Newsweek.

About 7 million New Yorkers plan to leave the state, a new survey revealed this month.

In a new Marist poll, 37 percent of New Yorkers—roughly 7 million people—said they plan to move away. The number was slightly more concentrated among Republicans, as 46 percent said they plan to leave the state compared to just 29 percent of Democrats.

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Memphis Police are responding to reports of multiple people shot in Orange Mound.

Viewer videos from the scene showed dozens of gunshots fired as a crowd gathered at the Orange Mound Community Center. People could be seen running for cover.

Sailr’s Law of Mass Shootings instructs us that if the number of wounded is greater then the number of fatalities, then the shooter(s) were probably non-white.

Coulter’s Law of Media instructs us that the longer the new media take to mention the race of the suspects, the greater the probability that the perps were non-white.

Follow along with the home game….

UPDATE: 2 Killed and 6 Injured in Shooting at Memphis Park Party, Police Say

The New Neo.

We can’t have students feeling bad about their grades – unless they’re smart and high-achieving students. Then it’s okay.

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The Monty Python veteran is as feisty as ever at 84, slashing those attempting to crush comedy that breaks any kind of so-called rule.

Cleese opened up to FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff about free speech, “The Life of Brian” and much more in a revealing chat. FIRE stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that often does what the ACLU once did – stands up for free speech.

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understood by even the most progressive educators that some rules need to be put in place to keep kids in check. Structure has always been a good thing for small people with developing brains and uncontrollable emotions. Sadly, the educational system has been inexorably hijacked by the most extreme elements of the far left and by extension the principles used to maintain order among often impetuous and impulsive children have been quickly eroded in the name of “deconstruction.”

For those outside of what is now referred to as “Gen Alpha” (the generation born from 2010 onward), most people grew up with restrictions in school, including dress codes. While some institutions might have been more oppressive than others, overall there was a balance between “expressing one’s individualism” and keeping that expression from disrupting one’s education – Schools should focus on academia, not catering to people’s narcissism.

Today, the progressive ideology has devolved into a bizarre form of cultism in which almost all behavior is justified as long as it is minority behavior. This includes the behaviors of the mentally unstable and deranged; such people are swiftly becoming the most popular minority on the victimhood totem pole.

Note to self: When the orcs start running, don’t stick around to find out what’s coming.

The American Mind.

After the first day of his show trial, Donald Trump cheered himself up by taking a trip uptown to a Harlem bodega. The Sanaa Convenient Store, on Broadway at 139th Street, was the site of a notorious robbery in 2022, during which the 61-year old clerk—while being beaten up by an angry patron—stabbed and killed his assailant. Jose Alba, the clerk, was hailed as a hero by most New Yorkers, except the one who decided to arrest and charge him with murder: District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the same man currently prosecuting Trump for allegedly falsifying business records.

Though Bragg—ever amenable to pressure—dropped the charges against Alba, the case resonated as an example of the anarcho-tyranny that governs many large American cities . Crime in Manhattan, according to Bragg and his champions, is “down,” but the lived experience of the average subway rider or shopper or pedestrian says otherwise. There may be fewer arrests, but public safety remains dicey.

Joel Kotkin.

Once the putative party of the people, the Democrats are increasingly the party of political “Mean Girls.” Epitomized by the congressional “Squad,” radicalized women are driving the party ever further to the leftist fringe on issues such as embracing Hamas, apocalyptic climate policies, mass illegal immigration, and transgenderism.

Party organs including the New Republic and the New York Times hail these activists as the “future of the Democratic Party.” Unlike traditional Democrats who won over small business owners, members of industrial unions, and aspiring middle class minorities, the Mean Girls have broken with the New Deal tradition that united the party. Rather than appealing to the aspirations of  families, in the new configuration it’s all about “the personal is political,” with lifestyle and sexual orientation as defining issues.

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A scathing report by three federal judges on the “misconduct” of plaintiff lawyers in a challenge to Alabama’s ban on gender-transition medicine for minors illustrates something we learned a long time ago: Many on the far Left, including radical lawyers employed by self-proclaimed civil rights organizations, believe the ends always justify the means and that rules of ethics don’t apply to them.

The report is the result of an investigation into the lawyers who filed three related lawsuits—Walker v. Marshall, Ladinsky v. Ivey, and Eknes-Tucker v. Ivey—challenging Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act in 2022. The state enacted the law that year to eliminate the use of experimental hormonal and surgical procedures on minors who experience discomfort with their biological sex.

The final report, issued by three judges representing each of the three federal court districts in Alabama, was initiated after Judge Liles C. Burke accused the lawyers of judge-shopping to get a particular judge they wanted assigned to the cases. Judge Burke called it “a particularly pernicious form of forum shopping” and “a practice that has the propensity to create the appearance of impropriety in the judicial system.”

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On Tuesday, a United States Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a West Virginia law that bars biological boys from competing on girls’ sports teams cannot be enforced with regard to a 13-year-old who competes on the girls’ track and field team at the athlete’s middle school.

“The defendants cannot expect that [this athlete] will countermand her social transition, her medical treatment, and all the work she has done with her schools, teachers, and coaches for nearly half her life by introducing herself to teammates, coaches, and even opponents as a boy,” Judge Toby Heytens wrote in his decision, according to the Associated Press.

It’s important to note that this ruling does not impact the West Virginia law – it only applies to the individual in this particular case, since the individual began transitioning in third grade, prior to hitting puberty. However, the ruling does potentially pave the way for other, similar cases.

UPDATE: W. Va. Girls Refuse to Compete Against Trans Athlete

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A hearing held earlier this week in New York by the Council’s immigration and hospital committees saw black migrants who have arrived in the city airing their grievances about public services they have been provided, including food and accommodation, with one woman even complaining that New Yorkers won’t learn Congolese languages.

What possible reason would anybody have to do so? Just so you could deal with illegal immigrants?

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A new Marist poll shows New Yorkers have a bleak view of their state, with residents saying the economy is going down the tubes, the cost of living is unaffordable, and nearly four in 10 say they plan to move out in the next five years.

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An Arab-Israeli journalist was forced to cancel his Thursday speech at Columbia University after campus agitators pushed him, punched him in the face, and told him to kill himself.

Yoseph Haddad was on his way to meet a Columbia Public Safety officer and a member of campus group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) when he encountered a group of what he called “pro-terrorist protesters.” One of the agitators wore a keffiyeh over his head, a Palestinian flag around his neck, and waved a bloodied and tattered Israeli flag in Haddad’s direction, a video of the encounter shows. Another repeatedly told the journalist to “take a gun to your head,” “kill yourself,” and “shoot yourself.”

New York Times.

Agents in South Carolina, the fastest growing state in the country last year, say that many newcomers are Republicans eager to leave the Northeast and West Coast.

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A Paris police official said the man was seen at about 11am local time (0900 GMT) entering the consulate, carrying what appeared to be a grenade and an explosive vest.

The man later left the consulate and on being searched was found not to be carrying any explosives, a police source said. The man’s motives were not immediately clear.

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With the much anticipated Summer Olympic Games fast approaching, and with Macron’s deeply unpopular government scrambling both to ensure the security of international guests and conceal Paris’s visible degeneration, new crime figures show the capital city in a less-than-favorable light and call into question authorities’ ability to keep women safe.

The figures, recorded by Paris Police Headquarters, revealed that 77% of rape cases in the capital solved in 2023 had been committed by perpetrators who do not hold French passports, with the majority of sexual crimes transpiring in and around tourist areas like Champs de Mars—soon to be packed with visitors to the games.

French broadcaster Europe 1, which saw the Paris Police Headquarters report, revealed 97 rapes were recorded across the capital in 2023, a figure up by 2% compared to those from 2022. Before this past year, the number had stayed relatively stable since 2018. Of the total recorded cases, 30 were solved with 36 perpetrators being arrested.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the unremarked things that has happened over the past ten years is the collapse of the so-called man-o-sphere. There may be people still working that land, but all the big names have moved on or disappeared. The pickup artist have all disappeared from the internet entirely. That whole scene just seems to have folded up and gone the way of the dinosaur without anyone noticing.

One reason is the demographic aged out of the material. A guy like Heartiste, for example, could do the pickup artist stuff when he was early middle-age, but once you hit fifty you become a skeevy weirdo, not a Don Juan. The same holds for the other subcultures in that space. Once you reach middle-age, it all starts to sound a bit weird and pointless, even to the people making money off it.

There is another aspect to it. That whole scene was a reaction to the feminization of the culture starting with second wave feminism. The next generation of males have no frame of reference in which to have a reaction. The typical Zoomer has been raised in the longhouse, to use the cool kid’s term. He has no way of knowing that all of this is both weird and unnatural.

That is the point of the show. The male role is not a slippery concept that changes from one generation to the next. It has been revolutionized and pulverized over the last few decades, but that is what makes this age anomalous. The male role in society is timeless, at least in the Western world. There are certain immutable characteristic to being a man that will reassert themselves in the coming years.

The Antiplanner.

axpayers spend billions of dollars a year subsidizing so-called affordable housing, but much of that money is wasted, says a new report from the Cascade Policy Institute. Affordable housing being built today actually costs much more than market-rate housing, and most of the benefits from building such expensive housing are captured by the developers, not low-income families who need housing.

Steve Sailer.

It’s widely assumed, both by Jews and by anti-Semites, that the roots of American progressivism are heavily Jewish.

Yet, Jews had relatively little impact on the crucial first century of the American republic, from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Yet progressivism that is ideologically ancestral to contemporary “In this house we believe” wokeness was already ascendant during the second quarter of the 19th Century in New England and its cultural satellites upstate New York, and northern Ohio, and triumphed nationally in the 1860s, if only briefly, from say 1862-1868.

For example, one of the first incidents in which I became aware of the Great Awokening was during the winter of 2013 when students at traditionally leftist Oberlin College in northern Ohio had one of their freakouts over the KKK running amok on campus (it turned out, evidently, to be a lady, perhaps homeless, walking around on a cold night with a white blanket draped around her).

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It would appear that at least some of them are.

Huffington Post.

Needless to say, the HuffPo doesn’t have a clue about why. Run a search on ‘hypergamy’ on YouTube and you will find a lot of explanations regarding what is going on, none of them from the middle-aged feminist viewpoint in which the HuffPo specializes.

Read it.

The ‘family farm’ is a doomed as the ‘family manufacturing company’ was when I was a child.

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Details are very thin and fleeting at the moment, but it seems clear that Israel has launched its counterstrike against Iranian interests in response to the large-scale attack directly on Israeli territory that occurred over the weekend.

The news began developing around 3:00 AM local time in Israel that explosions occurred in Iraq and in towns in Iran where well-known nuclear program-related facilities are located. There was also talk on social media of jets being heard flying very low in Eastern Syria and Iranian-related targets struck in Iraq, as well.

UPDATE: Futures Tumble, Oil And Gold Soar On Reports Of “Huge Explosions” In Central Iran, Israeli Airstrikes In Iraq And Syria

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Wednesday to protest Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request for an additional $70 million in taxpayers’ funds to be spent on tackling the city’s migrant crisis, while a petition that would give residents the right to recall the mayor is gathering serious traction.

The progressive mayor, who has vigorously defended the city’s sanctuary policies in the past, wants aldermen to greenlight the extra cash in a vote on Friday despite the Windy City having already poured $300 million into housing, food and health care for the recently arrived migrants, according to the city’s latest numbers.

However, critics of the spending spree blasted the mayor during Wednesday’s gathering, where aldermen were initially expected to vote on rubber-stamping the new funds. Aldermen deferred the measure, using the council tactic to stall consideration.

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The White House is weighing an unprecedented declaration of a national climate emergency to crack down on the oil industry and advance President Joe Biden’s climate policies, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Declaring a national climate emergency would allow the Biden administration to more easily reduce oil exports, offshore drilling, and greenhouse gas emissions, individuals familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations told Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity.

The administration, however, will likely not make a final decision anytime soon, with the president’s advisers still divided over whether such an unprecedented move to advance the green energy agenda is appropriate, especially as Biden looks to win over voters ahead of his rematch this fall with Republican nominee Donald Trump.

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Democratic officials are throwing billions at California high-speed rail projects that have yet to be built, funding thousands of jobs specifically for union members.

Despite funding initially being approved by a referendum in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail project currently has less than a quarter of its expected length under construction and was initially supposed to have connected Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 48 local unions and more than 150,000 members in California, boasted of the creation of 13,000 unionized construction jobs due to continued funding of California’s high-speed rail project.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, in its community benefits agreement regarding the construction of the rail, lays out that it will exclusively bargain with union representatives for craft labor and that no employee will be required to join a union, but workers who are at the site for more than eight total days will be required to pay union dues.

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Google said Thursday it terminated 28 employees after some staff participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.

My favorite line from the movie Jackie Brown: “Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I’m running a business here?”

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1 in 3 Muslims living in the UK want Islam to be declared the national religion and for everyone to live under the brutal system of Sharia law which calls for beheadings and amputations.

Less than 1 in 4 Muslims opposed the move while the majority were unwilling to commit.

Among younger Muslims 18-24, 1 in 5 believed that making Islam “our national religion” was “very desirable”, and a total of 43% supported redefining the UK as an Islamic state.

Only 16% opposed it.

Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology under the guise of a religion with which no co-existence is possible.

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In the past, teachers’ unions concentrated on fighting to keep all teachers employed—competent or otherwise—laying off teachers by seniority when necessary and soaking taxpayers every chance they could. While those activities are still part of their mission, they have, over time, increasingly delved into the political/social realm, promoting Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, DEI, class warfare, gender-bending, etc. And their current level of engagement is staggering.

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An effort to recall a progressive, George Soros-funded district attorney in California has received enough signatures from voters to advance amid an upswing in crime, officials say.

Organizers seeking to oust Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price collected 74,757 verified signatures in support of their effort to hold a recall election, over 1,000 more than needed, county Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis announced Monday.

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Monica Cornejo, an assistant professor of interpersonal communication, was forcibly removed from a Cornell University event this week after disrupting a speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter. She is only the latest faculty member to seek to prevent others from hearing opposing views. The question now is what Cornell will do about her conduct.

And most of them tend to be women. Coincidence? I think not….

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foreign meddling in U.S. elections, congressional Republicans say.

Amid the ongoing crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border, the lawmakers decried flyers posted at the migrant services center near Brownsville, Texas, that tell illegal aliens: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States.”

“Joe Biden has sacrificed our nation’s safety and security in his pursuit to get as many people here as possible. Why? Because he believes these are future Democrat voters,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told The Daily Signal.

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Brussels authorities shuttered the National Conservatism Conference on Tuesday, sending police to block entry to the conference and announcing that those inside would be permitted to leave but not to return. However, the action was not the result of any public disturbances or threats. It was a political action by left-progressive politicians who do not like the views being ventilated at the conference—and who fear the increasing success of nationalist and conservative ideas in European politics.

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Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said he is willing to vote with Democrats to dismiss impeachment articles against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

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A tenured professor is suspended throughout the rest of the semester after writing an essay celebrating Hamas’ attack on Israel.

“McCarthyism is real. I’ve been relieved of teaching responsibilities,” Hobart and William Smith Colleges Professor Jodi Dean wrote Saturday on X. “Don’t stop talking about Palestine.”

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A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute revealed that 28% of likely voters would be willing to engage in illegal voting activity if it would help their preferred candidate win the 2024 presidential election.

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For much of the past year, we had joked that behind the facade of western Democratic ideals, was a cold hard truth: the price of oil must not be allowed to go up in an election year. This was obvious in Biden’s “kid gloves” treatment of Iran’s regime, it was obvious when the US implemented “sanctions” on Russian oil that were breached within months with zero enforcement, it was also obvious when the US president became best friends with Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro last October when, in exchange for a few thousands barrels of Venezuela’s oil, the US lifted sanctions on the person that for years was one of western “democracies” biggest enemies.

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Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will get you punished.

Vox.

Take, for example, when tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book came out this February. A host of other books hit the Kindle store along with it. They all had bizarre, SEO-streamlined titles, like those new businesses that are named Plumbing Near Me to game the Google algorithm.

If you do stuff by algorithm, it can be gamed. God forbid you should actually, you know, have real people doing the work for you. (Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Dat.)

“I found ‘Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy,’ by a ‘guy’ who ‘wrote’ four biographies this month,” said Ben Smith when he interviewed Swisher for Semaforum.

Swisher was less than flattered by the biographies. “I wrote [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy and I said, ‘You’re stealing my IP! What is going on?’” she told Smith. (Disclosure: Swisher works for Vox Media.)

And that’s the key. If it had been something by, say, Alex Jones, or Andrew Tate, would they be so upset? I think not. (Unmentioned: That Vox is a Voice of the Crust–one of the worst–and full of ‘garbage pseudo-journalism’.)

Note that Amazon was NOT ‘stealing her IP’. The books complained about were entirely different from Swisher’s book; you would think that a professional writer would spend the effort to learn the basics of copyright law. (Not to mention the fact that ‘intellectual property’ is to actual property as ‘gay marriage’ is to actual marriage.)

Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

And, most importantly, dilute the impact of her book, which promotes the Woke agenda under the guise of being about tech.

All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.

Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.

In other words, Amazon has to step up and compensate (at great expense) for the fact that people are unwilling to act like adults and do some due diligence. These kids today….

Read it.

If you pay New York state taxes, you’re paying top dollar and getting bupkis. Nothing in the budget deal announced in Albany on Tuesday changes that.

State tax money is supposed to provide services and improve the state’s economic outlook. But a report released last week shows the state’s economic prospects plunging to dead last among the 50 states.

As for services, New York ranks 47th, fourth from the bottom, in what residents get for the money, according to WalletHub.

New York spends the most per public school student, but students perform worse by every measure than students in neighboring states.

New York’s roads rank 45th, according to MoneyGeek. The potholes and pavement roughness cost the average New York driver $715 a year in repairs, fuel and wear and tear. You need a Sherman tank to navigate the Bruckner Expressway.

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South Dakota state Sen. John Wiik likes to think of himself as a lookout of sorts — keeping an eye on new laws, programs and ideas brewing across the states.

“I don’t bring a ton of legislation,” said Wiik, a Republican. “The main thing I like to do is try and stay ahead of trends and try and prevent bad things from coming into our state.”

I like him already. Would that more elected officials made that their priority.

This session, that meant sponsoring successful legislation banning cities or counties from creating basic income programs, which provide direct, regular cash payments to low-income residents to help alleviate poverty.

While Wiik isn’t aware of any local governments publicly floating the idea in South Dakota, he describes such programs as “bureaucrats trying to hand out checks to make sure that your party registration matches whoever signed the checks for the rest of your life.”

Sounds like he’s been paying attention.

You always get more of what you are willing to pay for. If you pay people who aren’t working, you’ll always get more people not working. To have the income of as many people as possible dependent on the government is the cornerstone of modern progressivism.

CNN.

When asked whether Tabassum will still be permitted to participate in the graduation ceremony and what security measures were in place to secure her safety, Bartlett said she didn’t have that information. A Chino Hills, California native, Tabassum studied biomedical engineering with a minor in resistance to genocide and an interest in global health care equity.

Which tells you pretty much what her graduation speech would be about. (Hint: not biomedical engineering.)

Would a Jewish student who planned to denounce Islamic terrorism have faced the same strictures? (*That’s a trick question, because no Jewish student would have been allowed to be valedictorian of a large public university to begin with.)

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A Democrat-controlled city announced $45 million in funding for programs to help deal with the skyrocketing number of migrant arrivals it is facing, resulting in over $8 million in budget cuts for the police department.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced last week a package of $45.9 million to fully fund programs for “newcomers” for 2024 and avoid worst-case scenarios projected by the city. That’s in addition to $44 million in spending already secured for the program through previous budget moves.

Spending on migrants in the city skyrocketed last year from $2 million a month in August to $15 million in December. In January, migrant numbers peaked at around 5,000 in shelters but have since dropped to around 1,000, according to official figures.

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Not that he would them them if he had.

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Two conservative Colorado counties—Douglas and El Paso—have sued the state of Colorado and its Democrat governor over laws that prevent local law enforcement from working with federal agents to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

Pretty sad.

The Spectator.

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting.

Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity.

Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal.

Perhaps we can call it ‘lightgassing’.

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Perhaps because he’s in favor of it.