Tag: politics

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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U.S. Senate Candidate in Nebraska Claims to be an Independent But is Being Bankrolled by Prominent Democrats

Dan Osborn is a candidate for U.S. Senate in the state of Nebraska and he claims to be an independent, yet he is being funded by donations from major Democrats in various parts of the country and is using the far left portal Act Blue.

It looks as though the left is trying to put one over on the American people by disguising a candidate as something that he isn’t and hiding the truth. It’s an incredibly dishonest and cynical move.

Of course, the liberal media is playing right along. Almost every report describes Osborn as an independent.

FOX News reports:

National Dems bankroll campaign of ‘fake independent’ Senate candidate from Midwestern state

Labor Union leader Dan Osborn, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, has campaigned on being an “Independent,” going as far as saying he has no plans to caucus with either major party if elected, but his recent FEC filings paint a different picture.

Osborn has not only been endorsed by leaders of the Nebraska Democratic Party and mobilized fundraising on ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s main fundraising platform. He has also accepted donations from several prominent Washington Democrats and Democrat political action committees.

Among the donors to his campaign are the campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the PACs of former Democrat senators Bob Kerrey and Jon Tester. Democracy Summer, a leadership PAC founded by Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, also donated $2,000.

The latest FEC filings, released last week, also show Osborn continues to accept fundraising support from The People United, a left-wing super PAC that has supported Democrat ‘Squad’ members like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Summer Lee and Ilhan Omar.

“As an independent, I’ll be uniquely positioned to bring together a majority to get it done,” Osborn’s “Where I Stand” webpage on his campaign website states in reference to securing the border from illegal immigration. “I believe we all have more in common with each other than we do with the partisans who run Washington.”

Back in March, Bernie Sanders recommended this exact strategy. He told progressive candidates that they should run as independents.

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FEMA politically discriminated against Americans under Biden: Report

Reports of FEMA disaster assistance teams in 2024 bypassing homes displaying signs supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump were true and were indicative of a pattern tracing back to Hurricane Ida in 2021, says an internal probe by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, the 22-page analysis made available Tuesday says the Federal Emergency Management Agency violated the Privacy Act of 1974, treated individuals unfairly based on political beliefs, and these actions stemmed from systemic issues in FEMA policies, processes and practices.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said evidence is clear of “textbook political discrimination against Americans in crisis.”

“The federal government,” Noem said, “was withholding aid against Americans in crisis based on their political beliefs – this should horrify every American, regardless of political persuasion. For years, FEMA employees under the Biden administration intentionally delayed much-needed aid to Americans suffering from natural disasters on purely political grounds.

“They deliberately avoided houses displaying support for President Trump and the Second Amendment, illegally collected and stored information about survivors’ political beliefs, and failed to report their malicious behavior. We will not let this stand.”

Matt Taibbi was first to report the investigation’s conclusion on Monday. The Center Square on Monday was unsuccessful in obtaining a copy of the report before the Tuesday morning national release.

Evidence examined by the Privacy Office of Homeland Security included screenshots of FEMA’s tool to collect and maintain information for the purpose of disaster survivor assistance. The report says, “The entries within the tool clearly showed that canvassers included information related to political party affiliation, campaign signs, and other information that may be considered First Amendment-protected freedom of expression within the free-text notes section.”

And, it said, “In several instances, canvassers’ records indicate that canvassers skipped homes and left no disaster assistance flyers, citing the First Amendment-protected activity.”

A map of the United States includes instances in eight states between 2021 and 2024, with the testimony to Congress quote of former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell above it. She said, “I do not believe that this employee’s actions are indicative of any widespread cultural problems at FEMA.”

Marn’i Washington, fired from her position as a disaster survivor assistance crew leader for FEMA, on the Nov. 11 edition of the Roland Martin Unfiltered Daily Digital Show had confirmed homes skipped. She said it happened at homes not only with signs for Trump but also for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

She said it happened in Florida and the Carolinas. Hurricane Milton was one of three hurricanes to hit Florida in 66 days, and another was Helene that ravaged Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – the most deaths and mostly costly damage coming in North Carolina.

On the Homeland Security report’s map, two notations for North Carolina include instances in October and November last year. The first says, “The survivor had a sign that read NRA, we do our part,” and the second said, “Survivor stated that homes have been damaged, but there are Republicans on the grounds with guns, so please be careful.”

A dot for Florida from October says, “Trump sign, no contact per leadership.” Another dot for November said, “There was a political flyer so I didn’t leave a FEMA brochure.”

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NY lawmakers claim Hochul is targeting them for ongoing probe into alleged $11B Medicaid program scandal

State lawmakers are accusing Gov. Kathy Hochul of retaliating against them for continuing a probe into mounting claims her administration rigged the contract for a massive $11 billion Medicaid homecare program.

State Sens. Jim Skoufis (D-Orange) and Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) plan to send a letter Tuesday demanding Hochul’s administration turn over evidence surrounding bid rigging and other allegations centering on her overhaul of the $11 billion per year Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program.

While the lawmakers were finalizing plans to move the investigation forward last week, Hochul took the unusual step of vetoing several of Skoufis’ bills, including one that would reimburse pharmacies for consulting patients on abortion procedures.

The Hudson Valley lawmaker, who shocked many with his full-throated attacks on Hochul during this year’s budget votes, accused the Democratic governor of vetoing his bills as payback for pushing the probe.

“The Governor wanted me to suppress critical information related to the CDPAP investigation, plain and simple. Kathy Hochul is barking up the wrong tree if she’s looking for a hack to shamelessly cover for her administration,” Skoufis said.

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Journalist Exposes More Proof That FEMA Workers Collected Information About Politics of Disaster Victims

Following the disaster of Hurricane Milton, there were multiple reports throughout the affected areas in the south that FEMA workers were politicizing the response by skipping over homes that displayed Trump signs.

It’s maddening to think that such a thing could happen in the United States.

Following these reports, there were denials from some FEMA people while some pointed fingers at others claiming they were told this was official policy. In short, it mess and some people were fired.

Now the journalist Matt Taibbi has exposed more proof that this was happening.

From Racket News on Substack:

Exclusive: FEMA Workers Improperly Collected Data About Politics of Disaster Victims

Last November 8th, on the Saturday after Election Day, one of the more bizarre post-scripts to Donald Trump’s re-election emerged in the form of a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) decision to sideline one official accused of telling FEMA workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump” while canvassing for victims of Hurricane Milton in Florida. The Daily Wire spoke to multiple FEMA officials who produced screenshots of entries like “Trump sign, no contact per leadership”…

A year later, the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security is releasing a review of that episode, the broader issue of using disaster relief work to collect political intelligence on voters, and the potentially withholding of benefits from some with the wrong beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new administration found more than just one “isolated incident,” describing violations of the Privacy Act of 1974, which with a few exceptions bars collection of information about First Amendment-protected speech, like political signage. Most tellingly, though, DHS investigators found — in a near-exact parallel to trends in pro-censorship programs — that a lot of the political controversy surrounding FEMA aid grew out of the vague way in which the agency’s Disaster Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide was written…

Some examples cited: October, 2021: “Homeowner had sign stated… this is Trump country.” September, 2021: “A lot of political flags, posters, etc. ‘Fuck Joe Biden,’ ‘MAGA 2024,’ ‘Joe Biden Sucks’ ‘Trump 2024’ We do not recommend anyone visiting this location.” November 2024: ‘There was a political flyer so I didn’t leave a FEMA brochure.” Neither Criswell nor Washington responded to requests for comment.

It’s just stunning that this even happened at all.

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Pardoned Capitol rioter arrested for allegedly threatening to murder Hakeem Jeffries

A pardoned Capitol rioter has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries while he spoke at a New York event.

Christopher Moynihan, 34, allegedly said in a text that he would “eliminate” the Brooklyn Democrat during his Monday speech at the Economic Club of New York, according to a court filing seen by CBS News.

“Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” Moynihan, who was pardoned nine months ago by President Trump, allegedly wrote in the message.

“Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated,” he also allegedly stated, according to the filing. “I will kill him for the future.”

Force investigation on a felony charge of making a terroristic threat. He is due in court in Dutchess County, NY, on Thursday, court filings show.

He was arraigned in local court in Clinton, NY, and remanded to the Dutchess County Justice and Transition Center “in lieu of $10,000 cash bail, a $30,000 bond, or an $80,000 partially secured bond,” state troopers said in a statement.

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