May 27, 2026

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Sanders’ anti-oligarchy tour spent $608k on elite travel.

Sanders is barnstorming the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, a series of rallies aimed at opposing President Trump and supporting economic populism. To defray its cost, he is raising and spending money through his principal campaign committee, Friends of Bernie Sanders. Even as Sanders rails against billionaires’ political clout and economic inequality, his committee has relied on elite trappings more commonly associated with the wealthy.

The Center Square examined Friends of Bernie Sanders’ filings with the Federal Election Commission from the start of the tour in January 2025 through March, a 15-month stretch when Sanders was the featured speaker at 32 rallies at cities, university campuses, and small towns around the country. More than half a dozen other members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a New York Democrat, have also spoken at the rallies.

To travel, the committee paid $562,117 for 11 private jet trips and $16,633 for a chauffeured car or limousine service 11 times. For lodging, it paid $29,064 to stay at a four-star hotel 15 times.

Being in Friends of Bernie Sanders isn’t cheap, but pretending to stick it to the oligarchy that you’re actually a part of never was.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Another Rough Runoff Night for Trump Detractors. “I got quite a few emails and comments after that the Republicans simply needed to get the runoff election behind them in order to begin focusing on Talarico. Well, that happened last night, and the contest wasn’t even close.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

DON SURBER ON THIS YEAR’S PRIMARIES: Well, bye.

For RINOs this year, May was the cruelest month as MAGA voters primaried those who defied their orders.

In Indiana on May 5, Republican voters rejected six of the seven incumbent state senators who defied the desire to redistrict the state’s congressional map to send two more Republicans to Washington.

In Louisiana on May 16, Senator Wild Eyes Bill Cassidy finished third in the primary meaning he won’t be in the runoff primary that will decide the nomination. Cassidy voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment. MAGA impeached and convicted Cassidy.

In Kentucky on May 19, MAGA voters sent Congressman Thomas Massie packing. He’s headed to the Libertarian Party where he belongs. He’ll replace Jill Stein as their perennial losing presidential nominee.

In Texas on May 26 (last night), MAGA voters toppled Senator John Cornyn in a runoff against primary against Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. The race was close until Trump endorsed Paxton. That blew Cornyn off the map as Paxton beat him by 27 points.

The media is lying when it frames the issue as Trump’s revenge against perceived enemies.

This is MAGA voters flushing the commode. The electorate has had it with politicians who promise voters everything but give them Dem Lite.

Democrats are on the 20 side of every 80/20 issue and yet Republican representatives and senators keep blocking action on those 80/20 issues.

Yes.

Again:

Hey, even Texas Democrats have started taking out the smelliest trash: Sex therapist who vowed to put ‘American Zionists’ into ‘castration’ centers loses Texas Democratic primary.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

VDH: Spare Us the Selective Outrage.

Consider this hypothetical: the United States is roughly 34 times larger than Israel, with roughly 340 million to Israel’s 10 million citizens. Apply that asymmetrical magnitude to a thought experiment about how Americans would react to a proportional slaughter of their own.

Suppose that some 200,000 Sinaloa cartel killers (34 times the size of Hamas’s 6,000) swarmed across the southern border. They then began massacring 40,000 American civilians (34 times the Israeli number of 1,200 dead)—as well as torturing, dismembering, raping, and beheading. And then they were followed by thousands of tag-along civilians eager for loot and torture themselves.

Further imagine that the killers returned south across the border with 8,500 American hostages (34 times the 251 Israeli hostages). Once there, they then descended into a vast multibillion-dollar labyrinth of cartel tunnels beneath the cities of Sinaloa, protected by supportive and sympathetic citizens. Their tunnel entries and exits would be built beneath hospitals, schools, and churches.

So what exactly would the U.S. do if neither the Mexican government nor the cartel planners agreed to hand over the hostages and surrender the killers?

Take our case to the UN?

Ask NATO member Spain to chair talks?

Go to Geneva to negotiate with El Chapo and his henchmen?

If the Left got its way, yes.

And of course read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM?

Why does the left assume every Hispanic is an illegal alien?

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

#JOURNALISM:

Related:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

LEFTISTS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT WANT MAGA TO BE ALL ABOUT TRUMP, BECAUSE THEN WHEN HE’S GONE, IT’S GONE.

But Trump is an effect of widespread sentiments among the normals, not the cause.

Posted at 8:27 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE NATIONAL FELONS LEAGUE:

Wait, I thought the media loves it when NFL players are open about their politics:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

CURIOUSLY THOUGH, HE’LL SUFFER NO REPERCUSSIONS FOR SAYING THIS: Alan Cumming: America is a fascist country.

Alan Cumming, the Scottish actor, has complained that he has to pay taxes to a “fascist country”.

The host of The Traitors US has made his home in New York for the past 25 years but is deeply unhappy to be living under Donald Trump’s administration.

“Of course, there are kind people in America, and I live in New York, which is a different kettle of fish to the rest of America, but the government… It is a fascist country and I’m paying taxes to it. It’s horrible,” he said.

* * * * * * * *

Cumming said he was lulled into a false sense of security during Barack Obama’s presidency.

He told Radio Times: “I love Obama, but I do feel he didn’t do us a favour by not letting on about the level of racism and fury he was subjected to.

I agree, and neither did the New York Times; Byron York wrote on September 24th of 2008 that “Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase ‘God damn America.’” The two decades spent in the pews of Chicago’s Trinity United Church likely did much to shape the Lightworker’s worldview. And consequently, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote near the end of his time in office: Obama’s Legacy [was] The Rise Of Donald Trump.

Without policy achievements to hang his hat on, Obama’s rhetoric will be how he’s remembered – and the results have been ugly. On his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as “lazy.” In fact, he went on to deride Americans for a list of supposed transgressions ranging from the Vietnam War to environmental desecration to the 19th century treatment of Native Americans. “If you’re in the United States,” the president said, “sometimes you can feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.”

The attack on supposedly insular Americans was somewhat bizarre, given that Obama himself knows no foreign languages. He often seems confused about even basic world geography. (His birthplace of Hawaii is not “Asia,” Austrians do not speak “Austrian,” and the Falkland Islands are not the Maldives).

Obama’s sense of history is equally weak. Contrary to his past remarks, the Islamic world did not spark either the Western Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Cordoba was not, as he once suggested, an Islamic center of “tolerance” during the Spanish Inquisition; in fact, its Muslim population had been expelled during the early Reconquista over two centuries earlier.

In another eerie ditto of his infamous 2008 attack on the supposedly intolerant Pennsylvania “clingers,” Obama returned to his theme that ignorant Americans “typically” become xenophobic and racist: “Typically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them.” (“Typically” is not a good Obama word to use in the context of racial relations, since he once dubbed his own grandmother a “typical white person.”) Too often Obama has gratuitously aroused racial animosities with inflammatory rhetoric such as “punish our enemies,” or injected himself into the middle of hot-button controversies like the Trayvon Martin case, the Henry Louis Gates melodrama, and the “hands up, don’t shoot” Ferguson mayhem.

Most recently, Obama seemed to praise backup 49ers quarterback and multimillionaire Colin Kaepernick for his refusal to stand during the National Anthem, empathizing with Kaepernick’s claims of endemic American racism. What is going on in Obama’s home stretch? Apparently Obama is veering even further to the left, in hopes of establishing a rhetorical progressive legacy in lieu of any lasting legislative or foreign-policy achievement.

Evergreen:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

YES: The Navy Needs a Strategic Industrial Plan to Realize the Golden Fleet.

The details of Golden Fleet have become more visible recently with the release of the Navy’s shipbuilding plan and associated fiscal year 2027 budget. Realizing the fleet as envisioned will take more than the $65.8 billion (a 39% increase over the FY26 budget) that’s been earmarked. It will take a long-term industrial plan that builds and delivers warships on a meaningful timeline to deal with today’s chief threats – most notably, China.

Hung Cao, the acting Navy Secretary, understands this. In recent testimony to Congress, he detailed how he has challenged his department to “change how we do business” and “revitalize our industrial base.” The Golden Fleet provides a target in ship orders, and Congress appears on track to provide the resources.

But institutional discipline to stay the course for many years on the shipbuilding plan is less assured. Winning early successes can build momentum and set the direction for critical infrastructure investments, thereby sustaining congressional support… for a time. Focusing early actions that lead to an enduring naval buildup requires a roadmap.

The Navy’s problem — aside from decades-long, criminally bipartisan Congressional neglect of our shipyards — is that it couldn’t even build somebody else’s well-respected frigate without screwing things up so badly that the whole project got scrapped. It’s replacement? The still-under-development FF(X) frigate whose existence is also in doubt.

It seems almost insane to conclude this, but we need a Navy that’s serious about ships.

Posted at 7:34 am by Stephen Green

THE FLAG IS ONLY ‘COMPLICATED’ IF YOU’RE A DEMOCRAT:

“I often think, when reclaiming symbols, I think about the American flag,” Talarico said. “The American flag is such a complicated symbol for most of us. In many ways like Jesus, like the cross, it’s been co-opted and, in some ways, its true meaning has been betrayed.”

The flag stands for freedom, individual liberty, and the rule of law. All things that are antithetical to Democrats like Talarico. But they’re the very things that allow the Democrats to live well, speak freely, and get rich off the backs of their fellow Americans. It’s only been ‘co-opted’ if you don’t like those things, and Democrats do not.

Instead, Talarico wants the flag to represent his radical, anti-freedom agenda — the one that believes there are multiple genders, that God is nonbinary, that freedom of religion and speech are only for Leftists, and that we can magically control the weather if we all eat grass and tofu. He’s only proud of the flag when it represents what he likes.

Yes, it could be a far more complicated symbol:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

AARON HANSCOM: Is It Time for Jewish Patients in America to Start Worrying? “With anti-Israel sentiment rising in virtually every American institution — from academia to Congress to … Sesame Street — must Jewish Americans soon start worrying about the medical treatment they’ll receive at doctor’s offices and hospitals across the country? A Jewish doctor in recent testimony to Congress and in an interview with the Jerusalem Post is warning that such a moment may already have arrived.”

Posted at 7:03 am by Stephen Green

APPARENTLY I CAN’T LEAVE THE CLANKERS ALONE. THE SOUND TRACK FOR NO MAN’S LAND RESUMES:  Clanker Song.

At least I’m at the end of volume 2 now!

Posted at 7:01 am by Sarah Hoyt