September 21, 2026

UNEXPECTEDLY: Mamdani: Quality of Life, Efficiency, Rooting Out Fraud Have “Somehow Come To Be Seen as Somehow a Right-Wing Concern:”

Life I said, unexpectedly:

Tweet continues:

See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness and instead it ballooned on purpose.

This is why there was such enormous flip out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign.

Once people realize that things can be improved a lot of nonprofits and public union/money dries up. There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam.

In May during L.A.’s Spencer Pratt boomlet, Christopher Rufo tweeted:

Spencer Pratt grew up in a California that delivered all of the public services in the background without much fuss, and consequently, one could live out the California archetypes of the surfer, the burnout, or the party animal, and it was more or less as depicted in the movies…Pratt has a better understanding of the California Dream than a rigid, humorless apparatchik like Nithya Raman, who views the state as raw material for an ideological formula.

In contrast, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2024 of Chicago’s Mayor Daley:

Daley was a real New Deal-style liberal, but he would have no use for Shorism or Lakoff-ism. He barely spoke American. He once declared he was proud to welcome the “poet lariat” of Chicago. He complained of his enemies, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” He famously defended the Chicago police (which, we should concede did some indefensible things) by saying “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But he knew how to get snow cleared.

Again, I’m not trying to romanticize Daley, but I guarantee you a great many current residents of Chicago (or New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) would be far, far, happier to pay taxes for Daley-style government than to pay for what they have now—even if you convinced people that taxes are really just membership fees.

Democrats in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York would similarly accept a lot of corruption in their local government — if it still delivered basic services, such as fighting crime, putting out fires and repairing roads:

As Democrats continually move back and to the left, back and to the left, they continue to cede a massive amount of ideological ground to the right:

Screenshot

Not to mention, the English language itself. When even Van Jones notices how crazy the lefty lexicon has gotten over the past decade, and how off-putting it feels to those not in the cult, it may be too difficult to temporarily reel the smugness back in: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Bowling Alone. 

The New Hotness? Get outside, do things with the guys:

 

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ATTACK DOG WITH A SMILE:

Related:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green

DENMARK TOOK IN 321 PALESTINIAN REFUGEES IN 1992. DECADES LATER, 61% HAD BEEN CONVICTED OF CRIMES:

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PERSPECTIVE:

Posted at 4:03 pm by Stephen Green

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ALWAYS HAS THE LAST LAUGH:

Posted at 3:32 pm by Stephen Green

REAGAN WAS RIGHT ON STAR WARS: More than 1,500 Iranian ballistic missiles have been intercepted before striking U.S. military targets and other targets in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The President who first proposed the  Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) nee “Star Wars” in 1983 was lambasted for proposing the impossible. Too bad those critics aren’t around today to see Reagan’s vision being fulfilled.

Posted at 3:31 pm by Mark Tapscott

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT*:

*Because they do.

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Do COVID And AI Rhyme?

Think about that for a moment.

Some of the people leading the race are now asking government to help slow the race.

Business titans generally don’t beg Washington to regulate their industries. When they do, it is reasonable to ask why.

Perhaps these executives genuinely fear what they are creating. Given the extraordinary capabilities of AI, that possibility should not be dismissed.

But there is another possibility.

Regulation is expensive. Giant corporations can afford armies of lawyers, compliance officers, lobbyists, engineers, and safety researchers. Smaller competitors and startups often cannot. What begins as a regulatory guardrail can eventually become a competitive moat.

Investor Steve Eisman, famous for anticipating the 2008 housing collapse, recently made precisely this argument, suggesting that AI companies warning of catastrophe may benefit from regulations that protect dominant firms from competitors.

That doesn’t prove motive, but it certainly makes the question worth asking.

And the political cavalry was arriving at roughly the same time.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

BUT GOOD LUCK NEUTERING THE TRIAL LAWYER LOBBY:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK: The Banality of Leninism. “Historians often act like Lenin’s tyranny was a bolt from the blue: Who would have expected a bunch of socialists to be so bloodthirsty? Admirers of Lenin, in contrast, often paint him as a great innovator – at least as a strategist. A dictatorship of the proletariat run by a vanguard party of bourgeois intellectuals? Only Lenin could have conceived it. When you read 19th-century Russian literature, however, “Leninist” memes clearly predate the birth of Lenin. Contrary to many historians, Lenin’s atrocities were foreseeable. And contrary to Lenin’s admirers, his strategy of atrocity was pure cliche.”

This piece is from 2012 but is as timely as ever.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green