Read it.

The grassroots movement Operation Raise the Colors, which started in Birmingham, has since spread to Norwich, Bradford, Newcastle, Swindon, and London—among other towns and cities. The patriotic organization is encouraging people in the UK to fly their Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses and be proud of their country as a protest against the leftist liberal agenda.

Flags have appeared on lampposts and motorway bridges and have even been painted onto roundabouts. But as quickly as the banners go up, local councils are taking them down, often citing health and safety concerns. Birmingham’s Labour-run council, for example, claimed flags fixed 25 feet in the air put “motorists and pedestrians at risk.” The same authority has allowed Palestinian flags to remain in place since October 7, 2023, and even lit the city library in Pakistani colors for Independence Day.

Tower Hamlets in East London, run by the pro-Gaza Aspire Party, has also promised to strip Union Jacks and St. George’s Crosses from council infrastructure “as soon as possible.” Officials there acted far faster to remove British flags than they did Palestinian ones.

The American Mind.

In 1790, the first United States census was a straightforward affair. Marshals rode on horseback, counted people where they lived, and returned with ledgers that would determine representation in Congress. The idea was as simple as it was profound: political power should follow the actual number of people—not estimates, not probabilities, not manipulated figures—residing in each state. This “actual Enumeration,” written into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, was meant to be one of the republic’s great safeguards of equal representation.

Two hundred thirty years later, the Census Bureau turned that safeguard upside down and thwarted the will of voters. In 2020, it implemented “differential privacy,” an opaque algorithm that deliberately injects false numbers into small-area data. Supposedly designed to protect privacy and identities, it instead scrambled population counts in ways that Harvard researchers found made it “impossible to follow the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote.’”

At the same time, the incoming Biden Administration dismantled the Administrative Records Project, the Trump-era initiative that would have allowed the bureau to use existing federal data to determine citizenship and correct census errors. The result was a census that was riddled with miscounts, opaque to challenge, and constitutionally suspect.

The decision to implement differential privacy was made at the precise moment it became clear that President Trump intended to exclude illegal aliens from apportionment counts in the 2020 census. By scrambling block-level data and erasing the probability of independent verification, the permanent bureaucracy insulated itself from oversight and judicial review. This was the administrative state’s “insurance policy”—to create an algorithm that would outlast any presidential term and ensure that apportionment would inflate blue states. Citizenship status was also buried under layers of statistical noise.

Read it.

On the evening of Saturday, August 23rd, a violent altercation broke out between two groups of young Afghan men at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, leaving several participants seriously injured.

The clash, involving eight to ten individuals, occurred around 9:45 p.m in central Berlin.

Police confirmed that six men, aged 20 to 26, suffered cuts and stab wounds to their hands, legs, pelvis, and upper body.

Authorities initially detained a 19-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 14-year-old girl, who are now considered witnesses in the investigation. According to BZ, all victims and witnesses are reported to be Afghan nationals.

No clear motive for the confrontation has been disclosed. Police spokespersons stated that investigations are ongoing with the case being handled by the specialized unit of Police Directorate 1 (North).

That same night, authorities reported a separate knife crime incident on a tram in Dresden. The police managed to arrest one of the perpetrators, a Syrian, while details about other suspects and victims remain unclear.

Import Turd World people, win Turd World crime.

Read it.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that the welfare system in its current form “can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy.”

Speaking at a conference of his centre-right CDU party in Osnabrück on Saturday, August 23rd, Merz demanded reforms to social spending while at the same time ruling out tax increases on Germany’s medium-sized companies.

He coupled his appeal with a grim assessment of the economy, declaring Germany to be in a “structural crisis” after three years of recession and slipping industrial competitiveness.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

The Washington Post, a Voice of the Crust.

Which disaster was exacerbated by the government ‘helpfully’ straightening out the natural curves of the Mississippi delta that otherwise would have absorbed a lot of the wave surge. And don’t get me started on Nagin’s fumbling. (Remember the buses that weren’t even used and then got soaked and essentially destroyed by the surge?) And the increases in crimes wherever the New Orleans underclass wound up. (Dallas was one such place. I REMEMBER.)

The Narrative Media depend on people who can’t remember more than two or three years back, and sometimes not even then. That works with Democrats, but not Republicans.

The Washington Post, a Voice of the Crust.

Slammed by pricier policies and climate-driven natural disasters, more and more Americans are exposing themselves to risk.

And the Narrative creeos in on little cat feet…. No, they aren’t ‘climate driven natural disasters’. They are Democrat elected officials driven natural disasters, for which California is the poster child. Government incompetence makes natural disasters worse when it doesn’t actually cause them. That drives insurance rates up, and then government tries to muscle them down again so that they will be ‘affordable’, but those government-imposed rates aren’t ‘affordable’ for insurance companies, so the companies quit writing insurance. So people wind up without insurance whether they like it or not.

Even if the government doesn’t drive insurers out of the market, non-rich-people can’t afford the new rates. So going without insurance is the only option. Or move… (Time to leave.)

Read it.

Under Keir Starmer’s Labour government, influential Home Office civil servants and top-ranking Border Force officials are earning salaries of up to £260,000 (€300,089)—despite the migration disaster unfolding on their shores.

Paid at almost seven times the median UK wage, the bumbling penpushers have seen a record 50,000 known illegal migrants arrive illegally by ‘small boat’ since Starmer took office. With no end in sight, Rob Bates of the Centre for Migration Control estimated that Britain was now on course to take in 50,000 illegal migrants this year alone: “We’re about 40% up when it comes to Channel crossings on last year.”

Read it.

The cash is burning, too.

Millions of dollars raised to help victims of the 2025 California wildfires have ended up in the coffers of unrelated nonprofits pushing a variety of progressive causes, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Some of the groups that have received funds explicitly exclude white people from their services, while others advertise programs for illegal aliens.

Read it.

To some degree, New York has always walked the edge of chaos. Hell, from TV and movies, we know it’s even part of the city’s charm.

But incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani’s crime plan for the city at this point seems nothing more than a pre-meditated path for turning New York into a bona fide hellscape, while Mamdani smiles and pats himself on the back for his Ivy League-sounding, faux-intellectual “progressive” thinking.

First, it was socialism via government run food stores. Now, Mamdani’s latest proposal is to eliminate misdemeanor crimes altogether — a policy that would invite petty crime, drive down property values, and replicate the disastrous effects seen in places like San Francisco.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The NYT doesn’t shrink from assuming what you know, of course, since you (lowly reader) cannot possibly be as in-the-know as those exalted beings who write for the NYT.

Now, I think that the ‘typical college student’ is someone who hasn’t the intellectual capacity to handle college-level work (even in these degenerate modern times) and so ought not to be there, which is why we have a student-loan-debt problem.

The Blank Slate Wokerati think that the only barrier to everybody getting a college degree is finances, and if the government will just make sure everything is paid for, Utopia (defined as everybody being a college-educated Leftist) will inevitably follow. This program has led to enormous amounts of time wasted on worthless (i.e. incapable of getting one paid work) degrees, unsupportable levels of student loan debt, and skyrocketing expense levels for those who actually could profit from college study.

Power Line.

From the Times of India,

Sikh advocacy groups estimate there are approximately 150,000 to 200,000 Sikhs working in the trucking industry, with around 90% (135,000 to 180,000) being drivers. They constitute about 18% of the total truck drivers in the US and up to 40% are based in California.

This fact was buried in the 6th paragraph of a story about that Indian-national truck driver (Harjinder Singh, billed out of Stockton, CA) accused of causing three fatalities in a minivan with his truck on the Florida Turnpike earlier this month.

I mentioned the other day that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suspended new work visas for foreign truck drivers.

I’ve also written about an Indian-national, California-licensed truck driver–who goes by the handle Happy Nonamegiven (or the other way around, accounts vary), late of San Diego, but originally from the Punjab–who was convicted of murdering a bar patron on New Year’s Eve last year in southwest Minnesota.

Power Line.

Across the United Kingdom this weekend, people turned out to protest against the government’s immigration policies. But it goes beyond that: British elites, like those in America, hate their own country and its citizens, and have tried to make patriotism unacceptable. In Britain, you can get into trouble by displaying a Union Jack or, worse, St. George’s Cross, the symbol of England. Because England oppressed Scotland and Ireland, don’t you know.

For the British people, it is now or never, and they know it. Operation Raise the Flag calls on Brits to display their flags–a radical act, probably “far right” in contemporary lexicon. In some cases, the authorities are hauling flags down about as fact as beleaguered citizens can put them up.

It is hard to say how many people turned out for anti-migrant demonstrations this weekend, and, of course, there were counter-demonstrators, too. I am not sure about this, but my sense is that the counter-demonstrators agree that mass third-world immigration is destroying Britain, but they think that is a good thing.

Read it.

Earlier today, when reading a news story, I happened to encounter the town (or village, as they apparently call them in the Upper Midwest) of Mahomet, Illinois. That got my attention, because as most of you know, Mahomet, like Mahound, is an archaic variant of the name Mohammed or Muhammad. Which means the Illinois town has a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%.

I wondered how the village got its name — had a devotee of the Prophet wandered down that way from Detroit or Hamtramck? But no: in this case the Coefficient is misleading. According to the official history of the town, it was named Mahomet by its founder, a Connecticut expatriate, in honor of Mahomet Weyonomon, a sachem of the Mohegan tribe in Connecticut. I wonder how the Mohammedans of the region feel about the appropriation of the name of the Messenger of Allah by an infidel Indian — is it an insult or a compliment?

Quillette.

On a summer evening in downtown Manhattan, four professional women gather at a vegan restaurant to perform a ritual as old as consciousness itself: the airing of romantic grievances. “Aww, poor baby!” cries one, a historian, as they mock a man too anxious to show up for sex. The women work themselves “into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to ‘man up and [expletive] us,’” and ask in a “smug, chauvinistic” way: “Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?”

Considering the way men naturally are, if these women are having trouble arranged for sex, where does the problem obviously lie?

Read it.

President Donald Trump reportedly plans to sign an executive order Monday aimed at eliminating “cashless bail” for arrested suspects in Washington, D.C.

Reuters could not immediately verify the Axios report.

The order marks the latest step in Trump’s federal takeover of the capital’s law enforcement, which has already deployed thousands of federal agents and National Guard troops across the city.

Dumping criminals back on the streets without the necessity to post bail is a cornerstone of the Woke crime regime that puts the ‘rights’ of criminals ahead of those of victims (and potential victims).

UPDATE: Scoop: Trump plans order to end “cashless bail” in D.C. (Axios)  ‘Sccop’ is apparently what Axios calls using a shovel after the horse has already passed by.

Read it.

A 21-year-old American man paid a steep price for doing the right thing on a tram in Germany overnight. When he observed two Syrian men hassling a pair of female passengers, the as-yet unnamed American intervened, only to be beaten and slashed in the face with a knife. One of the assailants was arrested, but then immediately let go.

UPDATE: Germany: Suspect in Attack on American Tourist Released

UPDATE: American Tourist Stabbed on Dresden Tram After Stopping Migrant Assault

The Times (UK).

When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design.

In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up.

Read it.

It’s hard to argue with the recent numbers. Washington DC has long been a national embarrassment for the American public, consistently ranking high on the list of the most crime ridden cities in the US. The city consistently ranks in the top 20 for overall crime, 13th out of 200 US cities with the highest property crime and it was ranked 4th in the US for homicide last year.

While Democrats claim that the mayhem has been in decline since 2023, they don’t mention the fact that there was a dramatic spike in assaults, robberies, rapes and murders that year. Meaning, even with the drop, in 2025 DC still ranks among the worst cities in the US. There are also suspicions of data rigging by DC officials.

…

Recent reports show that Washington crime has plunged in the past two weeks. Property crime dropped 19%, violent crime dipped 17%-22% (depending on the source), robberies/muggings have dropped 40%-46% and carjackings have dropped 83%. The average murder rate in DC is one killing every 36hrs – There has not been a single murder since August 13th.

Read it.

My question is: Why is nobody defining exactly what a ‘starter home’/’entry-level home’ is? The whole discussion is based on something that most people have different notions about.

Read it.

When the feared firestorm hit Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena in Southern California last January, the Los Angeles mayor was MIA, the “public safety” guy in charge—the vice mayor—was on home confinement for making an anti-Israel bomb threat on city hall, fire fighters were not pre-deployed, there was no water in the reservoir, and fire hydrants went dry in the Palisades.

Soon came vows by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and elected officials in Malibu, Altadena, and the Palisades to streamline the rebuilding and permitting, which turned out to be a joke. Now, amid bad leadership, virtue signaling masquerading as help, incinerated FireAid money, and promises in name only, comes the fire sale.

In early August came word from an exclusive story in Realtor.com that foreign investors were buying up prime lots in the burned-out area of an iconic Malibu beach.

They will be disappointed when the city comes by and expropriates it to build ‘affordable housing’.

On the other hand, Democrats can always be bought, so maybe they know something we don’t.

Justice Dept. Sent Congress Epstein Files That Were Already Public, Democrats Say (Catie Edmondson/New York Times)

Epstein files released to Congress are mostly ‘recycled’ documents, Democrat says (Erin Doherty/CNBC)

Almost all the Epstein files given to Congress were already public, Democrats say (Emily Goodin/Miami Herald)

Justice Department gave Ghislaine Maxwell ‘a platform to rewrite history,’ family of Epstein abuse survivor says (NBC News)

MAGA Mainstay Nancy Mace Cancels Speech After Just Eight People Show Up (Emell Derra Adolphus/The Daily Beast)

SCOOP: Trump Moves to Spread MAGA Agenda to the States

SKorea’s $150B MASGA: ‘Make America Shipbuilding Great Again’

Read it.

Inside a cinder-block office building perhaps best known for the Hindu temple and table tennis club next door, a startup company is testing what may be one of the hottest new developments in clean-energy technology. Literally.

At the back of a small warehouse laboratory buzzing with fans and motors, an MIT spinoff company, Electrified Thermal Solutions, is operating something they call the Joule Hive, a thermal battery the size of an elevator.

The Hive is a large, insulated metal box loaded with dozens of white-hot ceramic bricks that convert electricity to heat at temperatures up to 1,800 degrees Celsius — well beyond the melting point of steel.

Read it.

Thugs on tw0-wheelers, from scooters to choppers, are very popular in the Turd World, especially for kidnappings and assassinations.

Read it.

The other morning, I was walking through Union Station and stopped short. It was clean. Strangely clean. No vagrants harassing commuters or tourists. No drugged-out shouting matches. Not even the ever-present fog of marijuana that seems to hang over every street corner in Washington, D.C. these days.

But as I took in the rare calm, I did witness one ugly moment. A professionally dressed middle-aged woman took it upon herself to curse out a pair of young National Guardsmen patrolling the station, venting her fury at President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown.

The young men politely ignored her and went back to their duty. But the exchange said something important: The fury of Washington’s liberal class isn’t directed at the criminals who have terrorized this city for years. It’s reserved for those finally trying to stop them.

Read it.

After decades of King Log, having King Stork is rather refreshing.

Read it.

What has changed? Cracker Barrel is now “on a mission.” In 2012, they described their mission without saying the word and knew exactly what they were about. By 2025, they tell us they are on a mission, but they have lost most of what made them distinctive. It’s not providing a home-away-from-home anymore, but it is mission-oriented. They have added “craveable” to the description of their food, which sounds like they have embraced the food science that makes Twinkies and Hostess Cakes nutritionally empty but addictive.

They are no longer proud of their roots. America’s country heritage – GONE. Mentions of their best dishes, which probably sound a touch declasse to the investors that Cracker Barrel now wants – GONE. Now they serve all guests and make everyone feel welcome. The 2012 description used the word “country” six times, but the 2025 description only uses it twice, both times in the name of company. Nothing is described as “country” anymore.

They have even engaged in some M&A activity and acquired Maple Street Biscuit Co. in 2019 – they are no longer simple country folks from Lebanon, Tenn., but play in the New York markets too. And most of their description is aimed at letting investors know that they are maximizing profit. They no longer need to let the investors know what hours they are open because they don’t expect their investors to stop by anymore.

Cracker Barrel didn’t just lose its vision this week when they launched their new logo. Year by year, they have forgotten that they were inviting customers into their own home and feeding them home-style country food and giving them a chance to buy some fun memorabilia on the way in and out of the store. They started catering to their investors instead of their customers.

I must confess that I’ve never eaten in a Cracker Barrel restaurant, and it looks like I never will.

Pity. I like country food.

Watch it.

The blogger Sargon of Akkad has an excellent analysis of what happens when you let hordes of foreigners, foreign in culture and ethicity, into a previously stable country.

Read it.

A South Florida lawmaker says it may be time to do away with homeowners associations altogether, as more Floridians speak out about rising fees, costly lawsuits, and even arrests tied to HOA disputes.

“You know, it might just be time we take a look if HOAs are really even necessary,” Porras said. “Maybe we should just do away with homeowner associations as a whole.”

The lawmaker, who has been working on HOA reform bills for the last two years, said he’s heard enough from frustrated homeowners to question whether the system still makes sense.

“In Miami-Dade County, where I live, it’s just a bunch of houses. The HOA doesn’t really maintain anything other than the grass in some areas,” Porras said. “And yet, you’re being charged $500, $600 plus a month. In reality, you don’t see a lot of that money going back to your community.”

Porras called HOAs a “failed experiment” that, after decades of abuse and mismanagement, “does more harm than good.”

Living with an HOA is the closest America can come to life in the old Soviet Union.

Read it.

“Their ancestors made this country into a slave hell, but they can clean it up now. Cause they got the Smithsonian, they can get rid of all the slavery stuff. They got PragerU, they can lie about the history to the children. They can’t originally invent anything, more than they were ever able to invent good music,” former MSNBC anchor Joy Reid claimed.

White people did invent a few things. Like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the microchip and the video technology that Joy Reid uses to complain about the worthlessness of white people.

But white people have also invented some pretty terrible things: like Joy Reid.

Have you ever noticed that black people, especially black women, spend a lot of their time trying to look like something other than black people? Beyoncé has spent most of her life trying to look white while getting credit for being black; Joy Reid dyes her hair blonde, which is I suppose the equivalent of a white chick dying her hair blue.

The New Neo (whose blog is highly recommended)

One of the main tasks of a blogger is deciding what topics to cover. It’s not as simple as it may seem.

Sometimes there are stories so huge they cry out for coverage, even if everyone else is writing about the same thing. Sometimes there’s just a quirky idiosyncratic topic that strikes my fancy. Sometimes I choose a story to which I think I can bring an unusual angle. Certain themes keep attracting me, although they aren’t current, such as ballet.

I’m only one person here, so I can’t do what Instapundit or RedState or other group blogs do, which is to cover all the stories or most of them, and keep churning out many posts each day. What I usually end up doing is writing about what most interests me, and what I think might interest my readers. Sometimes I guess right and sometimes I guess wrong.

I am in the same position, and follow more-or-less the same policies. I don’t break news; if the news is big enough, people will find out. I focus on things I find interesting (whether you do or not), and things that I believe my followers ought to know. That results in a pretty eclectic mix, as you may have noticed. The comment section isn’t very active, nor do I care very much that it is not; I write this stuff to get it off my chest rather than to attract ‘engagement’. My core audience are my family and friends; others a welcome to tag along for the ride.

The New Neo.

John Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor from April 2018 to September 2019. It seemed an odd choice, because Bolton is a hawk and Trump is a Jacksonian on foreign policy, which is not the same thing. Bolton had good credentials, having served under both Reagan and Bush, and had been Bush’s hard-nosed UN Ambassador for about a year and a half.

At a certain point Bolton openly turned against Trump – although I’m not sure he was all that supportive even from the start (here’s an article that claims to describe the downward trajectory of their relationship). But by the time he ended his tenure in the administration, Bolton was Trump’s enemy who wrote a book in 2020 excoriating Trump.

That’s not the issue. The issue is whether he leaked classified information. The proceedings against Bolton are framed by the left in this way: “the justice system is being turned on Trump’s political critics.”

Gee whiz, CNN; did you notice the lawfare against Trump and anyone with the temerity to support him? Did you notice the weakness of their cases? Do you remember “no one is above the law”? I suppose you think Trump’s enemies should get immunity from any prosecution, and a medal?

The real question is whether Bolton is guilty of leaking classified materials and whether his actions fit the definition of a crime, without gymnastics by prosecutors to make it somehow fit when it doesn’t.

The Foundry.

You’ve seen the video. Big-rig driver Harjinder Singh tries to make an illegal U-turn on a Florida Turnpike. The semi-truck jackknifed and blocked all lanes of traffic. Those in the minivan destroyed in the Aug. 12 crash never had a chance. The collision killed the driver and two passengers.

The question on everyone’s mind: How did Singh get a commercial driver’s license?

The Indian citizen reportedly crossed the U.S. border illegally in 2018. Nonetheless, he obtained driving credentials, and, thanks to the sanctuary state of California, not just a regular driver’s license. The Golden State issued the Stockton resident a limited-term/non-domiciled commercial driver’s license in 2024, even though his English comprehension, from what we know, was not up to the job.

When Singh appeared in a California court to face extradition on three charges of vehicular manslaughter, the court appointed a translator for him.

When federal investigators interviewed Singh after the fatal crash near an “Official Use Only” sign at a turnpike cut-through, he failed an English Language Proficiency test, according to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. Singh gave a mere two correct responses to 12 verbal questions and accurately identified only one of four traffic signs, according to Duffy.

Read it.

Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom is moving ahead with a controversial plan to redraw his state’s congressional maps by overriding the state’s non-partisan redistricting commission to counter redistricting moves by Republican lawmakers in Texas.

Newsom has launched a $100 million campaign that is backed by Planned Parenthood, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the California Teachers Association (CTA) and the California Federation of Labor Unions and a handful of billionaire donors.

However, serious concerns remain as to whether Newsom’s plan can survive legal scrutiny for a number of reasons.

In 2010, a decisive percentage of California voters (62-38) passed Prop 20 which took redistricting out of the hands of politicians and created an independent citizens commission in the state constitution.

Constitutional attorney Mark Meuser says Newsom’s redistricting plan would violate California’s constitution by holding hearings on a bill less than 30 days after introduction and by drawing maps without authority.

Meuser also says Newsom’s plan runs afoul of the state constitution by drawing maps contrary to its requirements and by drawing mid-decade maps, which are prohibited.

Democrats have never let laws or constitutions stand in their way, as Wilson and FDR demonstrated.

The Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

As Jay Powell stood up to deliver what will almost certainly be his final address to the global economic-policymaking elite at Jackson Hole on Friday, a rival conference had just wrapped up in the same Grand Tetons mountain resort.

Headlined by Eric Trump, the speakers at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium touted what they believed to be the new frontier of money. Their number included senior officials in the Trump administration, tech entrepreneurs and influential Republican Senator Tim Scott.

Held at the plush Four Seasons hotel, the blockchain event was a stark reminder of the political, intellectual and cultural clash that the US central bank is now facing.

Read it.

A left-leaning think tank is urging Democrats to stop repelling normal human beings with the use of a deep grab-bag of woke words and phrases. The road to electoral Hell is paved with good intentions, writes Third Way: “The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.”

Third Way is far from the first to warn leftists that their language is off-putting. Bill Maher has repeatedly pummeled them, and Vice President JD Vance has too, telling Laura Ingraham, “I mean, look, the autopsy for the Democrats, some free political advice from the president of the United States is: stop sounding like crazy people.”

However, Third Way’s communique is distinguished by its long and specific list of annoying jargon. “In this memo, we are putting a spotlight on the language we use that puts a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities. These are words that people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats,” said Third Way, which describes itself as a group of “passionate moderates” but is, in practice, an organization of center-leftists that evolved out of a gun control group, Americans for Gun Safety, and is led by a career Democratic pol, Jonathan Cowan.

UPDATE Was It Something The Democrats Said? — A Response to Third Way’s Political Language Memo (Lindsey Cormack/DCinbox Insights)

From Outsiders to a Movement, Trump’s MAGA Has Taken Over GOP

Read it.

While Washington, D.C., residents are enjoying feeling safe on the streets of their community once again, angry middle-class suburban protesters want the National Guard to leave the crime-ridden city. When Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the National Guard troops at Union Station this week, protesters used their First Amendment rights to express their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.

There were over 180 homicides in Washington in 2024. If it were a state, it would have the highest homicide rate in the nation. But Washington’s anti-law enforcement protesters appear more consumed by a political agenda than the safety of those who live and work in the city.

Read it.

Activist Democratic Party judges have done everything possible to throw monkey wrenches into Trump administration initiatives. In many instances, they have issued orders purporting to block executive actions without even hearing from the administration. I haven’t tried to keep count, but I think most of those orders have been stayed or reversed on appeal.

But Democratic Party judges are not easily deterred. In several cases, they have violated the rule of law by flouting Supreme Court orders and refusing to follow Supreme Court decisions.

Victor Davis Hanson.

We’ve talked about the challenges to big multiracial democracies like the United States, India, and Brazil. The other two, the latter two, don’t do very well because they accentuate a caste or a racial or an ethic spoils system. The United States is the only one in history that has been somewhat successful, very successful. But it depends on everybody looking at their own identity as incidental to being an American, rather than essential.

So, why am I talking about this? Recently, Joy Reid, who was an anchorwoman at MSNBC and let go, I think, not for any other reasons, because of poor ratings, but she has a podcast and she blasted, collectively, white people. And she said that “they can’t invent anything.” And then she went into a diatribe about American music, that it was solely the domain of black people.

But what I’m getting at is, we’re getting very dangerous in this DEI movement, as it starts to emit its death throes, as it’s challenged for being racist, which it is. It’s racial essentialism. People who defend it double down, and they double down in a way that’s very injurious for the rest of the country.

Read it.

A few months ago, an association was set up with the aim of supporting and certifying traditional festivals in French villages. The Left, which identified that the organisation had received support from Catholic billionaire Pierre-Edouard Stérin, launched a smear campaign against the project, claiming that it was a militant offensive by the far Right. Under pressure from the media, the festivals that had been awarded the label were asked to withdraw.

Power Line.

Rita Panahi has a show on Sky News Australia that includes a wildly popular “Lefties Losing It” segment. I was part of that segment last night. Rita and I talked about the New York Times analysis that shows Democrats losing ground to Republicans in voter registration; whether socialism can be the salvation of the Democratic Party; redistricting and gerrymandering; President Trump’s role on the international stage; and whether peace can be achieved in Ukraine. Quotable quote: “No one wants to mess with the United States Air Force.”

Read it.

“We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door,” a Kamala ally said after the election even as her campaign was still sending out texts to donors begging them to send more cash.

“Hi Team, It’s Kamala, The election isn’t what we wanted, but I will never give up the fight,” a post-election text message solicited donors to replace all the money that went out the door. In Jan 2025, even as President Trump was preparing for his inauguration, the ‘Harris Fight Fund’ was still milking recurring donations even though there was nothing left to fight for anymore.

Whether or not Kamala was giving up the fight, she certainly wasn’t giving up fleecing donors.

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Britain’s Home Office will appeal the High Court decision to prevent asylum seekers from being housed at the Bell Hotel, Epping.

A key government concern is that the earlier decision, which stipulates that migrants will need to vacate the premises by September 12, will set a wider legal precedent. The earlier decision ruled in favour of the local council, which argued that owners Somani Hotels Limited conducted an unauthorised ‘change of use’ under English planning laws when they replaced regular paying guests with publicly funded migrants.

Security minister Dan Jarvis announced the intentions of the Home Office, which will oppose the temporary injunction forcing the closure of the controversial Essex hotel. He described the action—formally led by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who is currently interrailing around Europe—as an attempt to ensure the closure of asylum hotels was run in an orderly fashion.

Local concern about the Bell Hotel increased when a ‘small boat’ migrant from Ethiopia was arrested and charged with multiple sexual assaults on a minor. Britain now houses more than 32,000 asylum seekers in more than 200 hotels, with a growing number of local authorities seeking to challenge this.

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As companies across America wake up to the risks of “wokeness,” the fight against ideological debanking has become the latest campaign against efforts to weaponize the finance industry to advance a left-wing agenda.

Following President Donald Trump’s Aug. 7 executive order against political debanking, new revelations emerged that bank executives may have been pressured by regulators in the Obama and Biden administrations to deny financial services to Trump and his associates. Fox News reported on Aug. 19 that, according to an unnamed bank executive, pressure from regulators to cancel political adversaries was “very, very real.”

“The banks discriminate against conservatives, they discriminate against religion, because they’re afraid of the radical left,” Trump stated. His own accounts were closed at several banks following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot, he said.

The Foundry.

Columbia, Brown, and Penn have already settled their disputes with the Trump administration over anti-Jewish, racial, and gender discrimination complaints. Now, several news reports suggest Harvard and Cornell will announce settlements soon—and UCLA, Northwestern, and others may follow soon after.

Many academics and their allies are mystified as to why these universities would agree to settlements. But it’s not that hard to understand.

First, universities are settling because they are guilty. The evidence is overwhelming that several universities failed to protect Jewish students—which they could have done simply by enforcing their own rules against such abuse and suspending or expelling bad-acting students. Instead, they rewarded students who violated the civil rights of Jewish students.

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Austria witnessed a record surge in knife-related crime in 2024, with official statistics revealing the highest number of incidents in at least a decade.

According to figures, there were 2,596 reported cases of stabbings or knife threats across the country last year, marking a sharp rise from previous years and fuelling concerns about public safety.

The Austrian capital has emerged as the centre of the crisis. Social democrat-controlled Vienna alone accounted for 1,121 of the incidents, making it by far the most dangerous region for knife attacks.

In stark contrast, the lowest figures were recorded in Burgenland, where just 44 such crimes were reported, followed by Carinthia with 90 cases.

Police data show that knife crime had been declining steadily up until 2020, when only 822 offences involving stabbing weapons were recorded nationwide.

But since then, the numbers have risen year on year. By 2024, the tally had not only returned to the 2015 level of 1,061 cases—it had more than doubled that figure.