In this exclusive interview, Jon analyzes his own blind spots and complains that fringe candidates are becoming the face of the Democratic Party, further alienating voters outside of deeply-blue, highly-educated, liberal urban bubbles. He is a vocal critic of the socialist DSA wing and candidates like Graham Platner.

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Jon agrees that identity politics have been a disaster for both parties. Republicans lose when they pander to Black voters and win when they are just normal Republicans who serve Black constituents well. Democrats on the other hand have slowly lost Black men by pandering to anti-police activism.

Then I asked Jon to analyze the party’s adherence to gender ideology, and we found our point of disagreement. He has not been radicalized on the issue (‘peak trans’). He still believes that “actual transgender people” need special rights. And like many Democrats, he discounts the valence of social issues at election-time.

However, Jon acknowledged that, like unrestricted immigration or consumer inflation, gender ideology can have deleterious long-term effects on the Democratic coalition that are hard to see in polling data. He admits that Democrats have a hard time being normal — and he is pessimistic about the future of the party.

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Jon’s X account is here.

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Abdul Rahman Toufic Ballout, a man of Lebanese descent born in Berlin, plowed a vehicle into a crowd outside a Pride event at the Tiergarten on Saturday night. Ballout exited the vehicle, a white Citröen Space Tourer, and stabbed bystanders before fleeing the scene. One woman was reported killed and 29 people injured.

After a 20-hour manhunt, a German SWAT team found and killed Ballout at a community garden complex in the Spandau district. Officers reportedly opened fire on Ballout when he ignored orders to surrender and advanced on them holding a knife.

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Ballout was born in Berlin, but he left Germany for Lebanon in May of 2025 intending to volunteer for the Islamic State. When German officials identified Ballout as an Islamist threat, they had him arrested in Lebanon and extradited to Germany on charges of plotting terrorism.

Incredibly, Ballout was convicted for terrorism offenses in May 2026, but the court put Ballout back on the streets. He was ordered to attend a “violence prevention course” that would de-radicalize him.

Instead, Ballout carried out a jihadist attack on a Pride event. Who could have predicted that a young, impulsive, radicalized man might prefer violence, even death, to such torture?

Ballout, 21, fits the profile of the westernized ISIS recruit by having a criminal record of violence, including assault and robbery convictions as a juvenile in 2022. His sentence for threatening violence against the German state was nevertheless reduced in order to release him on probation.

The prosecution was appealing that verdict when Ballout carried out his attack. According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR, Ballout was subject to wiretapping and surveillance. It was not enough to stop him.

From the instant his name was released by authorities who were looking for Ballout, there was palpable disappointment among the targets of his hate. “I had hoped that the attacker was not a foreigner, but a white Christian person”, said one LGBTQMOUSE activist at a vigil in Berlin on Sunday. Ballout is not right wing enough to make an interesting villain for the politics of Pride.

Muslims have been the totem class of western liberal coexistence politics for a decade, while immigration from majority-Muslim countries has altered the urban progressive voting demographics of Germany and the West. In London and Manchester, in New York City and Los Angeles, in Brussels and Paris, immigrant Muslims have been a fast-growing electoral demographic since 2000.

The politics of the western metropole require Germany to ‘include’ a radical Shi’a jihadi in the social fabric of the nation. He is however a poor fit with Christopher Street Day (CSD), which is named after the site of the Stonewall Inn in New York City where riots against police raids touched off the gay rights movement.

First held in West Berlin in 1979, rather than Communist East Berlin, CSD became the local Pride event — and a good example of how such a social phenomenon can only happen in the liberal West. No Pride event ever takes place in Beirut.

In 2025, Berlin organizers publicly reported a shortfall of about €200,000 in donations as corporate sponsors pulled back their support, leading to calls for increased public support. Try to imagine the governments in Tehran, Cairo, or Riyadh being asked to pay for a Pride parade.

The truth is that, no matter how many Queers For Palestine show up at western Pride events, there will never be a Gaza Pride. Islamists frequently use the left to take power (see: Iran), but they do not adopt the western lifestyle freedoms that the left values, and then Islamists are happy to liquidate leftists once they are in power themselves (see: Iran).

Gay liberation was achieved a generation ago across the western world. It is a wholly western value, however, and incompatible with Islamist values. That dissonance is eroding the hold of leftist politics on homosexuals.

According to a survey by the Romeo dating app, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has the highest support of any German political party among gay users, with the strongest plurality among the youngest voters.

In fact, the numbers exceed the AfD’s contemporaneous national polling, which is now in the high teens to the low 20s across all voting demographics. The AfD’s openly lesbian co-leader Alice Weidel belies the assumption that ‘right wing’ or ‘conservative’ is inherently homophobic.

The phenomenon has been dubbed ‘homonationalism’ or ‘homo-nativism’. It is a response to the outrages of poor immigration control and the erosion of public safety and social trust.

The cultural preservation of gay liberation is prioritized over traditional left-liberal positions, with the enforcement of national boundaries as a key concern for gay rights.

Many homosexuals are already alienated by the focus on gender ideology at Pride; they see it as a distraction from real threats to established rights that the left refuses to recognize.

German media and victim-support organizations have reported a rise in cases of immigrant men who arrange meetings with gay Germans using dating apps only to ambush, rob, assault, and humiliate them while recording their homophobic crimes.

This is all happening amid the broader decline of Pride events worldwide. Berlin CSD is hardly the only Pride event that has struggled to close funding gaps in the last two years as corporations dial back their donations to a cause that is increasingly at odds with the needs of their brands.

Islamist attacks on Pride events will have the effect of increasing the perceived risks in attending, sponsoring, or otherwise associating with Pride events. For political Islam, shutting down the decadent western sinfest is secondary to the goal of disrupting western civil society in general.

For the political left across the West, the project of importing Muslim voters is increasingly at odds with the achievements of gay liberation. The result is a growing partisan dissonance and the gradual unlocking of a small, but indicative voting demographic.

In the United States, Vice President J.D. Vance has said that “I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won, just, the normal gay guy vote, because they just wanted to be left the hell alone.” The alphabetical mafia attacked him, of course, but they were whistling past the graveyard.

‘Islamophobia’ stops being an effective word to use against political opponents once a people begins to fear the effects of mass Muslim immigration. It won’t take many more Abdul Ballouts for an actual majority of gay Germans to figure out they are only ever ‘left the hell alone’ inside of a strong, secure, western civilization.

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The Odyssey needs a solid second weekend to stay on course for the billion-dollar destination that Hollywood believes it deserves, right now. Director Christopher Nolan may not be the hero they needed, though.

The dismal economics of cinema mean that a film which grosses $303 million globally — raking in $163.6 million in domestic receipts and $140.2 million from overseas markets — reduces to about $140 million in net profit.

The Odyssey had a good opening weekend, but it must keep having good weekends (‘legs’) to reach profitability. It cost a reported $250 million to produce. Universal Pictures spent an estimated $125 million on marketing. Nolan has a reported $100 million payday coming out of gross receipts.

Movies do not really make money until they double their combined production and marketing budgets by taking a portion of each ticket. It is not an exaggeration to say that The Odyssey must actually make a billion dollars this way to be profitable. The journey is hardly over.

Getting to an actual billion will be more arduous than fans of the film expect. Dangers lie ahead in the form of collapsing box office returns, mixed word-of-mouth, and the limits of cinephile interest.

Nolan has his fans — millions of them — and some of them will see it twice. Many will buy one IMAX ticket and see it once, however. To have ‘legs’, the movie probably needed to be better than it reportedly is. It needs to keep them coming back, and keep new people coming in. That is the drama, now.

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I have not seen the film. I do not intend to see it in an IMAX theatre. A film should not be judged on its technical stunts or its stunt casting. Outlets rejoicing that ‘woke’ has made a comeback are balanced by conservatives claiming the film is secretly subversive of western decline.

Rather than a consensus, the first weekend produced a cacophony of opinions that broke political boundaries. Politics are the least interesting aspect of a work of art, however.

When creators make politics their script, the film becomes boring and pedantic. Characters cease making sense and start defying expectations instead. This is the essence of ‘woke’ storytelling, and Nolan does not do that kind of storytelling.

In 2023, I said that Greta Gerwig’s failures as a political philosopher were her triumphs as a director, and the same is likely true of Nolan, based on descriptions of the film.

“Barbenheimer”, the cinematic two-punch phenomenon of Gerwig’s Barbie and Nolan’s Oppenheimer, demonstrated the mass appeal of films that are entertaining despite their deconstructions.

The criticisms of The Odyssey that intrigue me are not about the race of any actress. Elliot Page has been described as an uncanny valley that takes people out of the story, so I am prepared for this hiccup.

A more interesting point is how the casting, which is sure to win an Oscar, resembles the Los Angeles culture that has reproduced itself onscreen in other ways that utterly transform the narrative.

Matt Damon apparently plays Ulysses as a victim of PTSD on Calypso’s couch, with Charlize Theron as his chemical therapist. It is a curse of our time that diagnosis has become identity.

Christopher Nolan’s use of history and realism is selective. He eschewed an orchestra because those did not exist in the Bronze Age, but used a Viking longboat to shoot the scenes at sea instead of a characteristically Greek vessel of the period.

Laestrygonians appear in steel plate armor from the Renaissance. Myceneans wear helmets and armor from the wrong period of Greek history. Nolan is an auteur; he does what he wants with history, archaeology, and myth like a child combining toys from a dozen different brands in their play.

All the resources for this film went into casting and shooting. The raw IMAX film stock alone accounts for approximately $3 million of the total budget for The Odyssey. Nolan used over 2 million feet (roughly 379 miles) of physical 70mm IMAX negative, making history with the first feature film ever shot entirely in the format.

He used a $500,000 custom-built “Keighley” IMAX camera with an acoustic enclosure to shoot the film in three-minute clips. Anyone who has ever worked on a movie set will appreciate how excruciating that is.

Like many Americans, I will not be seeing this film in Nolan’s intended format because it is 30-50 percent more expensive than a ticket to see a regular feature film. We have been conditioned to wait for streaming, now. Many of us will wait.

In the meantime, the higher ticket price of IMAX seats means that fewer people are actually buying tickets to see Nolan’s Odyssey than it seems.

“Assuming the average ticket sold was an IMAX ticket at approximately $25, that translates to roughly 4.98 million admissions”, WDW Pro explains.

“If those same 4.98 million moviegoers had instead purchased standard-format tickets averaging $16.67 each, the domestic opening weekend would have generated approximately $83.0 million rather than $124.5 million.”

Toy Story 5 sold more actual tickets than The Odyssey in its opening weekend. An argument already exists for box office results to be reported in tickets sold rather than gross receipts, and The Odyssey has intensified those calls for reform.

Social media is abuzz with charges that Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, which it owns, are falsely showing app users packed theatres and selective reviews. Studio intolerance of fair use by YouTube creators has been complete, dinging them for copyright claims on every clip.

Despite intense online image curation by the studio, the overall audience impression has been mixed, to say the least. Many enjoy it, including Ben Shapiro, who is allowed to have a fun time watching a movie.

Others were unimpressed, and they are allowed their criticisms. The point, again, is that Nolan has not united the audience behind his film. He has rather divided a middling mass audience that paid premium ticket prices in the first weekend.

Americans did not ask to see a foundational hero of the western canon reduced to a trauma patient. My impression is that Nolan’s choice to have his diversity cast speak in modern accents immerses the viewer in his own world rather than ancient Greece.

His controversial decisions to remove the gods from the story and strip out the hero’s journey either do, or do not, balance the spectacle, according to the individual moviegoer. That is not a cultural watershed by any definition. It is a debate.

Nolan cannot even unite the ‘woke’ behind his film. Postmodernists are put off by his post-postmodernism. He reportedly followed the controversial translation of Emily Wilson in developing his script. Wilson however has criticized Nolan for his focus on the “shame” of Odysseus over his “glory.”

“The film certainly presents us with an Odysseus who feels very bad about certain things he’s done in war and is struggling to process them in a very modern psychiatrized way,” Wilson said.

“He’s struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so. And he seems to feel bad about being a warrior and we never get to see him doing much warrioring.” She did not like the film.

Everyone has something they dislike. Indeed, the single most disappointing glimpse I have seen is a two-second clip of Matt Damon shooting his great bow, the one that only Ulysses is strong and wily enough to draw, with all the vigor and enthusiasm of dad plinking his kids with Nerf darts in the backyard for the hundredth time today.

Poor stage combat direction is of a piece with critiques of the visuals. Christopher Nolan is notoriously awful at sound direction, too. Several commentators have complained that much of the dialogue is lost in the mixing.

There are many reasons why someone who is woke might not like the film, and just as many reasons why someone who loathes wokeness might like it, and plenty of reactions in between.

My overall impression of the discourse around this film is that by the time the next IMAX release hits in mid-August, the film’s legs might not be long enough to put the budget in the black.

Then Dune III is likely to have a huge IMAX opening in December, just in time for Academy Awards season. Comparisons are inevitable, so the discourse around The Odyssey is hardly finished.

Elon Musk apparently wants to give Mel Gibson $100 million to make a more faithful adaptation of Homer. Musk also says that Grok generative AI will be able to create an alternative adaptation.

The debate over Nolan’s film promises to be a long, adventurous, arduous, and eventful journey filled with significant hardships and changes in perspective: an odyssey in itself. Fill your ears with wax or else tie yourself to the mast, for we are all destined to sail past the sirens of culture war for a while, yet.

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“Bruce set the story in a land that never was and always is,” a title card informs us at the opening of the 1978 film Circle of Iron. Unfolding as a series of Zen koans, the movie is ostensibly a …

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During a hearing by the House Oversight Committee yesterday, Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas grilled Anthea M. Hartig, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History since 2019. She is the tenth director in the history of the museum and its first female director since it opened in 1964.

Like the Smithsonian itself, the history of American desegregation began with decisions by President Eisenhower and culminated with President Johnson in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The prohibition of race-based hiring in all federal employment is exactly the same age as the institution. White supremacy has never shaped the Smithsonian or been part of the internal culture.

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At least, not until the last several years. “Ma’am, are you a white supremacist?” Rep. Gill asked Hartig, who denied it. “Can you help me square why your organization says that being polite is part of being a white supremacist?” Gill asked. Hartig was caught up by her initial agreement with Rep. Gill that politeness is a social good. This seemingly innocuous point shows how contentious the MASS Action (Museum As Site for Social Action) toolkit has been.

Developed by woke museum curators during 2017, the toolkit is pseudoscholarship. It draws on a knowledge base of progressive email forwards from 1999. I am not joking about this. The idea that politeness comes from ‘white supremacy culture’ originated with an exasperated rant by activist Tema Okun.

“White Supremacy Culture”, her essay, cites no research. Okun listed the supposed traits of white supremacy culture within organizations and ended up listing the characteristics of successful professional organizations, the real origin of her frustrations. Okun complains that whites use etiquette as an excuse to avoid difficult conversations, primarily around race, which is something only an activist would ever say.

In the world of self-important progressives, this is called problematizing. The activist wants to radicalize the rest of society by revealing underlying, hidden structures of power and meaning. Rep. Gill presented Hartig with examples of the Smithsonian problematizing American history and cultural curation. It was a short, sharp, and incisive five minutes that ended with the question: “Are you a white supremacist?” Watch Rep. Gill problematize the Smithsonian:

Hartig denied responsibility for creating the MASS toolkit. It is in fact the creation of an activist organization called “The Incluseum”, a name that speaks to its origins in the febrile post-Ferguson era of Black Lives Matter. Mike Murawski, who co-founded Museums Are Not Neutral, rejects the idea that museums should be neutral. We have to uproot the white supremacy from the museums, which requires us to get rid of the objectivity. His toolkit should not have been used by the Smithsonian for internal training.

“White supremacy thrives within this tyranny of the universal, the neutral, the apolitical, the fair and balanced, and the objective”, Murawski has written. “Acknowledging that museums are not neutral is a meaningful and urgent step toward gaining awareness of the powerful role that these forces play within these institutions.”

We must radicalize the institutions first, then remove the white supremacy that surely inhabits them. That way, the curation will achieve historical equities, much like jihadis smashing archaeological treasures achieve historical equities. Equity, decolonization, and social justice are key concerns of the MASS toolkit. Museum visitors will be radicalized into undermining the white supremacy everywhere by “questioning it, interrupting it, and being a part of taking transformative action to replace it.”

The solutions for white supremeness are suggested in its supposed characteristics. Laziness and irresponsibility are anti-whiteness, while foresight, planning, endurance, and independence are racism. Being on time is racism. Being married to your baby’s momma is racism. Boundaries are racist, criminality is anti-whiteness. The western canon must be abolished, Bowdlerized, Chris Nolanized. Science is racist against Native American beliefs. It’s all there.

Objectivity is the greatest of sins in the world of progressive Puritanism. Despite its pretensions to philosophy, or perhaps because of them, the MASS toolkit becomes the inversion of what it attempts to deconstruct. It is the outcry of people raised in a national culture shaped by Christian Protestant tradition who reject that tradition, and enact its worst impulses in the rejection. One of these is the prohibition of questioning, which might loosen the grip of a wrong idea from someone’s mind, allowing them to see history from an objective point of view.

Emotion and intimacy are meant to overcome good sense. Ferguson is an example of the progressive appeal to sentiment in advance of knowledge. Michael Brown never once put his hands up or said “Don’t shoot”. He was violent, aggressive, and attempted to take a police officer’s gun. According to the MASS toolkit and its creators, however, what we feel about his death is more important than any forensic evidence that Brown died of poor impulse control and criminal misbehavior.

Objectivity is just one of the goals of historical research and writing. Narrative is another, and tension always exists between the two goals. Read any book of history and there will be a story told. The best histories make the best use of objective facts to tell a story. A history of feelings will never be objective, though. Much of the modern progressive education system is geared to keep the kids in their feels with “Social Emotional Learning” so they adopt this value-system. Radical museum curators want to do the same with museums.

Gill started his questions by asking Hartig if the goal of history is to be objective. Hartig affirmed the Smithsonian strives for objectivity and nonpartisanship. Then Gill highlighted that the toolkit lists objectivity as a core aspect of white supremacy culture, and asked Hartig whether the Smithsonian promotes that culture. Hartig tried again to dodge accountability for the toolkit, which her institution’s staff used for trainings under her leadership in 2019-2020.

Rep. Gill had more current examples in mind, however. “Is Mickey Mouse racist?” After Hartig said no, he referenced a Smithsonian exhibit linking Mickey Mouse to “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy.” He followed up on whether that is racist. Is Mickey Mouse rooted in racism, or minstrelsy? The historical answer is a purely aesthetic one. If Cleopatra can be black, Mickey Mouse can be a white man mocking black people. Cultural vandalism can be institutionalized.

Then Gill confronted Hartig with “Latina Power” merchandise on the shelves at the Smithsonian gift shop. Hartig had to explain what it meant and answer whether it was appropriate. She defended the museum store for reflecting the richness and diversity of the community. Rep Gill did not follow up with the obvious implication that ‘White Girl Power’ merchandize would be instantly denounced as racist. The museum instead has double standards, which is also racist.

The only way that Anthea Hartig and the Smithsonian can stop being white supremacy culture is by ending their curation of ‘white supremacy culture’ as a legitimate idea. It has no foundation, least of all in the Smithsonian itself. Mickey Mouse never had to be problematized. It was a choice made by cultural and historical vandals doing politics.

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You can find Gerald Posner’s X account here.

His books are available at this Amazon link.

Here is his Substack.

Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

News and fact-driven analysis from a bestselling author and award-winning investigative reporter the Chicago Tribune described as “a merciless pit bull of an investigator.”

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CNN is reporting on a “midterm war” in the Democratic Party over the rise of Democratic Socialism.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York reportedly confronted Sen. Bernie Sanders over his “meddling” in a primary challenge against Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina during a recent phone call.

“He seemed to not care,” said Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, “a Jeffries ally” on that call. I believe Rep. Meeks because Sanders really does not care about black representation in Congress. Sanders wants Democratic Socialism represented in Congress. It can come in any color, for him.

Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, the first Muslim woman elected to office in North Carolina, was endorsed by Sanders, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, and the Working Families Party.

Foushee won the March primary by a single percentage point. It was just one of several races in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party challenged the ‘old guard’, which just happens to include the old Democratic Party coalition.

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The youth vanguard of Democratic Socialism is led mainly by immigrant populations, these days. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Hindu, comes to mind. So does Allam, or Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate, both Muslims.

Demographic displacement is not only painful, but unpopular. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for El-Sayed in Detroit last week. About three-quarters of the city’s population is black. Fox News reporter David Marcus found only around 100 people at the venue.

Among them were “fewer Black people than you could find at Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s restricted beach club in Rhode Island.” The Congressional Black Caucus has endorsed Haley Stevens in the race.

Marcus talked to “the spokesperson for Don Offord, the progressive running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District.”

One of the animating elements of this socialist insurgency became crystal clear, as he couldn’t stop talking about AIPAC.

“Don doesn’t take any money from AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobbying group),” Mark said proudly. I asked him if this could be a problem, not just with Jewish voters, but with moderate Democrats who support the Jewish state. A kind of shock fell over him, as if he’d never considered this, and he just refused to answer.

El-Sayed has found the limits of DSA pandering as well in Michigan, for he has distanced himself from ideological socialism while keeping the progressive economic agenda. He “believes” in a capitalism that is “regulated”. It is the DSA agenda — Medicare For All, wealth taxes, and businesses breakups — wearing a suit and tie.

This intersectional car-crash is coming into focus now because of the disaster in Maine, where Democrats are scrambling to replace Graham Platner as their challenger to incumbent Senator Susan Collins, a Republican.

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It’s time for another roundup of all the keyboard-tickling and podcastiness that I’ve been up to, lately. Next week, premium subscribers will get to hear my full interview with author and journalist Gerald Posner. Free subscribers will have to wait until August. I have also been working on a couple of short stories for premium subscribers, and one of these will publish during the first week of August. It’s going to be a good month to support the Ink.

If you are a free subscriber, you can support Osborne Ink with a premium subscription upgrade. If you are already premium subscriber, thank you for supporting this work. I’m going to finish banging out at least one more book draft this year and try to go for two. Stay tuned for other publishing announcements.

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Polemology Positions

Trump's Leveraged Buyout Of The Persian Rug Bazaar Is Happening Now, Cope With It

We are supposed to get peace in the Middle East this Friday. Actually, we are supposed to get 60 days of peace while the United States and Iran reach a deal on neutralizing the enriched uranium stockpile, so that there can be permanent peace. The Strait of Hormuz is supposed to reopen for business this week. Actually, it will take a month. At the time o…

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a month ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Pride Goeth Before A Fall In Public Approval

The collapse of Pride was already visible in 2025. In 2026, the air going out of the rainbow bubble is so visible that it cannot be denied by anyone. The most visible thing about Pride month anymore is that it passes with less fanfare, and more controversy, than ever…

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Polemology Positions

How To Cope With The Memorandum Of Misunderstanding Through Hard Power Analysis

Are you tired yet? I too am tired. Getting Iran to ‘yes’ is exhausting. The whole world is coping with the apparent outcome of ceasefire negotiations. I said it would be exhausting and I hate being right…

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Wages Are Low And 'The Rent Is Too Damn High' When Borders Are Not Enforced

Sarah Wakefield, the Green Party candidate for the Makerfield by-election in Greater Manchester, recently told BBC Question Time that it is “absolutely wild” to blame immigration for soaring housing costs…

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The Three Reasons Why The FTC Can Put WPATH On Trial For Fraud

Litigation filed this week promises to break the spell of protection that pediatric ‘gender medicine’ has enjoyed in American discourse…

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a month ago · 79 likes · 7 comments · Matt Osborne

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The Fine Art Of Assaulting Mesopotamian Walls

Kurd Qaburstan in Iraq has been identified as the ancient city of Qabara depicted in the Victory Stele of Dadusha. A new magnetometer survey of 180 acres by a team from the University of Central Florida has found a massive curtain wall with bastions surrounding the site, matching the fortifications portrayed on the stele…

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a month ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

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Dear Dad, The New York Times Hates You

Gender has become complicated now. Fatherhood is no longer something boys should aspire to, or be prepared to accept, because girls who have their breasts removed will do the fathering, from now on. Testosterone alone confers manhood. This new manhood does not pass between males, which makes it non-toxic masculinity…

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Osborne Ink

David Grusch Turns His Friend’s Tragic Overdose Into a National Security Mystery

According to David Grusch, the tragic overdose death of Matthew James Sullivan, a 39-year-old US Air Force veteran, is a national security mystery. “He passed away mysteriously”, Grusch told The Big Weekend Show on Fox News 13 June…

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a month ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

This video is available for premium subscribers of Osborne Ink. The audio is free.

The Distance

Why British Politics Cannot Save British Children from Puberty Blockers

The United Kingdom is about to have a new prime minister. Andy Burnham is in the photo above. He is standing on stage with Sarah Wakefield, the Green Party candidate for the Makerfield by-election in Greater Manchester, along with a trash bin and a fox…

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a month ago · 33 likes · Matt Osborne

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Polemology Positions

Iran Cannot Actually Close The Strait Of Hormuz

“What has taken shape in the Pakistan negotiations is fundamentally different from what was supposed to happen and from what constituted the condition for the legitimacy of the negotiations.” With those words, Iranian lawmaker Seyed Mahmoud Nabavian, an influential MP in the camp that opposes negotiations with the Great Satan, accused the government of treason against the Supreme Leader last weekend…

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a month ago · 6 likes · Matt Osborne

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Member Of Zizians Transgender Vegan Death Cult Charged With Murder Of Her Parents

Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse has charged Michelle ‘Jamie’ Zajko in the New Years Eve murders of her mother and father, Rita and Richard Zajko. Both were shot to death in Michelle’s childhood bedroom…

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Polemology Positions

George Washington And The Guns Of Monmouth

Monmouth was not a particularly large battle. In his dispatches to Congress, Gen. George Washington reported 69 dead, 161 wounded, and 140 missing from his army, most of the latter from heat exhaustion. He also reported that 249 enemy officers and men lay dead on the field. Sir Henry Cl…

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The Distance

The Cluster B Clique Just Got Famous For An 'Assault' In Seattle That Does Not Add Up

Three subjects of our previous reporting have released video of an altercation in a Seattle Park, framing themselves as victims of an unprovoked attack on detransitioners. The incident took place at a location that is famous for antifa organizing…

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a month ago · 6 likes

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Polemology Positions

Sophomore Soviet: How Gen. Zhukov Survived The Ordeal Of The Planetary Offensives

The dictator of the proletariat puffed at his pipe. Stalin was ready to take questions…

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a month ago · Matt Osborne

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Osborne Ink

Third Worldism And The Political Religion Of Our Downwardly Mobile Elites

Democrats are going full radical. To borrow a line from Kirk Lazarus, in American politics, you don’t ever go full radical…

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The Distance

Blasphemers! SCOTUS Protects Sports For Girls During The Holy Month Of Pridemadan

No, I will not be nice about this. We are many years past ‘nice’. Nor will I exhaust myself with scientific argument against unscientific arguments…

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Melat Asfawosen Kiros thinks that “Medicare is the most efficient and the most effective delivery system for health care in this country.” This is incorrect…

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The Pessimists Have Been Wrong About Iran

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The Distance

The Things That Never Or Hardly Ever Happen That Keep Happening All The Time, Now

Teha Delaruelle has been publicly repudiated by a Democratic Socialist running for Congress in Wisconsin after calling for a “trans jihad” against Republicans…

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Happy 4th Of July To Everyone Who Actually Loves America, The Land Of Economic Freedom

Zohran Mamdani knows how a desk works. He has not sat behind the desk wrong. A Washington-style desk has drawers on both sides. While this one is associated with George Washington, the style is European in origin. It’s a furnishing for an age before file cabinets and folders, which were invented a century after this style took the name of America’s firs…

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Osborne Ink

Graham Platner Used The Same App To Meet His Alleged Victim, Reconnect With His Wife

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner allegedly raped a woman. According to Politico, Jenny Racicot says Platner “forced her to have sex with him” in 2021 “despite her repeated objections”, i.e. rape…

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22 days ago · Matt Osborne

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Polemology Positions

Iran Cannot Possibly Win This War But Also Does Not Know How To Lose, Either

The United States Treasury Department revoked its waiver of sanctions on Iranian oil yesterday. CENTCOM reported strikes on “Iranian air defense systems, command and control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile capabilities, and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to con…

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20 days ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Why Does This Thing That Never Or Hardly Ever Happens Keep Happening All The Time?

Allison Howlett, a 36-year-old man, was arrested last weekend before he could carry out a threatened mass shooting…

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19 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

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Osborne Ink

The Body Keeps The Marxist Score: Queer Theory And The Christianity Of James Talarico

Roberto Henderson-Espinoza, a PhD scholar using he/they pronouns, identifies as Mestizaje, autistic, bi-polar, non-binary, transgender, and Latinx. She is all of the things, the most intersectional identity imaginable, in order to escape the “conditional whiteness” of her mixed parentage, the original sin that she rejects in herself…

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18 days ago · Matt Osborne

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Polemology Positions

Ukraine Blows The Lid Off Putin's Economy

The lids on large petroleum tanks like this one are not fixed into place. They float on the surface of the oil, sealed to the wall of the tank, so that pressure changes do not damage the structure. This one was reportedly struck by a Russian surface-to-air missile that failed to intercept a Ukrainian drone that reached Moscow. Iconic now, the images of this explosion have become a visual shorthand for Ukraine’s long-range campaign against Russian economic and military targets and the ineptitude of Russian responses…

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16 days ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

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The Distance

Dear Amnesty International, I Too Am 'Anti-Rights' That You Made Up Just Five Seconds Ago

A venerable human rights organization that has beclowned itself in gender madness has offered to become an object lesson in how human rights actually work…

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15 days ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

Robotic Warfare Comes Of Age In Crimea

On July 13, 2026, Ukraine’s 123rd Separate Territorial Defense Brigade conducted what it described as the world’s first known combat operation combining an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to land an armed unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and engage targets on the Russian-occupied shore of the Kinburn Spit…

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14 days ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Osborne Ink

Open Borders Raise The Rent: Third World Economics In The American Metropole

Manhattan median rents rose about 7 percent in the first six months of 2026 and median rent has reached a record $5,295 across New York Cit…

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11 days ago · Matt Osborne

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Polemology Positions

Trump Eyes An Escalation Strategy In Iran

The Chabahar maritime watchtower was 78 meters tall. It was constructed during the 2010s upgrades to the Shahid Beheshti terminal of Chabahar Port. Chabahar is the only deep water seaport Iran has on the Indian Ocean and it has become a regional trading hub. It allows the regime to bypass the Strait of Hormuz…

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11 days ago · Matt Osborne

The Distance

Dear Maine Democrats, Please Nominate Ashley Webb To Replace Graham Platner

Ashley J. Webb is the author of the self-published memoir I Am Ashley. He has self-produced four albums. Twice a candidate for the New Hampshire State House in 2012 and 2020, Webb has never had significant donors in any of his various vanity campaigns…

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11 days ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

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Manhattan median rents rose about 7 percent in the first six months of 2026 and median rent has reached a record $5,295 across New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze only applies to about a million units out of the 3.7 million housing units in the metropolitan area. It has the effect of making units more scarce, hence more expensive.

Market-rate apartments are snapped up quickly these days, and quality units demand premiums, so it is a good time for the private landlords. New construction is at record levels, but it is still not fast enough because it is limited by regulation. Thus market rate housing continues to rise in cost during the rent freeze, outpacing inflation.

Overall supply is declining because landlords of ‘stabilized’ apartments do not upgrade units that will never pay back the investment. Mamdani intends to crack down on these “bad landlords” through aggressive code enforcement, organize their tenants, and place distressed properties in more responsible hands through political means.

Put simply, the communists of New York want to seize property from private landlords of rent-controlled apartments and convert it into property controlled by the Democratic Socialists of America via nonprofit entities. The result of this governance already looks like the Third World with American characteristics, and that resemblance will intensify, now.

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The future New York City will have many expensive, high-quality properties, but also lots of low-quality housing for the ‘disenfranchised’. In fact, the disenfranchised are to become the enfranchised in this scheme, a reliable voting block that keeps the DSA-Democratic Party in power in the City. By granting these people a newly-minted human right to live free of rent, the DSA will be free of responsibility to the electorate that lives in the housing provided through nonprofit entities.

The phrase ‘housing is a human right’ sounds benign, but it comes with the implication that eviction is a form of violence. The Mamdani administration is “emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of ‘business as usual’”, said one tenant organizer at a recent Mamdani event, as he stood next to her, beaming. Call it Mamdaniville, a city where the biggest single landlord is city hall. And you can’t fight city hall.

Landlords already face a legal and bureaucratic mess with squatters. It takes weeks, often months to evict a tenant that stops paying rent. Squatting has become most common in public housing, and it will become very common in Mamdanivilles, where eviction is violence, while the tenants are organized and radicalized against eviction. The phrase ‘housing justice’ leads to just free housing, at some point, in this formula.

The free housing in Mamdaniville is of course available to undocumented immigrants. Mamdani has pursued strongly pro-sanctuary, anti-cooperation policies toward federal immigration enforcement, particularly ICE, while repeatedly calling for the agency to be abolished. Eviction of the non-citizen from the United States, even the worst sort of criminal, is actual violence: this is the progressive view in the Democratic Party.

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and 2024 vice presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, recently pardoned convicted child sex abuser Tou Lue Vang, a 42-year-old Laotian national, for the express purpose of avoiding his deportation. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio deported Vang anyway, Walz questioned whether it had made Minnesota “any safer”? “Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”

Vang did not simply have a bad day. He was convicted in 2006 of a sustained pattern of conduct from January 2002 through July 2004, at least 4-6 ‘bad days’ over 2.5 years. Vang told police it was a “minor thing” and normal in his culture. If true, then his culture does not belong in the United States. If false, then Vang and Walz are both guilty of dissembling on a horrible crime — Vang to save himself, Walz to save his favored constituent. Minnesota is indeed safer without Vang in it. Minnesota would be safer without Walz in charge.

Minnesota has simultaneously hosted a blue state experiment in housing policy that underlines the risk factors in Mamdaniville economics. St. Paul implemented strict rent stabilization through a popular vote in 2021, capping rent increases at 3 percent. The city had to amend this ordinance in 2025 to ease the pressure on newer buildings most in need of upgrade to remain competitive in the local housing market.

By contrast, Minneapolis, the twin city, stuck to supply-side reforms, including eased development rules. There was no rent control. Housing stock increased by about one-eighth, or 12 percent, from 2017-2022. By contrast, St. Paul saw a 79 percent drop in apartment building permits by 2023. Development “nearly froze” in some segments, and property values fell.

Whereas Minneapolis saw rent grow at a rate below inflation, St. Paul saw greater rent increases. Mamdaniville has more in common with St. Paul than Minneapolis. Like Tim Walz’s Minnesota, Mamdaniville goes out of its way to ensure that housing is a human right for the immigrant without permission to be in the United States. This has the effect of raising rents.

New York City is providing a second natural experiment through the provision of housing that will prove this point. According to “a preliminary draft” of a new Federal Reserve working paper, the Biden administration’s open borders policy approach produced a flood of illegal immigration “unprecedented in modern times” that “acted as a housing demand shock in markets where supply was already constrained.”

Put simply, more undocumented foreigners equaled higher rent. The Biden surge of illegal immigration “can explain approximately 30% of the total increase in house prices and 20% of the total increase in rents … in the average metropolitan area between March 2021 and March 2024.”

“The Impacts of Unauthorized Immigration on U.S. Labor and Housing Markets: New Evidence from Administrative Microdata” is written in the language of economics. Authors Daniel J. Wilson and Xiaoqing Zhou are difficult to pigeonhole politically, for their findings actually dispel canards about immigration at the same time.

Wages did not decline. The authors also found a “negative effect on government transfers”, that is, the use of food stamps and other welfare services by the undocumented, for the simple reason that they lack documentation. This is what makes Third Worldist governance in the form of sanctuary cities and states so odious: the undocumented are often simply given documents, and then services.

In normal times, immigration actually reduces the cost of housing startups, which increases housing stock. However, the Biden years created “demand shock to local housing markets, boosting rents given relatively inelastic short-run housing supply” — in other words, supply did not keep up with the sudden surge in demand.

Higher rents, not lower wages, turns out to be the hidden tax of unrestricted migration into American cities from abroad.

The effect is most pronounced on multi-family units, i.e. apartments. It is most pronounced in the cities that are controlled by the communist cargo cults of our time, that have become very powerful in the blue geographic centers of metropolitan culture production.

They think of themselves as the Elect, these hip young wokesters who dominate these places. They don’t believe in laws of supply and demand. They believe in magical redistributive formulas. As a result, the cities they run tend to increasingly resemble Third World conurbations with a two-tier system of rents.

For the rich, there will always be safe, nice places to live. For everyone else, the government is the landlord of first resort, because the government is the largest single landlord in town. That might not seem bad until the mayor wants you to raise your thermostat in summertime, and life increasingly resembles Havana, or Johannesburg, or Port au Prince.

I am no economist. However, this is an interesting and ongoing historical process that will be measured and reported by economists. Do sanctuary policies raise rents? I do not have an answer, but I am keeping an eye on the question. We have natural experiments taking place in Los Angeles, New York, and Denver, where Mamdanivilles are happening. Watch this space.

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Jonni Skinner’s X account is here.

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Roberto Henderson-Espinoza, a PhD scholar using he/they pronouns, identifies as Mestizaje, autistic, bi-polar, non-binary, transgender, and Latinx. She is all of the things, the most intersectional identity imaginable, in order to escape the “conditional whiteness” of her mixed parentage, the original sin that she rejects in herself.

Her white father was so racist that he told Henderson-Espinoza, PhD to disclose her ancestry on official forms, so that she could benefit from racial preferences in education and hiring. Robyn seeks escape from this painful consciousness of her own race as Roberto. “Especially now in the war against Black and Brown bodies, embodying whiteness on my skin has been the hardest journey of my life”, she writes in Body Becoming: A Path To Our Liberation.

This self-hatred “is the radical difference I seek to be connected with — the center of my own difference: conditionally white.” These words resonated with James Talarico, the very white Democratic US Senate candidate for Texas. After connecting with his favorite theologian on X in 2021, Talarico appeared on Henderson-Espinoza’s podcast to complain that “whiteness and masculinity” have limited his imagination.

In the ensuing podcast appearance, Talarico confessed (there is no better word) that he harbored doubts about electoral politics as the solution for change in Texas. He was considering seminary, he said, because we are “running out of time” due to climate change. Henderson-Espinoza described the task of politics as “help[ing]” Republicans “have compassion”, to which Talarico reverently responded, “Yeah”.

Henderson-Espinoza uses the word “compassion” a lot in Body Becoming. She takes it to mean “suffering with” someone, an exercise in empathy. Her activism asks us all to identify with her, and then through her, to identify with everyone. “Existential and survival questions that in one sense arise out of our particularities (for example, being Latinx, queer, and biracial) are shown to be deeply important at the level of universality”, she writes in Activist Theology.

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Theology without Christ or God

“There is no theology without activism, and there is no activist without theology.” Her life is activism. Being queer, injecting queerness into the world, creates a theological “culture shift”, Henderson-Espinoza told Talarico in an uncanny, testosterone-affected voice. Nashville, her current home, was a place where she felt she could change things — not like Texas, her birth state, which “felt scary to me” as a “trans and queer person”.

Henderson-Espinoza’s theology is focused on liberation from “interlocking supremacies”, which we might mistake for mere intersectionalism. Body Becoming describes something more up-to-date than the Combahee River Collective of 1977: “a concept proliferating for some years now in Queer theory and other theories: assemblage.”

Critics of progressive intersectionalism call it the omnicause. “An assemblage is a collection of any number of things that may appear alike or different in their materiality that are gathered into a single new context or a singularity.” Achieving the progressive singularity requires a “diversity of tactics”, Henderson-Espinoza told Talarico. “I don’t believe in electoral politics but I still participate in them.”

Translation: Henderson-Espinoza does not endorse Antifa terrorism against law enforcement in the name of immigration justice. She merely excuses it, and continues to vote as a regular citizen. Radicalism and religion together will “dismantle and compost” the parts of the American system that offend her, such as capitalism. In Body Becoming, she writes of the “body politic” as a queered body that is “still becoming” in a perpetual state of self-revolution. Democracy should be “embodied rather than remaining an ecosystem of transactions.”

Think of it as ersatz Christian spirit, a substitute for the real thing. Henderson-Espinoza proposes to change the world-body of humanity by “transing religion … to methodologically dismantle the logic of the norm that grounds the reproduction of binarisms and theologies of complementarity.” You know: all that stuff about God making humans male and female. If we just get rid of it, the world will become a paradise where everyone loves communism.

If we just look past the plain text of scripture, the Bible becomes “trans-positive” and transgender people become “Easter icons”. In her books, Henderson-Espinoza does not have much to say about Jesus. Christ is merely noted as a radical bringing “militant peace” to an unjust world.

In Activist Theology, Henderson-Espinoza names her inspirations as Central American Jesuits Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino as well as Marxist educator Paulo Freire. She has also named Dr. Jim Rigby, a Christian anarchist at St Andrews Presbyterian Church in south Texas, as another source of inspiration. Activist Theology calls the reader to be “contemplative in action for justice”, then describes a world of justice for free-floating “bodies”.

Many critics of woke language have noted the way gender identity activism uses the words “body/bodies” to flatten the meaning and valence of biological categories. Henderson-Espinoza extends this academic abracadabra to every progressive change project: immigration, “harm reduction”, and the “deterritorializing” of the world. Land acknowledgments abound in her books. No body is illegal on stolen land; no body should be unhoused; no body is in the wrong restroom. Black and brown bodies need liberation. Call it body Marxism.

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Political scientist Ruy Teixeira has co-authored two books on the changing Democratic Party in the 21st century. He witnessed the wokening of progressive political spaces. He tried to help Democrats see reason, but they did not want to listen.

In this interview, Teixeira explains how political geography and a “shadow party” of ideological extremists have transformed the Democrats within, so that the party no longer connects with Americans outside of its own culture.

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Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner allegedly raped a woman. According to Politico, Jenny Racicot says Platner “forced her to have sex with him” in 2021 “despite her repeated objections”, i.e. rape.

Racicot tells Politico that she met Platner on the dating app Bumble in 2019 and maintained an occasional sexual relationship with him for two years. Platner reconnected with his wife Amy Gertner through the same Bumble app in 2023.

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In previous reporting, Racicot has said she recognized Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo. Racicot texted friends referring to it as a “Nazi tattoo” in 2025.

When she asked him about it, Platner responded with a “bravado sob story” about keeping the tattoo as a reminder that “the United States was the evil, bad guy overseas”.

In retrospect, his explanations seemed tailored to her leftist politics, Racicot suggested. Indeed, Graham Platner has told different stories about his tattoo to different women in order to get laid.

Lindsay Fifield, a Republican campaign operative that Platner dated from 2012-2015, says that Platner called his tattoo “my Totenkopf” and joked about its Nazi connection.

Fifield says Platner explained that he and his Marine unit chose the design because “they were like a death unit, they were killers”, deliberately drawing a parallel to the Nazi SS. Platner has denied knowing what the symbol represented.

Racicot called Fifield’s account of Platner “a version of him that I had experiences with”, adding that “this person does not respect women.” Democrats dismissed the earlier reporting because of Fifield’s politics.

“I know that he is capable of putting his hands on women,” Racicot now tells Politico. “So I don’t believe that to be the truth.”

Racicot alluded to Platner’s alleged rape in the earlier coverage, saying only that she had ended the relationship after a “reckless” and “unsettling” drunken visit. She says she changed her mind after The New York Times glossed over her story in their coverage so that Democrats could frame Fifield as a political hit.

Unlike Fifield, Racicot shares generally the same political views as Platner. She’s a Democrat. She’s not a supporter of Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent.

Unlike Christine Blasey Ford, Fifield and Racicot have proof they actually met the man they accuse.

Racicot has proof she shared the accusations with other people before she went public, and people who already considered her a victim of Graham Platner’s abuse before we heard her story.

All three of these evidentiary elements were missing from the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

Platner allegedly entered Racicot’s home “uninvited”, indeed she had told him to stay away, that she was not in the mood for a visit.

Racicot says she was sexually assaulted and that Platner ejaculated inside of her without permission. This is a description of the criminal act of rape.

Platner and his campaign have denied the Politico story. Likewise, Fifield alleged that Platner was physically aggressive, grabby, and rough. Platner and campaign denied that story, too.

Racicot is not pressing charges, nor has she filed a civil action. However, Democrats deserve to know what they are getting into. Platner was in Washington, DC last month to assure Democratic Senators that no further scandals would emerge. Evidently, Platner lied to them. The one thing he seems to be good at is looking people in the eye while he lies to them.

Democrats nationalized the Platner campaign to appeal to the new, hip socialist youth vote. Platner did not emerge from the Maine Democratic Party establishment of Janet Mills. He was an organizer with the Maine Progressive Alliance who got the attention of Bernie Sanders and Morris Katz, and then the endorsements of unions.

Put another way, Platner’s candidacy was always a project. Now Democrats have a deadline of Sunday, 12 July, to replace their project with another candidate. They have to wonder what else he has not told them about himself, and there might be even more devastating allegations ahead.

We have preliminary evidence that Graham Platner may have committed actual crimes that lie well within the 20-year statute of limitations in Maine for such charges. While it is unlikely this new allegation will lead to a courtroom, it undermines the story of a redemption arc for Platner.

He did not emerge from a dark phase to become a good man in just three years while using the same dating apps. Graham Platner remained the same man. He is still the same person that Jenny Racicot knew.

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Zohran Mamdani knows how a desk works. He has not sat behind the desk wrong. A Washington-style desk has drawers on both sides. While this one is associated with George Washington, the style is European in origin. It’s a furnishing for an age before file cabinets and folders, which were invented a century after this style took the name of America’s first president.

What makes this image uncanny are the faces. American greatness was not achieved by such unenthusiastic patriots. The United States became a nation through strength, valor, and sacrifice by an Army of free men. America was already a land of freedom compared to Europe in Revolutionary times.

This is why Americans were already becoming richer than Europeans, which is why King George III wanted to tax the colonists so much in the first place.

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Mamdani’s paternal Indian family originated in Gujarat. His ancestors were traders — capitalists — who migrated to East Africa during the 1890s. Gujarat practiced slavery until the British East India Company abolished it in 1843, and the practice of bondage labor (halis) still continued into the 20th century.

Mamdani was raised in Uganda, where his wealthy family maintains a palatial estate with a staff. The slave trade was simultaneously rejected in Uganda by Christian chiefs and suppressed by the British East Africa Company right around the time his family arrived in Africa, though existing slavery lingered into the 20th century in the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda.

So by the time Mamdani’s family got to Africa, white Christian Europeans were ending slavery in both India and Africa, where it had existed for thousands of years, and the United States had already fought a bloody civil war to end slavery at home. The US Navy, the Royal Navy, and la Marine Nationale had ended the Atlantic slave trade, while France was busy ending the very last African slave kingdom in 1894.

So it is rich hearing Mamdani complain that “we spend our tax dollars on bombs” in the same speech where he praises the military daring of George Washington’s army. How else does Mayor Mamdani suppose freedom can be secured in the real world of human nature? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Mamdani is hardly interested in lowering taxes. He shares this in common with King George III. On the eve of the American Revolution, the Thirteen Colonies had higher average real per capita income — purchasing power — than Britain and most of Western Europe. America has always been envied for riches.

Fast-forward to the present, when European soccer fans are touring the United States to watch World Cup games and keep posting amazed videos in American restaurants and gas stations. Today, many times more Europeans die of heat stroke than Americans die of gun violence because air conditioning is considered a luxury.

Mamdani wants to redistribute all this wealth. In the current system, he says, “children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.” Of course, the world’s first trillionaire does not actually have a Scrooge McDuck vault with a trillion dollars in it. Elon Musk owns companies valued at a trillion dollars, and what Mamdani wants to do is seize that means of production.

Mamdani makes this clear when he talks of “corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model.” That is his innocent framing for the sinister policy of trapping landlords between rent control and high regulation, so that no one can afford to maintain or upgrade a building. Properties end up controlled by New York City government, which can run a grand experiment in public housing.

Mamdani wants us to empathize with “the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work and still believes his country can do better by his family.” In fact this describes the kind of housing his policy creates in pursuit of control over housing in the city.

When Mamdani criticizes “a health insurance industry that exploits the sick”, that is because the sick are supposed to become dependent classes under the redistribution of health care. When Mamdani decries “monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections”, it is because he wants to monopolize control of key industries in order to build a political machine.

According to Mamdani, opponents of this scheme want “an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.” People who resist communism are racists who think America “belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

It is uncanny to hear this Third Worldist prattle at the same time World Cup visitors are having such a good time at Bass Pro Shops. America has not had to build a single stadium in order to host the world’s largest sporting event. Europeans are impressed at how a small town college like Auburn, Alabama can afford such a large, modern stadium — and fly an eagle in it during a game.

The United States is indeed “the wealthiest country in the history of the world” as Mamdani says. That is because we remain a nation of free enterprise, and in general, low taxation. His program would repurpose capital to ends that he would manage on our behalf. We can be as poor and hot as Europeans, if we want. All we have to do is let Zohran have his way with us.

Democrats might just let him have his way. According to recent public opinion polls, just 36 percent of Democrats say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. That is a record low this century, down from 62 percent in 2024 and ~80% in the mid-2010s under President Obama. The partisan gap, 56 points, is the highest ever recorded.

Democratic Party patriotism appears to be more partisan and political than the patriotism of Republicans. When the voters don’t vote right, democracy goes out the window, and Democrats want to tear down the pillars of the republic. Democrats have a higher opinion of the Black Lives Matter flag than the American flag. The lack of enthusiasm in the picture is reflected in the polling.

A ‘diversity’ cast listlessly holding small American flags does not inspire patriotism. The scene is a conquest, not a celebration. Mayor Mamdani is a herald for the redistribution of socialized housing and health care sectors of the American economy, in that picture. His performance of patriotism is unconvincing.

Mamdani has been an American for just eight years, and he is already establishing king-like powers over life in New York City. Questioning his commitment to American principles is not a form of bigotry. It is an act of national self-preservation. Withholding health care and housing from immigrants is not racism. It is the first act of creating a newly independent American.

Invoking John Adams in the musical 1776, I vote for “independency”. Mamdani hates independency and loves Third World dependency. America must be independent of the world if we are to remain a place the world wants to visit, and our liberty requires taking responsibility for our own selves instead of surrendering sovereignty.

We are a nation of immigrants that has shut the gates before in order to stem the tides of radicalism and restore our independency: our exceptionalism. Turns out that we are Americans, and we can just do things. A country like that is worth our love.

Happy 4th of July. Go find some fireworks and have an independent weekend.

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Melat Asfawosen Kiros thinks that “Medicare is the most efficient and the most effective delivery system for health care in this country.” This is incorrect.

While Medicare has an efficiency advantage as a health care payer, it is not actually more effective at delivering health care than privatized Medicare Advantage plans. There is no real difference in mortality or readmissions or other metrics of health care delivery between them. Results of systematic reviews are mixed.

Kiros was born in Ethiopia and immigrated as an infant. She was fired from her job at the Sidley Austin law firm in New York when she refused to take down an article defending pro-Hamas campus protesters. Kiros has worked the barista circuit in Denver while pursuing a PhD in public affairs and policy at the University of Colorado Denver. Now she is likely going to Congress.

Kiros is both an immigrant and downwardly mobile member of the Elect. Having overcome the incumbent, Rep. Diana DeGette, in this week’s party primary for the safely-blue 1st Congressional District, Kiros is a generational change candidate, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America youth vanguard. The new Democrat wants Medicare for All, and they talk about it in a way that makes it sound good.

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It is a popular idea. Depending on how the question is phrased, support for Medicare For All has risen about 20 percentage points since the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’) passed in 2010.

This new public opinion majority has resulted from the affordability crisis of private health insurance. Premiums have grown three times faster than wages under the ACA. That makes it an easy sell, and Democrats are taking advantage.

“Medicare truly is I think one of the easiest things for folks to wrap their head around about what socialism looks like, what Democratic Socialism looks like”, she told Dean Obeidallah.

DSA outperformed the incumbent in a low-turnout election: the socialists of the party are enthusiastic, the old guard is not. Medicare For All sounds especially good to young people who imagine free health care. The liberation promised by this economic theology is personal, a problem of “affordability”, as Democrats are suddenly saying.

Republicans who opposed the ACA will be happy to say they told us so. Black letter law is one thing, implementation another, as the example of the Obamacare website illustrates. Joe Biden opposed Medicare For All, while Kamala Harris offered a similar plan under a different name.

Of course, Bernie Sanders introduced legislation and ran on the issue in 2016. To this day, many Democrats believe that Hillary Clinton might have won had she not opposed it. The correct answer is that it is just one issue of many, and voters do not really vote on issues, anyway.

People vote their feelings. Right now, Democrats are counting on “thermostatic” sentiment to give them power in Congress again. That means they expect Trump to be so unpopular that the masses will vote for Democrats reflexively, without thinking much about what Democrats are actually saying.

Look at the poster over Melat Kiros’ shoulder in this clip. More prominent than her name is the slogan “Housing is a Human Right”. She considers health care and housing to be human rights — not Constitutional rights that American citizens have, or ought to have, by dint of being American.

Herein lies the chicanery in the communist prattle: Kiros wants to give the whole world free health care and housing.

Kiros would abolish ICE, so that no one enforces immigration laws. She would speed up citizenship for immigrants, hire more judges, process people faster, she says, which is hilarious.

Democrat-appointed judges have systematically tried to micromanage the immigration and deportation process on behalf of their progressive immigration lawyer donors. Kiros thinks that detention is “inhumane”, which is another way of saying she wants open border policies back.

She blames the United States for destabilizing the world. She blames the United States for 9/11 and terrorism. She also blames Israel for Hamas and 10/7. Kiros loves to talk of “dignity and justice” for immigrants, meaning all of them.

She wants infinity immigrants. She wants to give them infinity health care and housing. She will make these things “affordable” for an infinite number of people: communism.

What will actually happen of course is scarcity.

Remember just five years ago, when New York City had a nuclear power plant that provided a quarter of the city’s electricity? Democrats, including Andrew Cuomo, spent years putting political pressure on the plant owners to close it for alleged environmental risks.

Replacement power has come from natural gas, which has higher emissions than nuclear power. Zohran Mamdani defeated Cuomo with promises of socialist housing, health care for all, and grocery stores. Well done, Andrew. You went the way of Germany, and now the socialist is telling everyone to sweat like the residents of Havana. It was a natural evolution, really.

Even the food supply can be monopolized for the Party. Infinity immigrants using infinity food stamps and infinity Medicare For All and infinity housing will not have to show any ID when they vote.

Meanwhile, they can send food to their home countries inside blue plastic barrels and run Medicare fraud schemes. So far in 2026, the Department of Justice has charged cases involving over $6.5 billion in alleged Medicare and related health care fraud.

Simply to indict hundreds of suspects took a “whole of government” effort, and this was just the Medicare program. More charges are bound to come. Estimates of annual Medicare fraud vary, but they are in the hundreds of billions.

Meanwhile, unchecked Medicare Advantage fraud might exceed a trillion dollars over the next decade. The evidence is mixed, again, but that’s a whole Elon Musk, and who knows how much of that money will end up in Somalia.

Melat Kiros is also into “reformative justice”, which is the hip way of saying she wants to abolish prisons. She is a critic of police. Infinity immigrants, doing infinity fraud, with infinity health care and infinity housing and infinity food stamps: this is the America she wants us all to share with her.

She sees no moral hazard in this program, let alone costs. The costs are to be borne by billionaires, then millionaires, then the middle class, and then anyone who gets in the way of the new Party. They will presumably be held in camps rather than prisons, since this is after all Communism.

I am no elections expert, nor an accomplished political scientist, nor a Republican. However, if I was a GOP strategist looking to focus group ideas for ads that might blanket midterm election markets during the next couple of months, I would try out ways of conveying this message, that when Democrats say “Medicare”, they mean to have it with open borders and inflation again.

I would remind them of Joe Biden and the immigrant tidal wave. Let everyone yell about a “red scare” all they want. Let them yell about -isms all day long. Say the word: Communism.

California spends $11-12 billion a year on free health care for the undocumented. They want all of America to be Los Angeles, or Minnesota, a one-party system of fraud and crime for all, courtesy of the taxpayer. Communism.

Republicans would be wise to remind dispirited voters what Democrats actually mean when they discuss their happy utopian redistribution schemes. The new DSA Democrat ‘brand’ of caring is in fact radical sharing. They are actual Communists. It’s not hyperbole. America cannot afford to empower them; this is the crisis.

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Darializa Avila Chevalier is a rising star in the Democratic Party. Endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, last week she ousted the incumbent, Adriano Espaillat, in the party primary for a safely blue congressional district. The victory has focused attention on her embrace of ideological communism.

In a now-deleted Twitter account, Chevalier posted that she wanted to “seize the means of production”. She opined that Black and Arab men fetishize white women and joked about using the American flag as a napkin. Now she says she has “grown considerably”.

President Trump denounced Chevalier as a “communist”. When Ari Velshi asked her about this on MSNOW, Chavalier declined to be “reactive”, and objected to the “framing”. At least she didn’t storm out on Velshi. A clip:

Chevalier wants “budgets” to reflect all-American values like “immigration justice”. Translation: she wants infinite immigrants to have infinite dollars, i.e. communism.

Chevalier wants to “move forward” from a politics of “what we should be afraid of” (communism) that “has prevented us from being able to have a politics of hope, and a politics of life [read: communism], that Democrats actually identify with”.

Two terms of Barack Obama, the man elected president on a platform of hope and change, were not enough for American politics. We need a politics of “life”, by which Chevalier means infinite money for infinite migrants, i.e. communism.

Chevalier posted several peans to communist theory on her deleted Twitter account. “Most of the theory I’ve read is communism but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me”, she tweeted.

She wants to burn everything down like Karen Bass so infinite immigrants can receive infinite money in the ashes: full communism.

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Party politics and political geography

Downplay divisions as they might, Dems are clearly disconcerted. What explains this new kind of Democrat that has James Carville talking of “schism”, and Letitia James complaining about progressives “blowing up” the party? Sure, the kids have been enthusiastic about ‘socialism’ for a long time, but surely they were always going to grow up and get jobs. Right?

Wrong. One key explanation is political economy. America has overproduced elite liberal arts students, and the glut is clogging up the ideopolises, the urban centers where the ‘knowledge economy’ lives. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis identified the ideopolis as the future home of the Democratic Party in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority.

The ideopolises are America’s cultural production centers. In Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, historian of philosophy Eric Voegelin uses the word “metropole” for this internationalized urban center, a phenomenon that has existed since the first empires had imperial cities.

New York state is the Empire state, America’s first such metropolis. America has many of them, now. They are the bright blue dots on the red political map of the United States.

In their 2023 sequel book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Judis and Teixeira note that they warned in the first book that the party risked losing the working class voter through cultural radicalism, and this warning had been ignored by the party.

In an exclusive interview with Teixeira this week, he told me that the ideopolises have outperformed his growth expectations — with disastrous results. The geography of highly-educated cultural elites produces a top-down radicalism that “open[s] up real vulnerabilities for the party.”

During the interview, which will be released as an exclusive podcast next week, Teixeira admits he was blindsided by the way cultural radicals took over progressive spaces in the 2010s.

“We didn’t anticipate that the professional class liberals who would come to dominate the party would be quite so radical in terms of their cultural outlook and the things they thought Democrats needed to stand for.”

You know, that goes from race and immigration and climate and gender. All these things that have loomed so large in the contemporary Democratic Party, and I might add, and so even social democratic parties in Europe, we just didn’t anticipate the professionals as a group would have such hegemony within the party and drive these things forward and make them so important to the image of the party. That was something we just didn't anticipate, and of course, that completely undercuts any kind of quote-unquote progressive centrism.

By “progressive centrism”, Teixeira describes an agenda designed to appeal to mainstream Americans. For example, Teixeira has long argued for an “all of the above” approach to energy that provides abundance rather than carbon limits.

His own career is a study in the shifting Overton window of what counts as a progressive point of view. Having started as a Marxist sociology student, he now works for the center-right American Enterprise Institute. Along the way, he spent nearly two decades working at the Center for American Progress.

The rise of the Democratic Party ideopolis has produced a new kind of Democrat shaped more by DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, than constitutional principles or the liberal tradition. In 2026, that new DSA Democrat is taking power in low-turnout primary races in deeply blue ideopolis districts.

These are young adults with little or no experience in the real economy. They come from middle class backgrounds and demand a job that feels like saving the world, so they ‘work’ for nonprofits, or stay in school for decades. They rarely make substantial fortunes saving the world.

Immediately following the election results, Batya Ungar-Sargon articulated this explanation very well. There are a couple of pull quotes that deserve emphasis.

First, there is nothing about Chevalier that resonates with people who labor for a living. Her focus is on issues that appeal to the constituency of highly-educated urban elites — her peers, crushed between high rent and low achievement.

It wasn’t “the working class” that voted in this slate of “socialists” and it wasn’t “socialism” they were running on. It was a hatred of this country, a hatred of Israel and the Americans who support it, and a deeply-embedded resentment that their vanity pursuits haven’t resulted in the riches they were promised in their fancy schools.

Chevalier is leading Democrats away from a message that resonates in her district, and districts like NY-13. The Bronx voted for her opponent, and the rest of America is ultimately more like the Bronx than Manhattan. Chevalier won educated whites but lost working classes of all colors. Emphasis mine:

They’ve turned the resentment of a downwardly mobile elite into their only politics, using their hatred of America and their hatred of Israel as a beard to cover up the fact that their candidates ousted the candidates chosen by the actual working class they pretend to fight for.

Chevalier is a professional student and PhD candidate in sociology. Her father is a landlord. She is not poor, but she wants to replace the housing market with public housing, and seize all properties from landlords like her own father.

The Mamdani administration has similar plans in New York City. By making property ownership unprofitable, squeezing the landlords between regulation and rent control, they can take over distressed properties for a grand experiment in public housing.

To the kids who never learned about the consequences of communist redistribution schemes in school, this sounds good.

It sounds even better coming from leftist professors reading the postmodern liturgy.

I see much truth in this ‘economic’ explanation, but it is incomplete, because it stops at the threshold of belief.

Belief, the mental acceptance or conviction that an idea, statement, or proposition is true or real, is an intrinsically spiritual activity. Darializa Avila Chevalier believes in communism the way Christians believe in God. This is crucial to understanding the cult of belief that is taking power in the Democratic Party.

The real communism has not been tried yet. The real God is ‘democratic socialism’, which has not been tried yet. If only the stupid workers would vote right, they would live in a worker’s paradise. It would be literal doomsday for billionaires.

See, it sounds like a cult because it is a cult. Chevalier is in a cult. We must examine this cult as a cult if we are to even hope of stopping it from having power over us.

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Errata: I accidentally and hilariously referred to Close Encounters of the First Kind by Stephen King, which is not an actual movie.

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You can check out Patrick’s Substack here.

Patrick Abbott, Sci-fi Author

This is the Substack of Patrick Abbott, author of the scifi novels of the Fallen universe, the Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency, and other stories.

By Patrick Abbott, Sci-Fi Author

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According to David Grusch, the tragic overdose death of Matthew James Sullivan, a 39-year-old US Air Force veteran, is a national security mystery. “He passed away mysteriously”, Grusch told The Big Weekend Show on Fox News 13 June.

In reality, the New York Post reports, Sullivan “died at his home in Falls Church, Va., on May 12, 2024 from a lethal mix …

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Gender has become complicated now. Fatherhood is no longer something boys should aspire to, or be prepared to accept, because girls who have their breasts removed will do the fathering, from now on. Testosterone alone confers manhood. This new manhood does not pass between males, which makes it non-toxic masculinity.

See, look at this cartoon that The N…

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When Rob Kenyon from Reform UK replied that more people require more housing, Wakefield conceded the commonsense point while making a facial display …

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