Tag: politics

New Yorkers ‘Stunned’ as Mamdani Admin’s Orders ‘Ruined’ Mothers Day for Countless Families

It’s telling when you finally find a rich person or moneyed entity that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani can get behind.

Sure, he’ll berate Citadel hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin outside Griffin’s home with a video touting new property taxes, even though it wasn’t terribly far from where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated not long ago.

And sure, he’s the kind of guy who talks about the city’s hemorrhaging of wealthy New Yorkers due to his tax policies as an “imagined exodus.”

But at least the infamously leftist mayor knows where to draw the line: He’ll let Hollywood millionaires ruin Mother’s Day for everyone who wanted to go in or around New York City’s Chinatown to let a studio film a movie.

According to the New York Post, Mamdani’s office issued filming permits for “A Quiet Place 3” for Sunday in the historic neighborhood, where residents “were jolted awake with predawn sounds of explosions and had to navigate traffic and parking chaos all day.”

“Residents were left not-so-quietly fuming at the Mamdani administration for issuing permits to Paramount Pictures to film the blockbuster sequel on the special day, gobbling up parking spots on a dozen streets and creating a Mother’s Day madhouse in the neighborhood,” the paper reported.

One woman, who crossed into the movie set with her daughter as a protest, decried the disruption.

“My Mother’s Day is terrible because they’ve blocked the whole f***ing place. It’s already ruined,” she told the newspaper.

A man who spoke to reporters wasn’t much happier.

“This is unexpected and annoying. I just want to get home so I can cook for my wife,” he said.

And this wasn’t an ordinary disruption put upon by billionaire moguls and millionaire actors and directors, either.

At 4 a.m., the whole shindig began with military vehicles and fake weapons lining up around the neighborhood.

By the time Mother’s Day brunches were beginning hours later, the filming had congested traffic around the intersection of Bowery and Canal Street — the heart of the district — making it difficult to reach the not-insignificant number of restaurants there.

Keep reading

Virginia Democrats Reveal a Radical Design

Virginia Democrats are doing an unwitting service to the whole country — by revealing just how hostile their party is to the most essential checks and balances.

Democrats violated the state’s constitution by pushing through a referendum to take four congressional seats away from Republicans.

But when Virginia’s supreme court threw out the illegal map, Democrats didn’t back down:

They started thinking of ways to get rid of every justice on the court, so they could pack it with new ones expressly picked to return a verdict more favorable to the party. 

If the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature could impose a mandatory retirement age of 54 on the justices — who are all older than that — they could be removed and replaced by compliant partisans.

This wasn’t just a harebrained scheme by state Democrats; this was discussed on a call with the highest-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

As breathtaking as this power grab might be, it’s consistent with the thrust of the national party’s thinking about doing away with troublesome constitutional checks.

Democrats have been arguing for decades to weaken or eliminate protections built into the Constitution to prevent a self-interested faction or party — even one with a short-term electoral majority behind it — from seizing total power.

Virginia today is exactly what James Madison and other framers of the Constitution were afraid of:

A faction — the Democrats — is using its success in the most recent election to try to rewrite the rules for future elections and is prepared to intimidate or destroy any institution that stands in its way, including the state’s supreme court. 

Virginia is not a solid-blue state — just a year ago, it had a full slate of Republican statewide elected officers.

Its congressional delegation is split, six Democrats to five Republicans. 

It may presently be out of reach for Republicans in presidential elections, but its legislative races and contests for statewide offices are competitive — Republicans had a majority in the House of Delegates as recently as three years ago.

Indeed, Virginia is so politically balanced that Democrats try to put a moderate face on their party by picking the likes of Abigail Spanberger, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine for governor or U.S. senator, candidates who present themselves as centrists.

Yet once Spanberger was sworn in as governor this year, with Democratic majorities in the general assembly, the push was on to throw the state constitution aside and redraw the congressional map to give Democrats 10 seats to one for the GOP, and now the justices who stopped that gerrymander face the party’s wrath.

Virginia’s constitution doesn’t seem to allow removal of sitting justices by imposing a mandatory retirement age.

Keep reading

The Self-Indulgent, Dead-End Politics of AOC’s Partisan Liberalism

One of the year’s best feel-good news stories materialized late last month when Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin was forced to release more than 1,500 beagles who had been bred by the corporation to be sold into gruesome, sadistic government-funded experiments, only to be unceremoniously killed thereafter. I first reported on these industrialized dog abuses at Ridglan and by other corporations like it back in 2018. The horrific conditions into which the dogs are bred, and the monstrosity of the government-funded experiments to which they were subjected, remain vivid to this day.

That 2018 article was enabled by activists long opposed to the industrialized abuses of dogs and other animals. They worked against Ridglan Farms for over eight years to make last week’s inspiring victories possible, often risking their liberty to do so. And one major factor in their success — arguably the most indispensable one — was that they took an issue long associated with left-wing activism (animal rights) and found a way to form coalitions and partnerships with all sorts of politicians and media figures who reside far from left-wing politics, including many in the conservative movement and on the broader American right.

Much of this transformative progress was due to the deliberate portrayal of this cause as appealing to values found both on the right and the left. The campaign from White Coat Waste Project, for instance, emphasized not only the horrors of industrialized dog abuse and experimentation but also the wasteful government funds that sustain it, including horrifying dog experiments funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Activists with the animal rescue group DxE deliberately courted right-wing dog lovers and, in doing so, catapulted their cause from a once-perceived ideological or partisan fringe issue into one that commands mainstream support from a remarkably wide range of individuals.

All of this devotion to assembling a trans-ideological, nonpartisan coalition against hideous dog experimentation paid off. In the weeks leading up to the liberation of those 1,500 Ridglan Farms beagles, the cause had been taken up and promoted by not only numerous left-wing animal rights activists and local liberal politicians, but also prominent MAGA influencers and institutions, such as Lara Trump, Tomi Lahren, Laura Loomer, Megyn Kelly, Fox News, and by all sorts of right-wing members of Congress, including Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY).

Keep reading

Mayor Overruled After He Dissolved Entire Police Force Following Dispute with His Wife

Municipal government is usually defined by procedure, paperwork, and painfully slow decision-making.

Not in the small town of Cohutta, Georgia.

In the span of a little over a week, the town went from a workplace mediation involving the mayor’s wife, to the firing of the entire police department, to an emergency public meeting that reinstated every officer almost as quickly as they had been dismissed.

According to WRCB-TV, the issue originally began between local officers and Cohutta Mayor Ron Shinnick’s wife.

Several officers had filed complaints about Shinnick’s wife, Pam, who had previously been relieved from her duties as town clerk for creating a hostile work environment.

The officers alleged that Pam still had access to private town information and other sensitive data.

This would eventually lead to formal mediation resolving the matter, and the town attorney assuring the local police officers that their jobs were not in any sort of danger.

About a week later, by Wednesday morning, Shinnick had dissolved the entire department.

When asked by WDEF-TV about the abrupt nature of the dissolution — and whether he was concerned about the livelihoods of these officers — Shinnick largely waved both concerns off.

“Well, I don’t think it’s that dire at all,” he said. “They’ll get a paycheck. We’re not that way, and I appreciate their service, okay? It is time for a change.”

Shinnick further compared the chaotic ordeal to sports: “It’s a guy thing. You know, occasionally, college football programs, you have to change the coach, and some people like it, some don’t. And that’s just kind of the way it happens sometimes, you know?”

That mayor’s words didn’t land with many of the officers.

Keep reading

Paris Prosecutors Move to Criminally Charge Musk and xAI

Paris prosecutors announced Thursday that their investigation into Elon Musk’s social platform X has been upgraded to a full criminal probe.

The Paris prosecutor’s office is now asking investigating magistrates to formally charge Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and three companies linked to the platform, including xAI and X.AI Holdings Corp. If they refuse to appear for those charges, prosecutors say judges can issue warrants that carry the same legal weight.

The charges cover a long and growing list of alleged offenses: Complicity in possessing and distributing sexual images. Nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. Denial of crimes against humanity. Fraudulent extraction of user data. Violation of the secrecy of electronic correspondence. Manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group. Illegal collection of personal data without adequate security.

The announcement came just three weeks after the US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it an attempt to regulate American speech through foreign criminal law. France pushed ahead anyway.

The investigation did not begin with deepfakes or child safety. It began with politics.

French Member of Parliament Éric Bothorel, a member of President Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, filed a complaint in 2025 alleging that X’s algorithm had been manipulated for the purpose of “foreign interference” in French politics.

Bothorel accused the platform of narrowing “diversity of voices and options” after Musk’s takeover and cited Musk’s “personal interventions” in moderation decisions.

A second complaint, from a senior official in French public administration, alleged the same thing, claiming to observe a surge of “hateful, racist, anti-LGBTQ” content aimed at skewing democratic debate.

Keep reading

The Absolute State Of This…

A trans Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa has just been ELECTED as a Green Party MSP to Holyrood in Scotland – despite having no British citizenship, no permanent residency and no right to full-time work.

Where else would this be allowed to happen? It’s insane.

The candidate, Dr Q Manivannan (they/them), arrived in the UK a few years ago as a PhD student and was selected for the Green list in Edinburgh and the Lothians East. Scotland’s rules – relaxed under the SNP – explicitly allow non-citizens to stand for election and take office.

Manivannan’s own victory remarks left nothing to the imagination. “My name is Dr Q Manivannan, I am a transgender Tamil immigrant, my pronouns are they/them.” And later: “I am, to some in this country, everything that the hateful despise, and I’m standing here as your MSP now with care.”

Keep reading

The Gerrymander Debacle In Virginia Leaves The Democratic Party With A Dangerous Agenda

“Eff around and find out”: That taunt from Hakeem Jeffries celebrating Virginia’s gerrymander did not age well.

On Friday, the House minority leader found out that Virginia’s Supreme Court was not quite as gleeful as he about Democrats’ attempt to virtually eliminate Republican representation in the purple state.

The court just cooked the party’s infamous lobster, a district over 100 miles long that was designed to help devour the GOP’s slender majority in the House of Representatives.

It also cooked the ambitions of Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democratic establishment, which tossed aside any pretense of principle in a raw political gambit.

The resulting faceplant is nothing short of legendary: Spanberger’s Democrats have succeeded in alienating half of the state.

For the governor, the court’s decision was particularly embarrassing.

Before assuming power, Spanberger denounced gerrymandering as “detrimental to our democracy and weakens the individual voices that form our electorates.”

She ran as a moderate, but Spanberger immediately turned sharply left once in office and called for the most extreme gerrymander in the nation.

The court found that effort was not only unconstitutional, but “wholly unprecedented in Virginia’s history.”

It characterized the state’s position as “a story of the tail wagging the dog that has no tail.”

While some of us had previously expressed skepticism over the rushed effort to circumvent the state constitution, the media almost exclusively relied on liberal experts who predicted the new districts would be upheld.

It was a calculated risk for Democrats, who have now burned their bridges with Virginia conservative and Republican voters.

As Winston Churchill said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Exhilarating and unforgettable: In a purple state where politicians often require crossover votes to prevail, the redistricting push was not just partisan but personal for voters.

National Democrats will soon “find out” whether Jeffries was right to prematurely celebrate a victory that seemed to secure his anticipated elevation to Speaker of the House.

The party is facing a potentially catastrophic reversal of fortune.

Keep reading

AOC Responds to 2028 Run Speculation: ‘My Ambition Is Way Bigger’ Than the Presidency, Wants to Lock in Socialist Policies ‘Forever’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to speculation about her 2028 presidential ambitions during a speech on Friday night by saying that her real ambition is far more radical.

During a conversation hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics with longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod, the socialist brushed aside questions about a potential 2028 presidential run or a challenge to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“You know, it’s funny because in this op-ed that Jeff Bezos paid for in The Washington Post, there was this line that you even mentioned earlier, about, ‘Well, as a potential 2028 contender, X, Y, Z.’ And in the context of that, it was very clear that this was a veiled threat, right?”

“This was the elite saying, ‘If you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms, and we’re gonna — we’ll make an example out of you,’” Ocasio-Cortez said.

The far-left representative continued, “And what’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat.”

“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials, come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights — all of that.”

Ocasio-Cortez ranted, “And so, anyways, a finer point to your question is that, when you aren’t attached, right? When you haven’t been, like, fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old, um, it is tremendously liberating, because I get to wake up every day and say, ‘How am I gonna meet the moment?’”

Keep reading

FURIOUS Democrats in Tennessee Demand SECESSION of Memphis from the State in Epic MELTDOWN After Republicans Erase Last Race-Based Democrat Stronghold

After Tennessee Republicans rammed through a new congressional map that dismantles the state’s lone Democrat-held congressional district centered in Memphis, at least one furious Democrat is now openly floating the idea of Memphis seceding from the Volunteer State altogether.

Tennessee State Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis), apparently unable to stomach the political reality of a deep-red Tennessee exercising its legislative authority, called for Memphis to separate from the state following the explosive redistricting battle.

As The Gateway Pundit reported just days ago, all hell broke loose in the Tennessee House when Republicans passed a new congressional map eliminating the state’s only majority-Black, Democrat-held district in Memphis.

The map, now signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee, cracks up Shelby County and spreads those heavily Democratic voters into three Republican-leaning districts stretching into rural and suburban areas.

A potential 9-0 Republican sweep in Tennessee’s congressional delegation, exactly what fair maps and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling against race-based mapmaking were designed to achieve.

The 9th District will now potentially see Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat, likely replaced by Charlotte Bergmann, a black female Republican.

But the sore-loser Democrats can’t handle it. Instead of accepting the will of the people and the rule of law, they’re throwing the ultimate hissy fit: secession.

Keep reading

Town Council Fires Back After Small Town Mayor Fires Entire Police Force for Allegedly ‘Insulting’ His Wife

The small town of Cohutta, Georgia, is making big news after its Mayor, Ron Shinnick, fired its entire police force.

The town, with a population of around 1000 people, saw all ten of its police officers relieved of their duties after officers allegedly made “inappropriate comments” about his wife on Facebook.

When asked about the decision, Shinnick said, “They’ll get a paycheck. We’re not that way, and I appreciate their service, okay? It is time for a change.”

Per Fox News:

The dispute appears to stem from last month, when officers filed formal complaints against former town clerk Pat Shinnick, the mayor’s wife.

Pat Shinnick was fired from her position for allegedly creating a “hostile work environment.” According to the officers’ complaints, despite her firing, she was still working and continued to have access to personal information of the town’s 1,000 residents.

Following the complaints, Shinnick, Police Chief Greg Fowler and town attorney Brian Rayburn said during a press conference that the situation had been resolved using “open dialogue and good-faith mediation.”

The following week, the entire department was fired.

During a packed special meeting of the Cohutta Town Council on Friday, the council voted to reinstate all officers immediately and to provide back pay.

Additionally, the council passed a separate measure to prevent Shinnick from firing the officers for the next 30 days.

According to Channel 9 News, the councilmembers say they stepped in “after finding the town’s charter wasn’t followed when Mayor Shinnick dissolved the police department.”

The charter mandates that the Mayor alert the town council at least 30 days before an employee is let go.

Further, the charter requires the Mayor to provide a clear reason for a termination.

Keep reading