Tag: politics

Schumer Takes Public Stab At Sanders As Democrats Descend Into Chaotic Political Scuffle

Democrats are already eating their own in Maine — and the Senate race hasn’t even started.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw gasoline on an already fiery primary Tuesday by endorsing Gov. Janet Mills for Senate — a move that instantly put him at odds with Bernie Sanders and the party’s progressive base.

“We think that Janet Mills is the best candidate to retire Susan Collins,” Schumer said at a press conference. “She’s a tested two-term governor and the people of Maine have an enormous amount of affection and respect for her.”

But Schumer’s safe, establishment pick enraged the left. Sanders — who’s been boosting populist underdog Graham Platner, a Marine veteran turned oyster farmer — has already blasted party leaders for “wasting millions on an unnecessary & divisive primary.”

Platner, who’s drawn heavy progressive support and hauled in over $3.2 million by the end of September, didn’t mince words either. His campaign torched Schumer’s move as “the establishment backing the establishment,” vowing their guy would win “because he has Mainers behind him.”

The Democratic civil war couldn’t be clearer: Schumer wants the polished, 77-year-old governor who’s led Maine for two terms. Sanders wants the scrappy outsider who calls out the Washington elite — even if his past social media posts have become a political minefield.

Platner has been scrambling to explain a string of crude Reddit comments unearthed by CNN and The Washington Post — including one where he used a slur for the disabled, called himself a “communist,” said “all” cops are “bastards,” and downplayed sexual assault in the military.

Platner’s scandals worsened this week when he revealed he has a tattoo resembling an alleged Nazi symbol.

In a video posted to X, Platner blamed the remarks on his battle with PTSD and insisted the people of Maine know “this is not at all the person that they have come to know, and come to interact with in reality.”

The controversy didn’t stop Sanders from sticking by him, calling Platner “a great working-class candidate.” But Schumer clearly wants none of it — betting that Mills is the Democrats’ best shot at unseating Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who’s gunning for a sixth term.

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The Shadow Of Terror: Zohran Mamdani’s Radical Islam Problem

New York City’s 2025 mayoral race has thrust Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist and New York State Assembly member, into the spotlight as the Democratic nominee. His candidacy, while historic as potentially the first Muslim and Indian-American mayor, raises serious concerns due to his (1) adherence to the Shi’a Twelver sect, (2) support of Hamas jihadist terrorists and its parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood, (3) rabid antisemitism, and (4) devastating economic implications of his socialist policies. Mamdani’s candidacy is a natural result of decades of failed NYC policies toward Islamists and jihadists, which have almost turned the city into a Muslim Brotherhood sanctuary. Mamdani’s candidacy is a symptom of a larger Islamist problem in NYC.

While many American Muslims in New York City are patriotic and capable of great leadership, Mamdani’s religious and ideological stances demand scrutiny. Mamdani wants to rule New York City, but who rules Mamdani?

New York City is home to over half a million Muslims, many of whom contribute significantly to the city’s vibrant fabric. Numerous Muslim leaders possess the vision, integrity, and capability to serve as mayor, championing policies that align with American values and the U.S. Constitution; however, Mamdani is not among them. He belongs on a terror watchlist and not in a mayoral race.

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Zohran Mamdani Boasts ‘Free’ NYC Bus Plan Would Cost $700 Million a Year

New York City mayoral candidate and state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani defended his proposal to make all city buses free during Wednesday night’s final mayoral debate, estimating the initiative would cost roughly $700 million annually and arguing it would ultimately benefit the city’s economy and environment.

Mamdani said the proposal “addresses the fact that today, in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one in five New Yorkers cannot afford the bus fare.” He described the measure as both an economic and social investment, explaining that “It could cost $700 million a year to make the slowest buses in the country fast and free,” but claimed the city would “generate more than double in economic revenue for New Yorkers across the city.”

He added that eliminating fares would “reduce assaults on bus drivers,” “increase ridership on those buses,” and “actually have environmental impacts as fewer New Yorkers would drive their own car or take a taxi and would instead get on the bus.” Mamdani stated he was confident in the plan’s feasibility because, as a state assemblyman, he “delivered it as the state assembly member who won the first free buses in New York City’s history.”

The cost projection drew comparisons to other cities that have experimented with fare-free transit, most notably Kansas City, which became the first major U.S. city to eliminate bus fares in 2020. After several years, city officials moved to reinstate fares amid ongoing financial and operational challenges. According to an April 2025 KCUR report, the Kansas City Council voted to bring back $2 fares and reduce route frequency after the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority warned that, without new funding sources, it could be forced to cut 13 of its 29 routes. The council’s six-month plan allocated $46.7 million to keep the system running through October while the agency seeks additional funding to sustain operations in the long term.

Mamdani’s comments come as his economic platform continues to draw attention for its sweeping government-led initiatives. The democratic socialist has previously proposed city-run grocery stores and increasing property taxes in “richer and whiter neighborhoods,” as well as backing measures to buy private housing for communal use. Polling reported by Breitbart News shows Mamdani leading the mayoral race with 43 percent of support citywide, bolstered by strong backing from foreign-born voters and younger residents.

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It Didn’t Start With Trump

“What do you expect when you sue the president?”

Hearing that comment, some people may guess the comment was made by someone addressing one of President Trump’s political opponents who has been targeted for federal prosecution.

That quote, though, is much older.

It is from an IRS agent addressing officials of a conservative organization that was being audited during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

This illustrates that the use of federal agencies to punish presidents’ enemies did not start with President Trump.

The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used tax investigations against political opponents.

Targeted individuals included publishers of newspapers that were highly critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.

President John F. Kennedy used the IRS and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to drive his conservative critics off the radio.

President Lyndon Johnson also used the IRS and the FCC to silence conservative critics.

One tool that was used to silence conservatives was to accuse broadcasters of violating the “fairness doctrine” by favoring conservative commentators.

President Richard Nixon used the IRS to target political enemies.

The Nixon administration also threatened television and radio companies with revocation of their broadcast licenses unless they provided favorable coverage of the administration.

During the Clinton administration, the IRS not only targeted conservative and libertarian organizations it audited Paula Jones after she sued President Clinton for sexual harassment.

During the George W. Bush years, the IRS targeted organizations critical of the Iraq War. When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the tax agency turned its attention back to conservative and libertarian groups, with a focus on organizations associated with the Tea Party.

The Department of Homeland Security also issued a warning that those with pro-liberty bumper stickers — including supporting the Libertarian Party or my presidential campaign — might be violent extremists.

During the Biden administration, many Americans received harsh sentences for being present at the Capitol on January 6 even if they did not commit any violent acts.

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Why Zohran Mamdani’s ‘Sewer Socialism’ Won’t Help Poor People

New York City is poised to elect a Jew-hating, jihadi-loving, police-defunding socialist for mayor. But New York Times contributor E.J. Dionne thinks that this is fine, because Zohran Mamdani wants to be a “sewer socialist.” Which is to say that “he is far more interested in the practical task of being a successful mayor than in the impossible dream of turning a single city into a socialist paradise.“

Dionne is the sort of self-described Catholic Democrat who prefers the party platform to the catechism of his church, and so he is a willing mark for Mamdani’s efforts to reassure voters that he isn’t a dangerous radical. Per Dionne, Mamdani understands that the best advertisement for socialism is success, and he therefore seeks to revive a tradition of socialist mayors who eagerly worked on “the grubbiest of urban amenities because doing so underscored their aim of running corruption-free governments that did whatever they could to improve the lives of working-class people.” 

That sounds nice. It would be good for the Big Apple if Mamdani delivered on this ideal. Indeed, if the Democrats who run our nation’s cities focused on good government, it would be good for their constituents, their party’s political fortunes, and the nation as a whole, which is harmed when Leftists such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson run our cities into the ground. But an outbreak of good government via urban socialism is not going to happen, no matter how much credulous liberals such as Dionne want to believe.

The first barrier is ideological. Socialism has changed since the early 20th century days that Dionne pines for. It is not about taking from the haves to give to the have-nots anymore (if it ever was). Rather, today’s socialism is an amalgamation of woke ideology, from intersectionality to anti-colonialism. Its advocates don’t care about sewers in working-class neighborhoods nearly as much as they do about climate change and letting sex offenders into the girls’ locker room. Today’s Left will enthusiastically take food from poor kids to pressure schools into implementing the rainbow agenda.

The result is an incoherent agenda that will hurt those whom Mamdani claims to want to help. For example, because socialism views excellence with suspicion, he wants to eliminate gifted programs for young public-school students. This will do nothing to advance the interests of the working class; it will only sabotage the chances of bright kids whose parents cannot afford private school tuition. Likewise, his antipathy toward law enforcement will undermine his signature initiatives, such as free busses. It is not just that “free” busses will, by his own estimate, cost taxpayers billions, but that people will avoid them because the Left refuses to enforce the laws that keep public spaces safe.

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Mamdani Vows To Shut Down Rikers Island, Release Almost 8K Criminals

If New York City voters elect Muslim democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, they will come to appreciate H.L. Mencken’s maxim that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The latest on the far-far-far left radical goes well beyond raising taxes on whites, providing free day care and bus transportation, and, famously, “seizing the means of production.”

Last night, during the final mayoral debate against independent candidate and former Governor Andrew Cuomo and radio talker and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, Mamdani vowed again to shut down the Rikers Island prison facility in 2027, as city law requires. The problem: Other jails cannot be built before the deadline.

Result: Almost 8,000 dangerous criminals would be loosed upon the city. Not that Mamdani would care. Aside from the other communist ideas he espouses, he would also abolish jails and prisons.

Rikers Island is a 413-acre property with 12 facilities, almost all the city’s jails. In 2019, the city passed a law to close the facility and replace it with jails in four of the city’s five boroughs. That was a pipe dream, and now, the deadline for shuttering Rikers looms.

Answering a debate moderator’s question about it, Cuomo said “you cannot close Rikers in 2027 because there’s no place to put the people unless you’re going to release 7,000 people.” Noting that Mamdani would release them, Cuomo added that “I’m not going to release 7,000 criminals into New York.”

Releasing the criminals is the Democratic Socialists’, and therefore Mamdani’s, policy, Cuomo said. The former Empire State governor would build new jails on the island.

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The GOP’s ‘Capitalism’ is Central Planning with MAGA Branding

When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) lashed out at last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies soon to arrive on Washington’s National Mall, he reached for an old conservative refrain: “They hate capitalism. They hate our free enterprise system.”

I am sure he’s correct about some of the protesters. But the message rings hollow coming from a party leader that stands by as President Donald Trump does precisely what Johnson rightly decries: substituting political control for market choice and ruling by executive order.

Indeed, what began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control. Take a look.

Recently, the Trump administration quietly converted CHIPS Act subsidies into an $8.9 billion equity purchase in Intel, making Washington a 10 percent owner of one of America’s largest technology companies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists “this is not socialism.” That’s semantics.

Socialism is government control of the means of production. When the government becomes your largest shareholder, that’s a strong first step.

The Intel case offends two basic economic truths. First, no group of officials can ever know enough to guide a complex industry better than millions of private investors, engineers, and consumers spending their own money. Second, the power to “partner” with business is the power to control it.

The more political capital the government invests, the more it demands in return. It’s only a matter of time until politically favored locations, suppliers, or hiring quotas shape Intel’s decisions. That isn’t capitalism.

The administration has taken shares in companies before, and it likely will again. In July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, considered the only fully operating rare-earth mine of scale in the U.S. The deal guarantees a 10-year price floor for MP output at nearly double the current market rate. MP competitors were rightly shocked.

Yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told CNBC that Washington will continue to “set price floors” and “forward-buy” commodities “across a range of industries” to encourage more investments into U.S. production and away from China.

While this may encourage more U.S. investments in the short term, guaranteeing an unfair advantage over competitors by setting a minimum price reduces American companies’ long-run incentives to innovate and produce better output. Economists have understood for more than a century what happens when the government fixes prices above their market level: Buyers purchase less, sellers produce more, surpluses pile up and waste follows. It’s the logic of failed farm-price support in the 1930s.

There are far better options than schemes like these. As for those rare-earth minerals, the U.S. sits on billions of dollars’ worth, yet MP is almost alone in extracting them. That’s in part because excessive regulation keeps the potential locked underground, deterring investment in innovative mining solutions, processing plants, magnet factories, and the skilled workforce needed to turn our geological abundance into economic value. Deregulation is the free-market way. Mimicking the Chinese model isn’t.

If that’s not enough, the administration has nationalized all but in name the company called U.S. Steel. To approve its market-driven purchase by Nippon Steel, Trump required a “golden share,” giving him veto power over plant closures, production levels, investments, even pricing. The White House effectively dictates how U.S. Steel can operate inside the United States.

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The Charlie Kirk Hysteria Is a Blueprint for Future Political Chaos

Despite their stark differences, both partisan reactions stemmed from deeply held beliefs expressed with intense emotion. Many of these beliefs concerned the biggest threats facing the United States. The mainstream right-wing reaction generally reflected a narrative familiar to their worldview: the evil left killed Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, left-wing indifference and celebration reflected their worldview: that Charlie Kirk was a Nazi, and MAGA is largely a collection of evil fascists.

The reactions to the assassination have settled down—for now. But the collective reactivity it triggered is cause for both concern and curiosity and applies to far more than his murder. Such volatile emotions and behavior will undoubtedly flare up again as current events grow increasingly inflammatory and polarized. Because this dynamic will inevitably play out again, it is vital to understand what made it so explosive.

One way to understand the collective chaos in response to Kirk’s death and many other dramatic events comes from a book that inspired one of America’s top propagandists, Edward Bernays. Bernays helped engineer public support for World War I, lent his talents to promoting and sanitizing a CIA-backed coup while working for the United Fruit Company, and wrote openly about the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses.”

“The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion”

The Crowd by Gustav Le Bon, written in 1895, explores crowd psychology, analyzing the hivemind and herd-like behavior of collective groups. In a chapter called “The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion,” Le Bon discussed how “leaders” can program beliefs, sentiments, and behaviors into collective groups. He explained how leaders can “stir up a crowd for a short space of time, to induce it to commit an act of any nature,” cautioning that “the crowd must be acted upon by rapid suggestion.” While rapid suggestion is key, Le Bon stressed that “it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared” to react in the way the leaders desire.

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Massive SCOTUS Case Could Guarantee House Control For GOP

The Supreme Court took a second look at a case that could result in handing the Republican Party guaranteed control of the House of Representatives last week, and initial reports suggest a major ruling is on the horizon. If the highest court in the land strikes down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, the GOP’s hold over the House could become insurmountable.

Reports say that if Section 2 is removed, which has been interpreted previously as requiring the creation of majority-minority districts, the Republican Party could toss out a dozen Democratic-held districts in the South.

It all started when a group of voters challenged a 2024 congressional map by claiming that it pushes unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. This means the map sorts voters based on their race, which is a violation of the 14th Amendment.

The court heard two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments, with conservative justices signaling they are most likely going to undermine a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, though they might not strike it down completely.

“Wednesday’s oral argument was the latest chapter in a dispute that dates back to 2022, when Louisiana adopted a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. Roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black, but the 2022 map had only one majority-Black district out of the six districts allotted to the state. That prompted a group of Black voters to go to federal court, where they argued that the 2022 map violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination in voting practices,” SCOTUS Blog reported.

U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2. She then forbade the state from using this particular map in future elections and ordered the state to create a new map featuring two majority-Black districts.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit supported that ruling. It then gave the state until January 15, 2024, to produce a new map; otherwise, the lower court would develop a plan for the 2024 elections.

Louisiana then created a new map that created a second majority-Black district. Complaints came forward from a group of voters who referred to themselves as “non-African American.” A three-judge federal district court ruled that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, as it sorted voters based on race. The court banned the state from using the map in future elections.

“In May 2024, the Supreme Court put the three-judge district court’s ruling on hold, which allowed the state to move forward with using the new map in the 2024 elections. Voters in the 6th District, the new majority-Black district, elected Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s, to represent them,” SCOTUS Blog writes.

Louisiana and the Black voters then appealed to the Supreme Court, which listened to oral arguments for the first time since spring. The state stated that once the lower courts determined the 2022 map likely violated the VRA, it directed the state to redraw a map with a second majority-Black district. State Republicans’ primary goal was to provide protection for the state’s GOP incumbents, such as Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who is an active member of the House Appropriations Committee.

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After Years of Calling Everyone Else Hitler, Democrats Suddenly Excuse Their Candidate’s Nazi Tattoo

The Democratic Party has spent the better part of a decade finding “Nazi dog whistles” in the most innocuous of places, including a blue jeans ad featuring Sydney Sweeney.

If you ask them, they’ll gladly tell you that Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump are just like Hitler. Robert De Niro thinks Trump advisor Stephen Miller, a Jew, is a Nazi. Back when President Trump nominated Pete Hegseth for Secretary of War, the Left made a big point of claiming his Christian tattoos were actually symbols of “white supremacy” and — you guessed it — Nazism.

But suddenly, Nazi imagery doesn’t seem to matter quite so much to Democrats. Not now that Graham Platner, a Democrat running to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, revealed he had a rather large Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest.

Platner’s excuse was that he was inebriated and on shore leave, and Democrats have spent the past 48 hours dismissing the troublesome ink as a distraction from the campaign. Even Bernie Sanders said it wasn’t a big deal. We doubt he’d be so blase about a Republican sporting such body art.

It’s one thing to think you’re getting the Chinese character for “peace” tattooed on your bicep. It’s another to get a literal Nazi skull inked on your chest.

As to the comment about “s**tposting” online, Democrats spent years pushing cancel culture on those young men.

An “authentic working-class party” would not want to be represented by someone like Platner and his Nazi tats. Then again, Vigeland is also the person who laughed at the traumatic brain injury inflicted on a teenage volleyball player by a “trans girl,” so perhaps she’s not the best judge of character.

But Vigeland wasn’t the only one. Journalist Ryan Grim is fine with Democrats embracing guys like Platner, too.

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