WH claims ‘inflation tamed,’ per DoorDash stats. Company says that’s not in its report. (Marisa Kabas/The Handbasket)

Trump faces heat from MAGA base on ‘America First’ agenda, Epstein (Hannah Knowles/Washington Post)  An addciti0n to the modern game of baseball? What is a “MAGA base”?

JD Vance Received a Dire Warning About the Groyper Takeover of the GOP From a Strange Source (Hunter Walker/Talking Points Memo)

Trump administration repealing protections for key swaths of Alaska petroleum reserve (Becky Bohrer/Associated Press)

Trump’s Unpublished National Security Strategy Is Stephen Miller’s Far-Right Wet Dream (Zeteo)

The Epstein Scandal Is Now a Chronic Disease of the Trump Presidency (Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker)  Well, it’s certainly a chronic disease for the Narrative Media.

Bondi Says Acting US Attorney Alina Habba Confronted, Property Destroyed

Ghislaine Maxwell Is Living It Up With Unlimited Toilet Paper (Nia Prater/New York Magazine)  And, of course, Trump is to blame.

Epstein Returns at the Worst Time for Trump (Jonathan Lemire/The Atlantic)

America First? Some Trump Supporters Worry That’s No Longer the Case. (New York Times) I wasn’t aware that the NYT knew any actual Trump supporters.

We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump … (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters …)  As opposed to the non-far-right MAGAs? Give us names, please.

Georgia election interference case against Trump and allies will carry on with new prosecutor to replace Fani Willis (Jason Morris/CNN)

Nevada Supreme Court revives criminal case over Trump elector gambit (Kyle Cheney/Politico)

Georgia prosecutor keeps case against Trump alive for now (Patrick Marley/Washington Post)

Ponzi Schemer Who Got Trump Clemency Faces 50 Years in New Fraud (David Voreacos/Bloomberg)

Humiliated Dems Forced to Delete Latest False Claim About Epstein and Trump (Rusty Weiss/RedState)

Here’s Everything We Know About Trump’s Financial Ties To Saudi Arabia (Dan Alexander/Forbes)

After Zohran’s Win, Trump Is Coming for New York (Adrian Carrasquillo/The Bulwark)

The Epstein files sinkhole widening under Trump (Philip Bump/MSNBC)  Philip Bump loses his shit.

Trump Boat Bombings Darken as Secret Memo Reveals Holes in Legal Case (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Greg Sargent loses his shit.

The President Who Cried ‘Hoax’ (Adam Serwer/The Atlantic)  And he was right.

The Epstein Email Cache: 2,300 Messages, Many of Which Mention Trump (Wall Street Journal)

Democrats’ Epstein Email Dump Backfires As Trump Sets DoJ On Clinton, Summers, Hoffman, Et Al.

The Trump Backlash Quietly Underway: Young Progressives Signing Up To Run For Office (Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost)

Chicago Mayor Asks The UN To Intervene In Trump’s Deportation Efforts  Hey, proglodyte help is where you find it.

Democrats inject “Epstein files” into special election that’s scaring GOP (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)  They hope.

Large far-right German delegation to visit Washington, Trump ally says (Politico)

Will Trump’s Economy Survive the Left’s Sabotage Ahead of Midterms?

Read it.

Spain’s Balearic Islands are facing an unprecedented surge in migrant arrivals as smugglers shift their operations from Morocco to Algeria. In the past two days alone, 19 boats carrying around 360 people reached the Spanish archipelago, defying authorities’ efforts to curb the fastest-growing migration route into the European Union.

According to EU border agency Frontex, arrivals via the Western Mediterranean route—from Algeria to Spain—rose 27% in January-October 2025 compared to the same period last year, even as overall illegal entries into the EU fell 22%. Smugglers are exploiting perceived weaker controls in Algeria and using faster boats, with the Balearics as their main destination. Departures from Algeria now account for 75% of people using this route, up from 40% last year.

The surge has strained local authorities and facilities. Nearly 6,280 migrants arrived in the Balearics between January and October, a 66% increase from 2024. Authorities have been overwhelmed, storing abandoned boats and supplies—life jackets, water bottles, flares—after rescuing migrants from the 300-kilometer sea crossing. With more than 330 boats arriving since January, 2025 has already surpassed last year’s total.

The Foundry.

In a recent interview, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared in unequivocal terms that President Donald Trump was “the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” You heard that right. Not a threat to democracy, not a danger to civility, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.

It was a statement so hyperbolic that it felt less like political commentary and more like a sermon from a zealot who has mistaken politics for theology.

Such rhetoric isn’t harmless. It corrodes the political imagination of a people already steeped in outrage. It plants in the public mind a simple but dangerous idea: that those who disagree with you aren’t just wrong, they’re evil. From that seed grows justification for all manner of destruction.

Read it.

Mexican security forces have prevented an attack that was allegedly being planned by Iran against Israeli ambassador Einat Kranz-Neiger and the Israeli embassy in Mexico City.

Read it.

The secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a recent interview that the department found that 500,000 people are registered twice for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, while more than 5,000 deceased people have also been receiving the benefits.

Read it.

China’s newest supercarrier is sending shock waves through the Pacific and underscoring how urgently the U.S. must rebuild its own naval edge.

Beijing this month officially launched and commissioned the Fujian, its third and by far most advanced aircraft carrier, an 80,000-ton flat-deck ship able to carry roughly 60 aircraft and sail with up to 10 escort warships.

Analysts say the ship dramatically narrows the naval capability gap with the U.S. and gives China a far more formidable tool to threaten Taiwan and bully neighbors in the South China Sea, The Washington Post reported.

Read it.

Before MSNBC transforms into MS Now at midnight on Saturday, The 11th Hour host Stephanie Ruhle joined ESPN and SiriusXM host Stephen A. Smith on Thursday for his Straight Shooter podcast. Once there, Ruhle offered up an unconvincing excuse for why she does not have Republican guests on her show.

What made Ruhle’s response even more strange was that Smith didn’t even ask about guests. Instead, he simply wondered, “What role is Stephanie Ruhle going to play? In bringing attention to these issues and making sure these issues are addressed in a manner in which it deserves as a member of the media, as a member of MS Now moving forward.”

Read it.

Virginia law enforcement officials are voicing deep concerns that Attorney General–elect Jay Jones could undermine public safety and drive officers out of the profession, citing a string of past statements and actions they say reveal hostility toward police and a disregard for law and order.

Jones, a former Democrat state lawmaker, has faced mounting scrutiny since the surfacing of 2022 text messages in which he told Republican Delegate Carrie Coyner that House GOP Leader Todd Gilbert “gets two bullets to the head” and suggested police might stop shooting people if “a few police died.

He has since scaled back his rhetoric, but many in uniform say the damage has already been done, reports The Washington Free Beacon on Friday.

Read it.

The U.S. Postal Service said on Friday it was seeking new administrative and legislative reforms as it reported a $9 billion yearly loss, slightly wider than the loss in the prior fiscal year.

New Postmaster General David Steiner said USPS must be more efficient and that it still has a “significant systemic annual revenue and cost imbalance.” He added: “To correct our financial imbalances, we must explore new revenue opportunities and public policy changes to improve our business model.”

USPS, which lost $9.5 billion in the prior year, has lost more than $100 billion since 2007 despite significant restructuring and legislative reforms. The U.S. Congress in 2022 provided the Postal Service with about $50 billion in financial relief over a decade.

Send something via the USPS. Then send something via UPS or FedEx. The latter is a far more pleasant experience. Yet UPS and FedEx make money, and the USPS sinks deeper into debt.

I wond why that is.

Read it.

And just like that we’re free from climate hysteria and worried about a new “ice age”…Funny how that works, isn’t it?

A new study in Communications Earth & Environment warns that a key Atlantic current could near collapse within decades, potentially triggering an “ice age” scenario and major sea-level rise, according to the NY Post.

The research, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oceanology and UC San Diego, focuses on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the “conveyor belt of the ocean” that includes the Gulf Stream and helps keep Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. East Coast relatively mild.

Newsbusters.

Tuesday’s PBS News Hour committed some serious bias by omission in Stephane Sy’s report from the campus of UCLA, home to actual Jew exclusion zones during the 2024 wave of pro-Hamas protests that plagued progressive college campuses. This August, UCLA settled with three Jewish students and a Jewish professor over the university failing to protect their civil rights against anti-Semitic campus mobs, which installed a so-called “Jew exclusion zone” erected and patrolled by campus protesters — with the aid of UCLA’s administration.

But those devastating details didn’t make the cut of Sy’s story, which instead accused President Trump of squelching academic freedom (for leftists, anyway) at UCLA, which was in the news for not having settled with the administration over, among other issues, anti-semitism on campus.

Read it.

During the recent government shutdown, the temporary interruption of benefits to 42 million food stamp recipients was hyped as practically the greatest human rights violation of our time. A Nation magazine headline howled: “The United States Is Letting Its People Starve.” But the delayed payments had scant impact in part because many states offered supplemental benefits, many recipients had leftover benefits on their Electronic Benefit Cards (EBTs), and because vast numbers of food pantries and other private charities provided relief.

Democrats accused Trump of “weaponizing hunger.” But the real problem is that politicians going back more than half a century have weaponized dependency to destroy limits on government power.

Most Americans support giving government assistance to people who are unable to feed themselves. But politicians profited by multiplying the number of people who relied on Washington for their next meal.

Read it.

As flight delays ease nationwide after days of disruption, a former air traffic controller is placing blame for the FAA’s long-running staffing shortages on hiring policies implemented under the Obama administration.

Former air traffic controller Michael Pearson told Newsmax on Thursday the FAA’s workforce crisis traces back to 2011, when he asserted the administration “chose color over competency” by discarding a pool of roughly 3,000 qualified applicants and introducing a controversial biographical assessment.

According to Pearson, those applicants had already passed aptitude tests, held relevant college degrees, and completed controller training programs at no taxpayer cost.

Read it.

Languages with very simple sentence structure are, for the most part, oral languages. It’s the languages that have a culture of writing, developed over a long span of time, that display a fondness for stacking clauses onto one another to create towering sentences. This pattern raises the possibility that the invention of writing, a very recent innovation tagged on to the very last millennia of human evolution, can dramatically alter a language’s linguistic niche, spurring the development of elaborate sentence structure, and leading to the shedding of other features, on a timescale that cannot be achieved through biological evolution. If that’s so, then the languages that many of us have grown up with are very different from the languages that have been spoken throughout the vast majority of human existence.

Read it.

The tactical arguments for and against homeschooling all cancel each other out.

Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.

Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.

Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement. Also, it’s really hard to teach your kids everything they need to know, consistently, year after year, all by yourself. And really, really expensive.

Pro-homeschooling: We homeschooled a family of seven on one income of $25k.

Anti-homeschooling: Homeschoolers don’t get enough social interaction.2

Pro-homeschooling: Yes we do.

None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.

So why’s it becoming so fashionable?

Read it.

1913 was a terrible year for America and human freedom.

It was the year Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act and ratified the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, which authorized a federal income tax.

At first glance, these two unfortunate developments may seem unrelated. Yet what are the odds that the US would adopt both a central bank and an income tax in the very same year?

It seems implausible that this was the result of mere chance.

In fact, upon closer examination, the Federal Reserve system depends on an income tax to function as it does.

If anyone ever asks “Who hurt you?” tell them “Woodrow Wilson”.

Richard Hanania.

A Democratic organization called Deciding to Win just put out a report on the popularity of dozens of policy positions.

[interesting chart}

There’s not much surprising here for anyone who has looked at polling data before. People love Social Security and Medicare, dislike immigration, and want tough on crime policies. They are skeptical of government creating new programs (free universal childcare, free public college), but like ideas that raise costs and burdens on employers in favor of workers (increase minimum wage, protect the right to strike).

One thing the chart captures is just how much people support giveaways to old people over other forms of welfare. Below is a figure that simply extracts policies that are aimed either at helping the old or helping families with young children.

Read the Whole Thing.

Read it.

Below, we’ll look at how the 1914-18 conflict reshaped America’s system of national finance, and laid foundations that eventually brought us to the current situation of $38 trillion in national debt and $4,000 gold.

It’s not pretty.

Bondi Ripped After Epstein Files Blow Up on Her (Adam Downer/The Daily Beast)

House Democrats release new Epstein emails referencing Trump (ABC News)

Latest Epstein Emails About Trump Appear To Be Just Another Misleading Democrat Info Op (Mark Hemingway/The Federalist)

As Trump Defends Foreign Workers, His Company Sought Record Number In 2025 (Zach Everson/Forbes)

These are the 37 donors helping pay for Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom (Will Weissert/Associated Press)

Docs reveal Jeffrey Epstein’s behind-the-scenes image consultant: Trump foe Michael Wolff (Politico)

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker worries that Trump will go to extremes to distract from Epstein files (Joey Cappelletti/Associated Press)

It Was the Epstein Shutdown All Along (Marc Elias/Democracy Docket)

Epstein files become a fiasco of Trump’s own making (Marc Caputo/Axios)

18 Trump voters explain why a slice of his base is unhappy with his economic performance (NBC News)  I wonder how long it took them to find 18 such people.

Epstein is the one issue that persistently splits Trump from his base (Karen Tumulty/Washington Post) They hope, they hope, they hope.

Democrats Released Three Cherrypicked Epstein Emails… So the GOP Released 20,000 (Matt Margolis/PJ Media)

MAGA offers fresh pushback on Trump’s immigration policies (Julia Manchester/The Hill)  There’s that MAGA guy again. He sure gets around. (MAGA is the New Nigger)

Scoop: Mamdani, Dem governors plot how to stand up to Trump (Holly Otterbein/Axios)  How is this a ‘scoop’?

The left is pushing another desperate anti-Trump hoax – a false Epstein smear campaign (Miranda Devine/New York Post)

Latest Epstein files knock White House on it heels (Politico)  They wish….

‘This Sucks’: Trump and the GOP Thought They Survived the Epstein Scandal. It’s Back (Zeteo)  With the Narrative Media beating it as hard as they can to bring it back to life.

Frightening Wake-up for MAGA (Jennifer Rubin/The Contrarian)  Jennifer Rubin loses her shit. (MAGA is the New Nigger)

The Dogs That Haven’t Barked — The Trump administration is a regime of restoring male power. (Jill Filipovic)

I Know Why Epstein Refused to Expose Trump: Wolff (Erkki Forster/The Daily Beast)

When Trump talks about ‘trillions,’ does he understand what the word means? (Steve Benen/MSNBC)  Probably more than some proglodyte ‘journalist’.

Lefty Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett gets fact-checked by CNN while failing to smear Trump over Epstein docs (Chris Nesi/New York Post)

Read it.

I wasn’t aware that that was a thing.

China and other foreign adversaries are abusing American birthright citizenship to have American children through surrogacy. But one Republican Senator has a plan to criminalize the growing surrogacy industry for foreigners.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., recently introduced a bill called the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy (SAFE KIDS) Act that would prevent adversarial nations, specifically China, from using and taking advantage of American women to obtain U.S. citizenship for their child.

I wonder how long it took to make up a name for the bill that worked out to a catchy acronym.

“[Surrogacy] should never be the avenue to allow abuse, neglect, or deceit of innocent women and babies,” Sen. Rick Scott said in a press release. “And it’s terrifying that this might be at the hands of foreign adversaries with the sole intent of having a child that is a U.S. citizen.”

End birthright citizenship and it wouldn’t be a problem. The distinguished gentleman is treating the symptom, not the disease.

The Other McCain.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like when you’re considering who should and should not be allowed to immigrate to the United States, perhaps you should say “no” to a guy with a “666” tattoo on his face….

Read it.

A top housing official in President Donald Trump’s administration has referred California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a frequent critic of the president, to the Justice Department for a potential federal criminal investigation into alleged mortgage and tax fraud tied to a Washington, D.C., home, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged in a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi that Swalwell may have made false or misleading statements in loan documents.

The California Democrat is the fourth member of his party in recent months to face similar allegations, reports NBC News.

I wonder whether he’s still baning Fang Fang, the Chinese spy?

UPDATE: Rep. Eric Swalwell’s $1.2 million DC home target of DOJ mortgage fraud criminal referral (Josh Christenson/New York Post)

Read it.

A judge declined Thursday to throw out the criminal case against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver, who was charged with assaulting federal agents during a chaotic visit last spring to an immigration detention center in New Jersey.

McIver’s lawyers had argued that the prosecution was selective and vindictive, and that the New Jersey Democrat hadn’t assaulted anyone during her May 9 trip to Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. They also said McIver was performing legislative duties protected by the Constitution when she showed up to inspect the detention center, and was thus immune from prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Jamel Semper wrote that McIver failed to show the prosecution was vindictive and that her actions were “wholly disconnected” from the oversight she was conducting as a member of Congress.

Newsbusters.

Gregory Svirnovskiy of Politico has a very special gift of being able to ignore the more than obvious elephants in the room. This was on full display on Wednesday when he wrote about Jack Kennedy Schlossberg announcing his candidacy for the New York congressional seat now held by by retiring Congressman Jerry Nadler in “Schlossberg officially launches New York House campaign.”

One of the elephants in the room is Schlossberg’s almost non-existent work history at the age of 32 which Svirnovskiy seems either unaware of or just ignores.

He’s the son of a Kennedy. Why would he have a work history?

Read it.

In November 2015, a string of attacks later claimed by terror group ISIS in the French capital Paris killed 137 people and shook the world. Ten years on, jihadist terror in Europe is still a major topic of concern, data by Europol shows. At the same time, ISIS in Syria and Iraq has had its presence majorly decimated, leading to fewer attacks and victims by the terror group in the region and elsewhere, while ISIS subgroups in African countries are inflicting more deadly attacks, mostly on their strongholds in the Sahel region, West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

ISIS remains a threat even in its original location but has lost territory and influence as is was pushed back by local troops and an international alliance. This caused the group to change its strategy and pivot to a decentralized model of subgroups scattered across the globe, operating in near-autonomy. Especially in Africa, the terror group has been able to exploit the local realities of what the Geopolitical Monitor calls “chronic fragilty”.

Data by the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center accessed in November 2025 shows that the ISIS subgroups Greater Sahara, Western Africa, DRC, Somalia and Mozambique claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people last year. This is a stark increase from just around 600 in 2018. Northern African groups were less active in 2024, but had killed as many 800 in 2018.

At the same time, ISIS core groups in Syria and Iraq were still responsible for the deaths of around 1,000 people last year, down from 3,500 in 2018. ISIS in the Khorasan region, encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia was also decimated over the years and killed fewer than 400 recently, down from more than 1,200 when database records started in 2018.

Read it.

Controversy over the Obama Presidential Center is boiling over again in Chicago, as residents and preservationists question why a former president would build what many view as an oversized monument on protected, historic parkland — concerns detailed extensively by the New York Post.

According to the Post, critics across the city are still stunned that Barack Obama’s $850 million center — derisively dubbed “The Obamalisk” by some locals quoted by the paper — replaced prized sections of Jackson Park, the landmark landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted for the 1893 World’s Fair.

Construction began in 2021 and is expected to finish next spring.

Daily Record (UK).

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Foundry.

Karl Marx famously wrote in his 1848 Communist Manifesto, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” and it was these unchained proletarians who elected Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City, along with other socialists in municipal elections from Atlanta, Georgia to Portland, Oregon and cities in between. But the 2025 elections did more than sweep a surprising number of socialist politicians to power. They also revealed contradictions inherent to all leftist ideologies.

One big contradiction involves affordability, a major issue in the 2025 elections, particularly in terms of housing. But proletarians voting for socialists in the hopes of achieving the dream of homeownership don’t realize they’re voting for the kind of big government that’s already putting it out of reach.

A report by Murray Weidenbaum at Washington University in St. Louis found that in three surveyed locales—Colorado, St. Louis, and New Jersey—the cost of government regulations added $1,500 to $2,500 to the price of an average house in the mid-1970s. By 2011, government mandates increased home prices by $65,224. Over the next decade, government made homes $93,870 more expensive. Socialists decry the high price of housing, but intrusive government contradicts them by burdening homebuyers with escalating regulatory costs, and socialists are not prone to surrendering government control of people’s lives.

Read it.

Europe is facing a mounting threat from Hamas, whose operatives have infiltrated the continent to establish their presence across Europe.

This week, in Germany, police apprehended Borhan El-K., a suspected Hamas member who had procured an automatic rifle, eight pistols, and more than 600 rounds of ammunition, allegedly intended for attacks on Jewish institutions. The weapons were reportedly handed to another suspected member of the terrorist group, Wael FM, in Berlin. German authorities believe the group had been stockpiling arms since the summer.

The danger is not confined to Germany. Last week, a Hamas-linked weapons cache was discovered in Vienna. After the incident, a 39-year-old British citizen—identified in Germany as Mohammed A.—was arrested in London. Uncontrolled migration and open borders have inadvertently provided cover, allowing extremists to operate undetected and to cross borders seamlessly.

Read it.

Next time you fire up a games console, you could also be shifting the Overton Window to the far, far Right. That’s the belief behind a‘scholarly journal’ which is currently soliciting submissions. Key questions include:

? How are fascist games and play entwined with the hyper-capitalist and games industry [sic] and its exploitation of workers throughout its supply chains, from the extractive mining operations to the self-exploitative hustle of ‘independent’ developers?

? How is ludic fascism connected to resurgent patriarchy, racism, nationalism, colonialism and genocide (in Palestine and beyond), revanchist politics, and rampant and violent Transphobia?

These and other burning issues of the day will feature in a special issue of Eludamos:  Journal for Computer Game Culture, an “international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the critical academic study of games and play” spawned (and no doubt respawned, FPS fans) by Septentrio Academic Publishing based in Tromsø, Norway.

Read it.

A decade has passed since the night of November 13, 2015—the night when the heart of Paris was pierced by a wave of coordinated terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 130 people. Among the bloodiest of these was the massacre at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 concertgoers were gunned down in cold blood.

A single photograph from that night has stayed with me over the years. It was taken just minutes before the attack began—an image of joy and abandon. The crowd is ecstatic. Arms are raised. Smiles are everywhere. The atmosphere is electric with freedom, pleasure, and anticipation. The American rock band Eagles of Death Metal is on stage, and the audience, caught in the height of their performance, appears to embody everything modern Western nightlife claims to be: liberated, exuberant, carefree.

But this seemingly ordinary concert would soon become the stage for one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in modern European history. Moments after that photograph was taken, three Islamist gunmen entered the venue and opened fire. What began as a celebration of life ended in a massacre. The photograph is haunting not only because we now know what came next, but because, when viewed in hindsight, the moment it captures seems loaded with meaning—perhaps even prophetic.

UPDATE: Memories From the Bataclan

Read it.

France may well be the most thoroughly Islamized nation in Western Europe. This sad fact is reflected in the following report about the jihad terror attacks that have permeated every part of the country.

Quillette.

When New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani as their mayor on 4 November, many commentators and politicians treated the result as a political earthquake. In his victory speech, Mamdani also adopted the language of epochal change. “New York will remain a city of immigrants,” he told supporters, “a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” Then, quoting Jawaharlal Nehru, he cast his election as a wild new watershed: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new. … Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new.”

For progressives, Mamdani’s rhetoric was exhilarating. The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan reported that his message possessed “a clarity that stands in sharp contrast to most Democratic politicians,” while others on the Left saw his win as proof that the city’s younger voters—many of whom are renters struggling with the cost of living—were finally asserting themselves against decades of failed centrist compromise. On the Right, meanwhile, people reacted with the same intensity but the opposite emotion. Republican Representative Nicole Malliotakis spoke for many conservatives when she warned that the result would be “a disaster.” Her mother, she added, “fled communist Cuba to not live in a communist New York.” President Trump went further, calling Mamdani “a 100% Communist lunatic” and predicting economic ruin (although he hasn’t given Mamdani a Trump nickname yet).

Both sides, in their own way, reinforced the sense that something extraordinary had just happened. However, history and the constraints of American federalism suggest that the euphoria and catastrophism are misplaced. Campaign idealism may have propelled Mamdani to power, but the arithmetic of governing New York tells a different story. The city has been here before, after all, from Fiorello La Guardia’s New Deal municipalism to Bill de Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities.” The details change, but the structural constraints on ambitious mayoral candidates do not.

The Foundry.

After weeks of noncommittal responses during the nation’s longest federal government shutdown, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who is now looking to unseat Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, has proclaimed the deal to end the government shutdown is “a bad deal for Ohioans.”

Brown took to X to express his displeasure with his fellow Democrats: “Half a million Ohioans are facing monthly premiums that are double or triple what they were paying. This is a bad deal for Ohioans. It does nothing to help the out-of-control costs people are facing. We can’t allow health care costs to skyrocket and not be willing to fight.”

Senate Democrats had refused to support measures that would reopen the government for more than 40 days until, on Sunday night, enough Senate Democrat Caucus members struck a deal with Senate Republicans to advance legislation that could reopen the government.

Brown is seeking a comeback bid after losing last November to now Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Gallup.

For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women.

In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.

They’ve discovered that, feminist propaganda to the contrary, they really can’t ‘have it all’. Very few men want to marry a ‘boss babe’, and those that do don’t fit the preferences of Modern Women. There aren’t enough hunky billionaires to go around.

Read it.

Every month, around 300 to 500 public school teachers are arrested or charged for incidents involving a minor, including sexual assault on minors. The majority of these cases do not receive much attention in the media and often school districts will “pass the trash”; quietly removing an offending teacher and using confidentiality agreements to cover up incidents, allowing that employee to simply move on to another school district and repeat the pattern all over again.

These cases tend to start with lewd conduct – Teachers acting inappropriately or making sexualized comments with multiple students. They are punished by school officials, but the action is kept under wraps. The teacher then moves to another county and does something even worse.

For example, a teacher in NJ became the subject of a media firestorm last year when he was caught in multiple instances over the course of several years engaging in sexual discussions and behavior with students. These incidents including dropping items in front of female students, telling them to pick up the objects so that he could look at them from behind as they bent over. There were also several reports of the teacher discussing his personal sex life with children and making bizarre comments about how the girls in his class looked “cute”.

Despite New Jersey making laws against “pass the trash” practices, schools flouted the restrictions and hid groomer teachers anyway. Lewd conduct often ends up leading to physical abuse if teachers are not outed right away.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

Self-described socialist Katie Wilson, who has drawn comparisons to New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, is poised to become the next mayor of Seattle.

Wilson, 43, a longtime fixture in Seattle’s progressive politics, leads incumbent Democrat Bruce Harrell by 1,346 votes out of 273,996 tabulated, more than a week after Election Day on Nov. 4, according to DecisionDesk HQ.

After trailing by more than 10,000 votes on Nov. 5, Wilson cut into Harrell’s margin as late-counted ballots broke her way.

Newsbusters.

On Wednesday, CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today predictably served as clapping seals in celebrating Jack Schlossberg — the grandson of John F. Kennedy and thus royalty on the left — launching a bid for a Manhattan-area House seat despite having only been an “influencer” and a self-described provocateur on social media. In other words, he’s never had a real job.

To be sure, as a child of a Kennedy he’s really never had to work in his life.

NBC was particularly enthralled and head-over-heels as a longtime friend of the show might be representing many of them in Congress.

They teased a full segment on Schlossberg not just once, but twice. In the second, co-host Savannah Guthrie gushed: “Then, just Jack. John F. Kennedy’s grandson throwing his hat into the political ring…The social media lightning rod now looking to takeover a high-profile seat. The full story coming right up.”

Co-host Craig Melvin tossed to correspondent Stephanie Gosk: “Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, announcing on social media overnight that he plans to run for Congress. Schlossberg is targeting an open seat in a high-profile, influential district in New York.”

The ancient cliché that politics is “show-business for ugly people” suggests that non-ugly people have an even smoother road. After all, “show-business” does actually involve a modicum of work, whereas politics merely requires effort, which is not the same thing; and damned little effort at that, as former Representative George Santos has demonstrated.

Read it.

Archbishop Paul Stagg Coakley, elected this week as the new president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has steadfastly maintained that pro-abortion lawmakers should not receive Holy Communion.

That includes former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., LifeNews reported Wednesday.

Coakley, archbishop of Oklahoma City, was elected Tuesday and will serve a three-year term as president of the USCCB. He has established a long-standing record of supporting the denial of Communion to certain politicians, a stance he has held for more than a decade.

And about time, too.

The Telegraph (UK).

Sara Sharif’s neighbours did not report concerns that she was being abused to police because they were scared of being called racist, a safeguarding review has found.The 10-year-old schoolgirl was discovered dead at her home in Woking, Surrey, on Aug 10 2023, after being beaten, burned, hooded and strangled.
Urfan Sharif, Sara’s father, 43, and Beinash Batool, her stepmother, 31, were sentenced to life in prison last year for her murder after subjecting her to years of “inconceivable cruelty”.
Local authorities commissioned a safeguarding practice review after the convictions.
It found wide-ranging failings by a number of authorities and said neighbours of the family were scared to report “concerns about what they heard” in the Sharif household.
“They feared being branded as being racist, especially on social media,” the authors of the report wrote.
“While understanding their point of view, this is concerning that race was a bar to reporting possible child abuse and it needs to be overcome.”

The War Zone.

Recent imagery indicates that China is progressing with work on a new aircraft carrier, its fourth, which is expected by many sources to introduce nuclear propulsion. A new detail that is now visible of the makings of the ship’s hull structure would appear to directly support this. The development comes just a week after the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) commissioned its first domestically produced carrier, the Fujian. Meanwhile, there are increasing reports that Beijing may also still be working on at least one more conventionally powered carrier, too.

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When the future King of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) visits the White House on November 18th, he will bring with him a number of major agreements and business deals. Among these may be the long-awaited US-Saudi Nuclear Energy Cooperation Agreement (referred to as a “123 Agreement”, the section of the Atomic Energy Act that governs US technology transfer to international partners). That agreement, under discussion for over a decade, appears to be close to finalization and may lead to significant business for US nuclear companies.This pact would enable the transfer of US nuclear technology, materials, and expertise to Saudi Arabia, facilitating Riyadh’s civil nuclear program that aims to build at least two large pressurized water reactors (PWRs) on the Arabian Gulf under a new holding company, the Duwayhin Nuclear Energy Company (DNEC).

DNEC submitted a site license application to the Saudi Nuclear and Radiological Regulatory Commission (NRRC) in May 2022 for its flagship Duwaiheen Nuclear Power Plant on the Gulf coast, targeting an initial capacity of 2.8 GW. Observers note that 2.8 GW matches the output of two of KEPCO’s AP-1400 reactors, the same built across the border in UAE, leading many to speculate that the Koreans have been in the lead for supplying the Saudi’s nuclear plant technology.

The associated tender for the two Duwaiheen plants, launched in 2022, has faced multiple delays. Initially slated for bids in April 2024, the deadline shifted repeatedly and still remains pending. Analysts have understood it to be the Saudi’s intention to delay selection until after a 123 Agreement is signed in order to enable US companies to bid on the project and to ensure that the Saudi program has a nod of approval from the US.

No Kings Founder: Primary Dems Who Won’t Fight Trump

Newsom tells AP the eight senators who struck the shutdown deal aren’t alarmed enough about Trump (Associated Press)

CNN This Morning Doesn’t Know How Trump’s Foreign Policy Duties Work

Trump plan would open California to offshore oil drilling (Washington Post)

Florida AG Targets JPMorgan Over Trump Debanking, Jack Smith Collusion

Obamacare could collapse under Trump’s new plan, policy experts say (Politico)

The Supreme Court Just Took a Scary Voting Case That Has Trump Salivating. He Might Be Disappointed. (Richard L. Hasen/Slate)  And, then again, he might not.

‘Latin American Kuwait’? Trump’s Looming War In The Caribbean Might Have Nothing To Do With Narco-Terrorism

Trump built a surprising voter coalition. One key piece just cracked. (Politico)

The I.R.S. Tried to Stop This Tax Dodge. Scott Bessent Used It Anyway. (Andrew Duehren/New York Times)

How Trump Has Exploited Pardons and Clemency to Reward Allies and Supporters (Jeremy Kohler/ProPublica)

‘He’s Actually Weakening the Economy’: Why Trump’s Strategy May Fail (Victoria Guida/Politico)

Epstein Alleged in Emails That Trump Knew of His Conduct (Michael Gold/New York Times)

Epstein mentioned Trump multiple times in private emails, new release shows (Kaitlan Collins/CNN)

US Mint to strike last penny as Trump’s phaseout rattles retailers (Michael Stratford/Politico)

Donald Trump ‘spent hours’ at Jeffrey Epstein’s house with sex-trafficking victim, newly released email alleges – live (Shrai Popat/The Guardian)

Jeffrey Epstein, in newly released email, says Trump ‘knew about the girls’ (Hailey Fuchs/Politico)

Mink Confronts ICE (Adam Pagnucco/Montgomery Perspective)

PARTISAN TILT: PolitiFact Hammers Trump and GOP as Liars, Goes Soft on Democrats

South African finance minister rebukes Trump’s claims of Afrikaner persecution (Gregory Svirnovskiy/Politico)  Trump showed us the video.

House Democrats release Epstein email that claimed Trump ‘spent hours’ with victim (Matthew Choi/Washington Post)

Trump’s Military Occupations of U.S. Cities Cost $473 Million and Rising (Nick Turse/The Intercept)

Epstein emails released by Democrats say Trump ‘knew about the girls’ and spent time with a victim (Associated Press)

Dems Dump New ‘Epstein Files’ With Trump – Redact Witness Who Already Exonerated Him

Donald Trump Is a Lamer Duck Than Ever (Mark Leibovich/The Atlantic)

Trump’s Shocking Brawl With Laura Ingraham on Fox Exposes His Weakness (Greg Sargent/New Republic)  Greg Sargent loses his shit.

Jeffrey Epstein Claimed Trump Knew About His Conduct, New Emails Show (Arthur Delaney/HuffPost)

Trump ‘spent hours’ at Epstein’s house with victim of sex trafficking, email alleges (Financial Times)

MAGA goes quiet on the “Epstein files” (Tal Axelrod/Axios)  There’s that MAGA guy again. He could probably use the rest; he’s been very busy lately, at least according to the Narrative Media. (MAGA is the New Nigger)

Read it.

The American Freedom Law Center is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to grant oral arguments in its First Amendment lawsuit against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for the “irreparable harm” of her endorsing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s claim that AFLC is a “hate group.”

“From the very beginning, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has politicized and weaponized her office and abused her government authority to target political opponents,” AFLC co-founder Robert Muise told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday.

“Her use of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘hate group’ list as a matter of public policy to identify organizations, mostly conservative Christian and Jewish organizations, for her propaganda attacks and threats of surveillance are detrimental to the rights and freedoms of individuals in our free society,” Muise added. “Indeed, this is right out of the pages of George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, and it is unconstitutional.”

The case traces back to a 2019 press release Nessel published, along with Michigan Department of Civil Rights then-Director Agustin Arbulu, announcing a “Hate Crimes Unit” that would “fight against hate crimes and the many hate groups … in our state.” The announcement linked to the SPLC’s list of “hate groups,” which puts conservative and Christian organizations on a “hate map” alongside largely defunct chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

Read it.

Greece’s new age verification system found that the majority of asylum seekers are lying about their age, claiming to be minors, Migration and Asylum Minister Thanos Plevris said on Tuesday, November 12th.

Plevris stated that out of 104 cases reviewed since late August, 59 individuals were determined to be over 18. “The repercussions for those who filed a false statement are self-evident,” he said.

The new, stricter verification process requires age determination to be completed “once and on the same day” using three methods: a medical evaluation of physical development, a psychosocial assessment, and an X-ray of the applicant’s left wrist to assess skeletal maturity. Officials say the system is designed to prevent adults from posing as minors to gain preferential legal protections.

Read it.

Canada has warned its citizens to exercise caution when traveling to Sweden, placing the country in the same travel advisory category as Turkey and Morocco. Once seen as tranquil, Sweden has experienced a sharp rise in recent gang-related crime—including shootings, bombings, robberies, and sexual assaults.

The Canadian travel advisory cites two main risks: gang violence and terrorism. It advises travelers to stay alert, avoid crowds and be cautious in areas with high crime. Gang violence is increasingly affecting residential neighborhoods, shopping malls and public spaces, sometimes harming innocent bystanders.

This warning marks a significant shift in the international perception of Sweden which was previously considered one of the world’s safest countries before the onset of massive illegal migration.