ballot in Colorado because Griswold, who had spent every single year warning about an “assault on democracy”, launched an actual assault on democracy to ensure that people in Colorado would not be able to freely vote in elections.

The Spectator.

What happens now that the Colorado Supreme Court has kicked Donald Trump off the primary ballot? The first thing, apparently, is similar lawsuits in other “blue” states. Those will continue despite the Wednesday decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that Trump’s name can remain.

Nearly all the commentary has been devoted to the legal reasons for these rulings and their political implications. But it is important to consider the effort to exclude Trump in a wider context, one that goes beyond his personality, polarizing candidacy and events of January 6.

That wider frame is a century-long progressive effort to reframe the way America is governed and to loosen the constitutional barriers to those changes. That effort might be called the progressives’ “long march through the Constitution.” The Colorado decision was the bitter fruit of that march. It will almost certainly be slapped down, harshly and quickly, by the US Supreme Court.

The long march began in earnest over a century ago with Woodrow Wilson, more as a scholar than as a president. It became dominant among jurists with the rise of “legal realism” in the 1940s.

Read it.

Special Counsel Democratic Party activist Jack Smith has filed a motion in limine in his Washington, D.C. prosecution of Donald Trump for trying to reverse the apparent result of the 2020 election. The motion won’t be heard for a while, as the case is now on appeal. But Smith is desperate to get it tried in time to imprison Trump, or at least convict him, before the election. So he is doing all he can to preserve the impression that the case is on track.

What is Smith asking the court to do? He wants to bar several categories of evidence that he thinks Trump and his lawyers may try to introduce, including any suggestion that Smith’s prosecution is politically motivated. Smith invokes the danger of “disinformation”.

…

The idea that it is Trump who might “attempt to inject politics into this proceeding” is laugh-out-loud funny. Smith’s appointment, and everything he has done since, has been a political act on behalf of the Democratic Party. Apparently everyone except the yet-to-be-empaneled jury knows this.

Read it.

Had the Biden administration prioritized southern border security, significant efforts to resolve the crisis would likely have been completed by now instead of peddling blatant lies and half-truths to deflect the blame for their disastrous open border policies that have flooded the nation with millions of illegals (and individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list) ahead the 2024 presidential election cycle.

A large chunk of corporate progressive media outlets have been spoonfed propaganda from the White House this year to distract Americans with southern border misinformation.

The clearest misinformation campaign from the White House was in May, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorka declared: “I want to be very clear, our borders are not open.”

Read it.

As fighting rages in the Middle East and Europe and China looms as a threat, America’s dwindling arsenal of high-end munitions emerges as an alarming crisis. The United States, once a fortress of military might, now faces the prospect of a munitions deficit in an era brimming with uncertainties. This desperate situation demands the development of a national critical munitions stockpile.

Read it.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams issued an executive order Wednesday mandating that charter bus companies transporting migrants must provide a 32-hour notice before reaching the city.

Read it.

In the context of that war, does anyone doubt that Iran is pulling at least some of the strings? Is there any doubt that the Biden administration’s financial largesse towards Iran has facilitated that generosity on Iran’s part? And, most importantly, is there any doubt that Iran would be willing to use nuclear weapons on Israel?

Read it.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked roads heading to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday. Protesters on a Van Wyck Expressway ramp stopped in front of traffic at about 11:30 a.m. local time.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Some of the 11,000 migrants waiting in Mexico to enter the United States know they do not qualify for asylum, but they have received messages from past migrant crossers that it will not matter.

Steve Sailer has some fun.

Back when junk mail genius Morris Dees was running the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC was pretty good at coming up with acronyms. For example, consider the cunning of the acronym “SPLC,” which no doubt confused some elderly donors into thinking Morris’s new 1970s operation was actually Martin Luther King’s venerable 1960s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) or the SCLC’s youth outgrowth, the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which featured such worthies as John Lewis, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, and Marion Barry.

But in 2019, Morris got booted out of the SPLC for his flagrant White Maleness. (He was then on his sixth wife, and I’ve been told he’s moved on to #7.) And even though Morris was already 82 then, it’s no surprise that I haven’t heard much from the SPLC ever since they dumped the old rogue. It’s been over 4 years, but they still haven’t found a black woman competent enough to be put in charge, so the SPLC’s current president and chief executive officer is named Margaret Huang, but that’s kind of embarrassing so you don’t hear much from her, or the SPLC in general anymore. The SPLC doesn’t give Ms. Huang her own web page. Instead, they put the 13 people who qualify as “Leadership” on one page in alphabetical order so Huang is listed #6.

Sure, the media and the White House still take seriously the SPLC’s blacklists of whom to hate. Nobody calls them the “scandal-plagued SPLC.” But the scandal-plagued SPLC is now just coasting on what Morris built.

ZMan shakes his head.

The remarkable thing thus far about the 2024 presidential election is that the so-called conservatives, and therefore the Republican Party, have gone into this process without having prepared for it. They have experienced two presidential cycles that went entirely against their interests, yet they have not done anything over the last eight years to prepare for this cycle. Their plan, if you want to call it a plan, is to pray the other party eliminates Trump for them via lawfare.

We know with a fair bit of certainty that the party told the collection of munchkins showing up at debates that they expected Trump to be disqualified. In the first debate, the zombie-like Asa Hutchinson blurted this out during the questioning. In the last debate, Ron DeSantis said something along the lines that the option for voters is what was onstage due to Trump’s legal troubles. It was long rumored that he decided to run based on the assurance that Trump would be eliminated.

Now, that is a plan, of sorts, but only if you think the only problem you have as a party is this one man wrecking your fun. Get rid of the bad man and the party, along with the so-called conservative movement, can go back to the old times. They are even bringing back the neocon nutters to promote a dingbat. It is as if they think they are just one more court ruling from going back to 2000 when they could pass off a simpleton to their voters as the updated version of The Gipper.

Read it.

The market for used EVs is plummeting. What will car rental companies do with the used ones? Problems started in China but have spread to Europe and the US.

Read it.

Scientists have discovered a new way to destroy cancer cells. Stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light caused them to vibrate in sync, enough to break apart the membranes of cancer cells.

Aminocyanine molecules are already used in bioimaging as synthetic dyes. Commonly used in low doses to detect cancer, they stay stable in water and are very good at attaching themselves to the outside of cells

Read it.

This is elementary economics: If you raise the price of something, people buy less of it. If you raise the price of labor, businesses employ fewer laborers. Somehow politicians (especially proglodyte politicians) seem to think they can get around reality just by writing a law.

Mark Kalinowski, a restaurant-industry analyst, wrote in a note this week that he expected “more harm to come” in various ways as fast-food chains “take action in an attempt to blunt the impact of higher labor costs.”

Chains such as Chipotle and McDonald’s said they planned to pass the costs of higher wages in California to customers by raising menu prices.

Read it.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was originally a small agency mandated to provide basic humanitarian relief for Palestinians, including a vote for renewal every three years. Seventy-three years and four generations later, and with more than 30,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $1 billion, it has astonishingly become one of the largest UN agencies.

In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, UNRWA has, in fact, long been operating as the de facto government. By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons. If UNRWA were not there, Hamas would have been forced to fill the vacuum and, for example, build hospitals and schools and find solutions to economic hardship, including unemployment and poverty.

Read it.

The 17 were processed by law enforcement agents after crossing into the United States, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). There has been an increasing trend in the number of known terrorists found to be entering the U.S. southern border beyond ports of entry, with a record 169 individuals detected in Financial Year 2023.

A record number of individuals of interest on the watch list have also been attempting entry at U.S. ports of entry on either the northern or southern border, with 564 individuals detected at ports in FY 2023.

And how many DIDN’T they catch?

Read it.

The Indian Navy has deployed three guided missile destroyers to the Arabian Sea in response to an alleged drone attack on an Israeli-linked chemical tanker last week. New Delhi also uses long-range maritime patrol aircraft for “domain awareness,” the defense ministry reported Monday night.

On Saturday, the Liberian-flagged MV Chem Pluto, a Japanese-owned tanker traveling 370km off the coast of India, was reportedly hit by a kamikaze drone, according to the Pentagon.

Read it.

California has so much going for it that it should have been indestructible. But it turns out there is nothing that liberalism can’t destroy. People–that is, taxpayers–are fleeing California in droves, and the state is experiencing a budget crisis. Conversely, illegal aliens who cross the southern border undetected generally head for California, where they know they can expect a warm welcome.

And it is about to get warmer. California is now opening its Medicaid system to all, “papers or no papers.”

Read it.

Authorities are investigating a Christmas Day swatting attempt at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s residence in Rome, Georgia, but the Republican congresswoman says enough isn’t being done to catch the offenders. A swatting call is a dangerous prank in which the perpetrator reports a severe crime to police to lure swat teams to the victim’s home in a forceful law enforcement response.

Read it.

Iran recently tripled its enrichment of uranium to 60%, reversing a slowdown earlier this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Tuesday.

Read it.

ABC’s The View is not known for rational and measured conversations, so for this retrospective of The View’s antics in 2023, you’re advised to get multiple rolls of tin foil! Throughout the year, the liberal ladies have floated all sorts of harebrained, truly bonkers, and rather laughable accusations and theories about everything from Republican ninjas planting drugs to presidential candidates using body doubles.

And what makes their insane accusations even worse is the fact that The View is under the ABC News umbrella.

Read it.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Mexico City on Wednesday to discuss a new agreement with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to control the surge of migrants flooding the southern border.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall will join Blinken in discussions with AMLO about “unprecedented irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere,” a US Department of State press release read.

Read it.

Another day, another tanker attack in the Red Sea, and Yemen’s Houthis are positively boasting about it as the Biden White House continues attempts to cobble together its much touted multi-national naval coalition, which is clearly taking some time getting off the ground.

“The naval forces of the Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a targeting operation against the commercial ship, ‘MSC UNITED’ with appropriate naval missiles,” according to a Houthi statement.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)

Are you a techno-optimist? This is a serious condition—as common as prediabetes. Don’t laugh. You can treat your prediabetes—and your techno-optimism, too.

30% of Americans are prediabetic. All Americans are prediabetic, in a sense—we all have access to hot and cold-running corn syrup. It comes out of the tap. In 50 years as an American, statistics show, I have ingested a literal ton of corn syrup—a long ton. An imperial ton! I believe that major organs of my body, for example the pancreas, are this point primarily made from corn syrup.

It’s just the same with techno-optimism. As Americans—and we are all Americans now; location, even birth location, is just a detail—we are all techno-optimists. The American idea is the idea of techne, man-made order, creating a “city on a hill” in a new wild continent. As John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, said: “a city on a hill cannot be hid.” San Francisco is on a hill, or several, and it cannot be hid. Although sometimes we wish it could. (To be fair, the hills are the best part—“crime don’t climb,” as they say. Try pushing a shopping cart from the Castro to the Haight.) Technical and moral progress have always been equated in the American philosophy.

And how did that work out? How is that working out—for us Americans? Quite well, at first! But of late—well, opinions vary.

Read it.

The invasion proceeds, with the active support of Mexico.,

Democrats aren’t doing a damned thing about it.

Read it.

minor but significant spark of direct action occurred in New York on 15 December. A group of people entered a Whole Foods store (owned by Amazon), took groceries without paying and exited wearing Jeff Bezos masks.

Independent reporter Talia Jane posted the following on Twitter/X:

“The action was in protest against corporate wealth alongside increased food insecurity & to call attention to Amazon’s contracts with Israel.”

She also posted a video of the event with people throwing around flyers and shouting, “Feed the people, eat the rich!” Jane stated the food was later redistributed and given to food ‘distros’ and community care spaces feeding migrants and the unhoused.

Newsbusters.

Of course, every year there is way too much bias for just one category. So Baker led a panel of NewsBusters editors to break down the Worst of 2023 into eight additional categories (The Craziest Analysis Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The Joy of Hate Award for Joy Reid Rants; The Jihadist Journalism Award for Helping Hamas; The Damning Florida’s Dictator Award; The Praising and Protecting Old Joe Award; The Cursing the Conservative Court Award and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

Read it.

Williams said that the officers sent to his home left with Christmas cookies and spiced nuts to take home for the holidays.

“Our home was swatted this afternoon,” Williams wrote. “Thanks to the Deputies and Troopers who contacted me before arriving. They left with homemade cookies and spiced nuts! Merry Christmas everyone!”

…

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was also swatted on the holiday, police confirmed to The Messenger on Monday.

“I was just swatted. This is like the 8th time. On Christmas with my family here, ” Greene wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “My local police are the GREATEST and shouldn’t have to deal with this. I appreciate them so much and my family and I are in joyous spirits celebrating the birth of our savior Jesus Christ!”

Read it.

“Joy is canceled,” read the signs wielded by Hamas supporters protesting a Christmas tree lighting at Columbia University. While a student group tried to sing, the terror backers shrieked, “there’s no room for celebration.” And no room for anything except terrorism and hate.

Supporters of the Islamic terrorist group took a special pleasure in attacking Christianity.

Carolers singing “Gloria in excelsis deo” or “Glory to God in the highest” at the Washington Square Park Christmas tree near New York University were shouted down by Muslim and leftist allies shrieking, “Shut it down! Shut it down!”

Read it.

Pro-Palestinian protesters raged across New York City on Monday, apparently determined to piss Christians off on their most sacred holiday.

Read it.

The latest from the Gaza Strip includes the discovery of child-size suicide vests from a Gazan kindergarten: Israel finds explosive belts made for kids, toy chests with warheads in Gaza.

Read it.

Once upon a time, different institutions believed in different things.

Take universities. We had Royalist Oxford and Parliamentarian Cambridge; later came UCL, the “Godless college of Gower Street”; King’s College London was the Tory response. As 2023 began, our graduates received their new-year alumni magazines, featuring refreshingly identical opinions on sustainability, migration, decolonisation.

Like in early East Germany, private companies still exist, but they increasingly understand that their role is to support the state and its ideology. The chief executive of KLM airlines asks people to take fewer flights for the sake of Net Zero; a new label on Nescafé jars reminds instant-coffee drinkers to celebrate “gender diversity”.

Read it.

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. In the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Is parking really more important than anything else?

Yes. Automobiles mean freedom.

CNN.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

In the village of Ilion, New York, 80 miles west of the state capital in Albany, residents are mourning the departure of gunmaker Remington Arms Co. after two centuries of continuous operation.

…

Publicly, the company attributed the plant closure in part to a hostile political climate in Albany regarding firearms production.

The Georgia-based company said it would continue to make firearms at its facility in Huntsville, Alabama, which opened in 2014, a year after New York’s passage of the Safe Act, which created stricter gun laws.

 

Read it.

Pro-Palestinian supporters demonstrated Monday outside the residences of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Read it.

On a recent episode of the All-In Podcast, hosts David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg discussed the weaponization of federal agencies by the Biden administration against Elon Musk.

“They’ve now weaponized multiple federal agencies to go after Elon on these cases that seem transparently trumped up,” Sacks said.

Musk, an outspoken critic of President Biden, has seen an increasing number of banana republic-style weaponization tactics by the administration against his companies, from Tesla to SpaceX, this year.

Read it.

Bahara Rustam, 13, took her last class at Bibi Razia School in Kabul on Dec. 11 knowing it was the end of her education. Under Taliban rule, she is unlikely to step foot in a classroom again.In September 2021, a month after U.S. and NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan.

Read it.

A network of NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, seems to be playing a powerful role in coordinating the large-scale invasion of illegals at the US southern border.

The new website Muckraker revealed a treasure trove of “mass migration blueprints,” handed out by NGOs across South and Central America to illegals with details about their route to the US.

Read it.

Non-fungible tokens promised to revolutionise the concept of ownership using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin, but the market seems to have all but collapsed.

Read it.

CNN’s Christmas Eve edition of State of the Union with Jake Tapper earned itself a huge lump of coal by devoting its entire hour to climate propaganda. In other words, religious counterprogramming. It is here that former Vice President Al Gore came on and blamed populist movements around the world on, you guessed it…climate change.

Watch as Algore concocts a new climate change boogeyman out of thin air.

Read it.

Thousands of migrants arrived Sunday in the southern Mexican town Alvaro Obregon to spend the Christmas Eve in a public square without shelter before making their way north to cross the country and reach the border with the United States.

The invasion continues, and Democrats continue sitting on their hands.

Read it.

The halal industry has now gained a secure foothold in Germany. This article doesn’t mention it, but in the long run, the Islamization of the food industry means that pork will eventually become a black-market commodity.