Read it.

2026 to identify and shut down unlicensed or illegal places of worship, focusing heavily on the approximately 60 informal mosques in Athens and the wider Attica basin and promising to deport those responsible for operating them.

Authorities have linked the initiative to national security, citing concerns over extremist ideologies and past security challenges. Unlike in much of Europe, muftis and imams in Greece are appointed by the state, and funding from foreign governments is forbidden. It is partly for this reason that Greece does not experience Islamic terror attacks like much of Western Europe, despite there being over 300 mosques in the Western Thrace region on the border with Turkey and the Dodecanese Islands, where over 150,000 Muslims have resided since the time of Ottoman rule.

While Athens was once the only European Union capital without a mosque, the official Votanikos Mosque opened in 2020, without minarets or loudspeakers. Being able to accommodate only around 300 to 350 people, the Votanikos Mosque evidently cannot serve the 200,000 to 300,000 Muslims residing in Athens, contributing to why illegal mosques in basements, apartments, and warehouses popped up outside the control of the state.

Read it.

The past five years have seen a massive migration of Americans out of heavily Democratic counties and into ones where Donald Trump won majorities in each of the past three elections. That’s according to an exclusive analysis by Issues & Insights of the latest Census Bureau and election data.

Most analyses of internal migration patterns look only at state-level data. And what they show is that blue states are losing population to red states, and have been for many years.

I&I wanted to go deeper, so we used the latest Census data on migration between counties and compared that with how these counties voted in the past three presidential elections.

What we found was that millions aren’t just moving out of blue states, but are moving out of blue counties within states.

…

Of the 50 counties with the biggest net gain of population, all but four voted for Trump in the past three elections. Of the 50 counties with the biggest losses due to net migration, all but five are solid blue.

Read it.

A growing number of young Germans say they are actively planning to leave their homeland. According to a recent study entitled Youth in Germany, approximately 21% of surveyed youth reported they aim to move abroad in search of a better life. Furthermore, as many as 41% stated they could imagine moving abroad in the longer term.

And who could blame them?

UPDATE: Almost Half of German Benefits Go to Non-Germans

Read it.

Since his election as mayor of Saint-Denis, the second-largest city in the Île-de-France region, Bally Bagayoko—the La France Insoumise mayor of Malian origin—has been constantly in the news and sees himself as a champion of the anti-racist cause. Yet his approach to politics only serves to highlight his racist vision of the ‘new France’ that is being built before our very eyes, with the media’s blessing.

It takes some people longer to wake up than others.

Read it.

The Netherlands’ Ministry of Education has wasted an incredible €40,000—not far off the average annual gross salary—of taxpayer cash on a language guide for civil servants, which advises them to call Father’s Day and Mother’s Day ‘You Day.’

This guide “against discrimination and racism” is, Dutch daily De Telegraaf reports, intended to ensure that officials “include families of all shapes and sizes” in their communications.

It has received sharp criticism, including from former MEP Rob Roos, who described the guide as “WOKE S**T,” and as “evidence that we can save a hell of a lot on civil servants.”

Even Education Secretary Judith Tielen, who belongs to the same liberal (VVD) party as new Prime Minister Rob Jetten, branded the guide “patronising.” She admitted that it was “not necessarily the best” tool—raising the question of who is actually in charge at the ministry.

Writer Marieke Hoogwout lamented that “when the government dictates which words must be used, those in power control the language.” This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given that the administration is also working to hand the police more powers to monitor citizens online, even when there are no concrete suspicions of criminal activity.

Author Klaas Wilting said the language guide showed that “the Hague has gone absolutely bonkers, and that bonkers nonsense costs money too.”

What kind of crazy characters came up with this. Before you know it, kids won’t be allowed to call their dad or mom dad/mom anymore.

The document also discourages the use of the words “white” and “Golden Age,” and proposes the capitalisation of “black,” especially when referring to “shared cultural identity.”

Read it.

In a chilling retaliation against an act of civic duty, a 39-year-old man was left with severe facial fractures—after he intervened to protect two young women on a Berlin commuter train.

The April 2nd incident was a display of violence which aboard an S46 train near the Wildau station in the Dahme-Spreewald district.

According to Federal Police, the victim noticed a group of approximately 12 individuals harassing two female passengers. When he attempted to de-escalate the situation and shield the women, the group turned their aggression toward him, delivering a brutal beating during the journey.

Despite sustaining significant injuries, the victim remained on the train until reaching the Treptower Park station, eventually calling for help only after he had returned to his home.

He was subsequently rushed to a hospital to undergo surgery for multiple facial breaks. While investigators have secured CCTV footage from the carriage, the identities of the assailants remain unknown.

Authorities are now issuing an urgent public appeal for witnesses, specifically calling on the two young women who were being harassed to come forward to provide crucial testimony.

Which they won’t do, of course, for fear of being tracked down by the people who are harassing them once their identities are know publicly. They know the police won’t lift a finger to protect them, especially if (as I suspect) their assailants are ‘migrants’.

Read it.

It takes some people longer to wake up than others.

Read it.

It takes some people longer to wake up than others.

Read it.

Remember when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on the campaign trail that he wanted to increase taxes on richer, “whiter” residents? It seems he meant what he said.

That much should be obvious following New York Mamdani’s announcement on Monday that he’s going forward with a so-called Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan.

The plan released by the mayor’s office says that “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.”

It’s striking that a Muslim man born to Indian parents in Uganda, who only became a U.S. citizen in 2018 and yet is now mayor of the nation’s largest city, sees no irony in condemning New York’s history of “colonization.” But that’s just how it is on the Left. Only some colonizers are the bad ones.

Read it.

A recent poll found that a clear majority of Americans favor limiting politics in the classroom. This is bad news for teachers’ unions, who often advocate against that very thing.

Consider the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). With 1.8 million members, the AFT is one of the largest teachers’ unions in the country. It has gained prominence less for advancing classroom outcomes and more for engaging in political activism far removed from instruction. This political activism has been evident recently, as illustrated by AFT president Randi Weingarten speaking at a “No Kings” protest in Minnesota and the organization’s increasing focus on anti-ICE efforts.

Taken together, these developments reveal a widening gap between teachers’ unions and both the public and the educators they claim to represent. Rather than focusing on classroom instruction and professional support, large unions have increasingly prioritized ideological activism, often at the expense of students, parents, and even their own members.

Teachers’ unions should focus solely on supporting educators, students, and their families. On paper, this may be what many teachers’ unions claim to do. The mission of the AFT, for example, is to “champion fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education.” But there’s a difference between theory and practice. Realistically, the actions of larger teachers’ unions, such as the AFT, aren’t aligned with these objectives.

Adamantly pushing political agendas—such as LGBTQ+ practices or advocating for biological boys to be able to compete in girls’ sports—in schools across the country doesn’t give students a high-quality education. Instead, it takes time away from students learning how to read or write critically and authentically.

In addition, using member dues to lobby for left-wing causes or endorse political campaigns doesn’t benefit teachers. Staunchly opposing education choice such as education savings accounts ultimately hinders parents’ freedom to make the right decisions concerning their children’s education.

Unions also have a track record for keeping kids out of the classroom. Oftentimes, when school strikes are encouraged by the unions, students and families are the ones who pay the price.

Read it.

As the Department of Homeland Security shutdown slouches through its seventh week, this outrage should convince voters that the Democrats have devolved into a delivery system for pain. Yet again, the so-called “Party of the Little Guy” relishes in making regular Americans writhe in agony so Democrats can score political points and weaponize whatever partisan advantage they can muster. Hope and Change have decayed into Cruelty and Sadism.

Since Valentine’s Day, American travelers have stood in hours-long lines that have snaked through airport terminals, out front doors, and into parking structures. Wait times have stretched into three and even four hours. Anxious babies have exhausted young parents before flights. Older passengers have shifted carry-on bags between their weary shoulders as their backs and knees buckle. Throats have parched at security checks as boredom approaches paralysis. If not Hell, Democrats have turned U.S. airports into Purgatory with wings.

But, after enduring this agony, travelers have boarded their aircraft and jetted back to normal. For TSA agents, things have been far tougher. Most have worked valiantly without pay. While President Donald J. Trump’s executive order has begun to pay their back wages, many remain delinquent on credit cards, car loans, rents, and mortgages—through no fault of their own.

TSA agents have taken second jobs. Others have relied on food banks. Some have slept in their cars. Roughly 500 simply have quit their jobs. Who can blame them?

In the interim, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Senate Democrats repeatedly have torpedoed Republican attempts to reopen DHS. Democrats’ goal: Make ICE leave illegal aliens alone.

The American Scholar.

As I type these words, I worry over the day when I will no longer be commissioned to write them. The day, to be specific, that The American Scholar asks Claude (the moniker for Anthropic’s AI) and not Robert (the name of Max and Roslyn Zaretsky’s son) to create an essay on, say, AI and the future of work.

Not surprisingly, I am not alone to worry: Not many subjects stir greater fear and dread among Americans than the seemingly irresistible rise of AI. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 64 percent of the public believes that AI will translate into fewer jobs. Small wonder, then, that only 17 percent of the same respondents expect that AI, even when humanized by names like Claude, will make their future brighter.

Were he alive today, Paul Lafargue would be among that 17 percent, and his voice would be both loud and funny. Born in Cuba in 1842 to parents of mixed race—part Jewish and part Creole—Lafargue was married to Laura Marx, one of Karl Marx’s four daughters. Even before this marriage, though, Lafargue, who had studied medicine in Paris, had thrown over a secure future as a doctor to devote (and pauperize) himself and his family to working on behalf of the shining (and classless) future glimpsed by his father-in-law.

The Telegraph (UK).

A historic home that the King once stayed in has been turned into a cannabis farm.

Police found a large number of “fairly mature plants” within the stone walls of Plas Glynllifon, a 19th-century palace in north Wales that formerly belonged to Lord Newborough.

The Grade I listed property near Caernarfon, Gwynedd, was sealed off by officers after they executed a warrant on Tuesday.

Inside, a “significant grow” was found in 12 rooms on the top floor.

Electricity and water had been diverted into the house, which is privately owned but not inhabited, for the drugs farm, detectives said.

Well, you know, taxes in Britain being what they are….

The Telegraph (UK).

A pastor has been charged with gross negligence manslaughter following the death of a man during a paddling pool baptism.

Robert Smith, 61, from Brixton, London, died during the ceremony held in the back garden of an address in Erdington, Birmingham, on October 8 2023.

Cheryl Bartley, 48, who is the pastor for the Life Changing Ministries church, has since been charged with one count of gross negligence manslaughter in relation to her role in the baptism, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.

The Register.

An enthusiast has built a digital 3D model of the SG-41 cipher machine, replete with wheels, levers, and stepping logic, accessible via a browser.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

We rescued an American soldier. It was miraculous. It was heroic. It was everything you want in an American story.

Except the retelling of rescuing a MAN didn’t consider the fact that a woman might exist in the same situation in an alternate universe.

No, it couldn’t. A woman would have surrendered to the Iranians.

Read it. 

Sometimes you see an idea come from the Dems that’s so ridiculous, all you can do is hit them with the Charlton Heston laugh.

California is voting whether or not to suicide itself by taking money from taxpayers to wage the legal battle for them to be replaced by a new population.

It’s just so perfect.

Read it.

Minneapolis has become a super-gay (and surprisingly, Somali) version of Gotham, so I guess this was bound to happen.

The anonymous crusader, who took up the role because “a law enforcement career didn’t appeal,” appears mostly to just wander around Minneapolis.

The stolen bike recovery and the Internet “nemesis” battle were, alas, both staged. But he’s apparently done some vague sort of community-service crime policing, including having “escorted drunk people home.”

Read it.

Hey, Democrats got to be good for something, right?

Sure … just wait for it.

Read it.

The leftist Canadian government has been systematically removing rights in the name of hate speech for years, but at least up until now, there were some protections for religious beliefs within those power grabs.

Communicating a sincere religious belief regarding things like biblical marriage and sexuality could now land you in a Canadian prison for up to ten years. That is, if this passes in the Senate.

Not only that, but the bill also prevents any restrictions to entry into houses of worship for things like protesting.

Read it.

I’m sure there will be no negative consequences from this whatsoever…

One might think that Minneapolis could share some of that Quality Learing Center money to help homeless Americans, but I guess that’s only for the Somalis!

Watch it.

To be fair, the Orthdox service is Russian and the Roman Catholic service is Hispanic of some sort, so these may not be typical.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

The Antiplanner.

In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

Read it.

In my last Wyoming wind power article I noted a National Audubon Society warning that the growing masses of wind farms could be “population sinks” for golden eagles. This means that many eagles will be attracted to them, to then be killed by them.

Digging into the scientific literature I found that this is a well recognized wildlife management issue. It usually goes by the name “ecological trap.” Since being trapped means being killed I think ecological death trap is more appropriate.

In fact Wyoming wind power is a double death trap for golden eagles. First, as Audubon says, when the local eagles are killed this creates a sparsely populated area which other eagles will then come into. Eagles like most birds try to spread out, probably to maintain the local food supply for their hatchlings. These new eagles are then also killed and the cycle is repeated in a true death spiral.

In addition wind farms kill a lot of other birds as well as a huge number of bats. Golden eagles are scavengers so they are attracted by this abundant food supply. In fact being struck by cars while eating road kill is a major cause of golden eagle death.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Gov. Josh Shapiro keeps repeating the claim that Pennsylvania is the only growing state in the Northeast. But that’s not true.

Residents continue to leave Pennsylvania for greener pastures. New data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that Pennsylvania lost 15,000 residents on net to other states in 2023. Those residents took with them $2.3 billion in annual income.

This outmigration spans all age groups, but it is especially pronounced among working-age professionals and higher-income earners. These are the very people who drive economic growth. And they are leaving for more-competitive states, such as Florida, Texas, and the Carolinas.

The Foundry.

On Sept. 3, 2011, in the parking lot of the Delaware Park Racetrack, a woman named Bridget Wismer handed her newborn son to a man named John Gavaghan in exchange for $15,000 in cash and a money order.

Gavaghan had never met Wismer before the pregnancy and had no genetic connection to the child, but he listed himself as the biological father on the birth certificate anyway. Wismer’s grandmother tipped off police.

Both were arrested and indicted by a grand jury on charges of dealing in children. Wismer eventually pleaded to a lesser charge and was sentenced to five years in prison.

What Wismer did in that parking lot is now being legalized across the country, and Delaware is one of the states leading the charge.

Delaware’s Senate Bill 250, introduced on March 5, is the latest in a growing wave of state legislation built on the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act, which expands surrogacy frameworks to include paid “genetic surrogacy.”

The American Mind.

When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.

Read it.

Never before have more Americans attended college. Today, roughly 57% of Gen Z enroll in some form of postsecondary education after high school.

Yet at the very moment participation has peaked, confidence in higher education is eroding. The traditional four-year degree, once a hallmark of intellectual formation and social mobility, is increasingly questioned, both for its cost and its purpose.

Part of this decline stems from a shift away from classical liberal arts education, which once emphasized the pursuit of truth through disciplines such as philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric. This model aimed not merely at job preparation, but at forming well-rounded, critical-thinking individuals.

In contrast, much of modern higher education has become narrowly utilitarian, focused on credentialing, specialization, and workforce outcomes, often at the expense of intellectual depth and coherence.

So, is the current model losing its authority? And what does this transformation mean for the future of colleges and universities?

Newsbusters.

National Public Radio recently aired two frankly sexist episodes of its race-based podcast Code Switch , hosted by B.A. Parker and Gene Demby. The April 1 edition was titled “’Mar-a-Lago face’: MAGA’s aesthetic loyalty test.” Anti-Trump sexism is acceptable in “public” radio.

Read it.

Over the past few days, Fox News has continued to keep their viewers informed about the problem of illegal aliens committing violent crimes in the U.S. that MS NOW and CNN viewers don’t get to hear about.

Several shows not only recounted that, in the sanctuary county of Fairfax in Virginia, three out of four murders from this year were allegedly committed by illegals, but the far-left D.A., Steve Descano, recently sought only five year sentences for a pair of illegals who committed a murder in 2024.

The Register.

Datacenter protests have taken an ugly turn in the US, with gunshots fired at the home of an Indianapolis councilor who recently lent his support to plans for a server farm in the area.

Ron Gibson, a city-county representative for Indianapolis’s 8th District, was woken in the early hours of Monday by gunfire. He found that 13 shots were fired at his front door, and a note left on the doorstep reading “No data centers.”

In a statement posted on social media site X, Gibson said the bullets struck just steps away from where his eight-year-old son had been playing with Lego the previous day, and described the event as “deeply unsettling.”

The Telegraph (UK).

Ben Roberts-Smith, 47, is expected to be charged with five counts of murder which he allegedly committed while on deployment in Afghanistan.

The former Australian Defence Force member was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday morning.

The charges brought against Mr Roberts-Smith are in connection to the deaths of five people in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012, the Australian Federal Police said.

…

Mr Roberts-Smith was heralded as a national hero after being awarded several top military honours – including the prestigious Victoria Cross – for his actions during six tours of Afghanistan from 2006 to 2012.

The Telegraph (UK).

Adult chaperones are to take children to and from school to protect them from violence in knife-crime hotspots.

Up to 250 schools in the areas worst affected by knife crime will be identified by the Home Office using new mapping technology, which can pinpoint the most dangerous streets and when pupils are most at risk.

Adult volunteers from charities and teachers will be recruited to act as chaperones, replicating a scheme in Chicago, which cut crime on targeted routes by 14 per cent and helped students cross gang boundaries.

The War Zone.

Bleeding from injuries incurred ejecting from his F-15E Strike Eagle fighter and climbing a craggy mountain to escape, the U.S. Air Force Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) hid out in a crevice as both rescuers and Iranians frantically searched for him. Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered new details about the complex and dangerous missions to rescue the WSO and pilot – call signs DUDE44 Bravo and DUDE44 Alpha – whose Strike Eagle had been shot down April 3, the first loss of crewed aircraft to enemy fire during Epic Fury. While they offered the government’s narrative of events, and it should it should be treated as such, other details emerged that we will address later in this story.

These rescue missions involved hundreds of troops, scores of aircraft and diversion operations over more than a half dozen different parts of Iran. It required risking the lives of many of those personnel to recover the two airmen.

Read it.

This program has been running since 2011, so it’s not some new George Floyd program thought up during the woke era. Boston was way ahead of the woke stuff.

And now an officer has been stabbed after taking advice from a social worker.

Here’s what happened. First, a mentally ill man called police because he thought four people with guns were trying to kill him. When police got there, they couldn’t find the four people, but they did speak with the alleged caller through his apartment door.

They would soon call in the social worker to calm the situation down, and it did not go well.

My instinctive reaction would be to pull out my gun and shoot the social worker. ‘Oh, gosh my finger slipped.’

Byt that’s me.

Read it.

I mean, you and I know that a lady would have to be certifiable to marry Gavin Newscum, but, honestly, I didn’t think it could be worse than Gwen Walz.

Somehow, Jennifer Siebel Newsom gives Gwen a run for her money.

Newsom’s wife is speaking from experience, as a former close friend of Harvey Weinstein, so she’s got that going for her.

The release of this video from the “First Partner” of California (she won’t go by “First Lady” because she is THAT woke) led people to look into Mrs. Newsom a little more.

Read it.

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for the Justice Department to move forward with dismissing a criminal case in which Steve Bannon, an influential ally of President Donald Trump, was convicted after defying a congressional subpoena.

Bannon was convicted by a jury in Washington in 2022 on two counts of contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents or testimony to a Democratic-led House of Representatives panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a lower court’s decision to uphold Bannon’s conviction.

Trump’s Justice Department, in urging the Supreme Court to toss the lower court’s decision, told the justices in court papers it has determined that dismissal of Bannon’s case “is in the interests of justice.” The department already had filed a motion to dismiss the case at the trial court level.

More accurately Trump groupie Steve Bannon. I’m sure Bannon thinks that the relationship is closer than Trump does.

Newsbusters.

On Monday’s CNN This Morning, the panel on the Audie Cornish-hosted program started with more accusations of U.S. war crimes from panelist Sarah Fitzpatrick of The Atlantic and Kim Dozier, a CNN Global Affairs Analyst. Fitzpatrick said the US will be “turning off incubators for babies,” while Dozier claimed the US is about to violate the Geneva Conventions like Russia had in Ukraine.

I wasn’t aware that Russia was a signatory to any ‘Geneva Conventions’.

Furthermore, at the end of the hour-long morning show, a discussion ensued between Cornish and Fitzpatrick, which worried almost only about the “cost” of the rescue mission of a U.S. Military pilot.

In the opening salvo of the show, Cornish asked if the original “sense” of the U.S. and Israel’s desire to preserve the infrastructure of Iran had shifted, and Fitzpatrick turned to the “ramifications” of possible strikes.

Read it.

ampaign in the state with Hasan Piker — a streamer accused of antisemitic rhetoric — is prompting unease among Jewish leaders and fellow Democrats.

Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former county health executive, is set to appear with Piker at two different Michigan universities on Tuesday.

The Hillel at Michigan State University said it was “deeply troubled” by Piker’s planned visit to campus, calling him a “known antisemite,” while at least one planned speaker, a state representative, backed out of the rallies citing the concerns of her Jewish constituents.

National Jewish leaders also criticized the planned events, with some comparing Piker to Nick Fuentes, the openly antisemitic livestreamer who has divided Republicans and others drawing a connection to the attack last month on Temple Israel.

“Abdul El-Sayed’s decision to host campaign rallies with Piker is not just alarming; it’s absolutely shocking. It reflects a broader trend: the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League. “That this is happening in Michigan, where Temple Israel was targeted in a violent antisemitic attack … makes it even more egregious.”

I’ve been to Michigan. I’d rather live in Saudi Arabia.

Read it.

Rima Hassan is a well-known “Frenchwoman” who serves in the European Parliament for the far-left La France Insoumise, the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Ms. Hassan has gained notoriety for her vigorous public support for jihad in Palestine, and now she is facing trial for “justifying terrorism”.

I’m an American with an atavistic attachment to the First Amendment, so the idea of prosecuting someone for justifying terrorism (or anything else) is repugnant to me. However, France is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.

Quillette.

Every communist state in history has either collapsed, reformed into something unrecognisable, or survived only through external life support. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years before structural decay outpaced its capacity to maintain coherence. Maoist China killed tens of millions of its own citizens through policy-induced famine before quietly abandoning the economic model that caused it. Cuba persists on foreign subsidy and remittance income. North Korea sustains itself through nuclear extortion and a prison-state apparatus that would be unsustainable without Chinese patronage. Venezuela’s Bolivarian experiment collapsed an oil-rich economy into hyperinflation and mass emigration within two decades.

The standard explanation for these failures is ideological. Communism is bad because it denies freedom, punishes ambition, and consolidates power in the hands of corrupt elites. That explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It treats communism as a moral failure when the deeper problem is structural. Communism does not collapse because bad people run it. Communism collapses because it is architecturally incapable of surviving its own contradictions.

The argument is straightforward and does not require ideology. Any system that suppresses internal deviation, eliminates meaningful feedback, and centralises all decision-making into a single loop will accumulate errors faster than it can correct them. This is not a political claim. It is a structural one. It applies to corporations, organisms, software architectures, and governments alike. Communism simply represents the purest political expression of this failure model because it suppresses deviation by design rather than by accident.

Communism doesn’t fail because it’s bad; it fails because it’s stupid.

Read it.

In yet another jaw-dropping display of elite hypocrisy, Barack Obama’s Chicago Presidential Center – long derided as the “Tower of Doom” – now requires proof of U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residency just to enter a ticket giveaway for its grand opening ceremony on June 18, 2026.

While Democrats in Washington relentlessly push policies that treat America’s borders like an open invitation, the Obama Foundation has quietly imposed strict eligibility rules for its own high-profile event.

The sweepstakes for two free tickets, complete with a potential $1,500 travel stipend for winners living 100 miles or more away, is explicitly limited to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents who are legal residents of the 50 states, D.C., or Puerto Rico and at least 18 years old.

The Telegraph (UK).

No good deed goes unpunished.

The Telegraph (UK).

The remarkable rescue of an American airman shot down in Iran partially lays to rest the ghost of one of the great calamities of recent US history. In April 1980, an attempt to recover 53 embassy hostages held captive in Tehran went disastrously wrong, leaving eight US servicemen dead. Having taken place a few years after the Vietnam War, the failed mission was a humiliation for the Americans and ensured the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The prospect of another hostage crisis, if the missing airman had been captured and paraded by the Iranians, was a potential propaganda coup for Tehran that Donald Trump intended to avoid.

The Other McCain.

So if you hate America, support our enemies and think of the United States as “the Great Satan,” where else would choose to live except in Gavin Newsom’s California, “enjoying a lavish lifestyle” among the liberal Hollywood snobs who hate America as much as you do? But why bring up Robert De Niro at a time like this?

Read it.

In a story that could only come out of West Virginia, a woman living in a chicken coop with her dad had to defend her home against a burglar.

I’ve been in chicken coops that had more room than my first apartment after college.

Apparently, a girl named Anna Groves was there to kick somebody’s butt over money, but that didn’t really work out for her.

But the daughter pulled a knife and stabbed Groves instead, and the invaders fled.

Officers found Groves at CAMC General Hospital being treated for stab wounds.