December 11, 2025

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: One Cheer for Colonialism! “It is unseemly, untimely, unjustifiable, distasteful, and surely flat-out wrong to offer even one cheer for colonialism. So here I go.”

As promised earlier this week, right here on Instapundit.

Posted at 5:24 pm by Stephen Green

F-35 Talks With Turkey Could See ‘Breakthrough,’ U.S. Ambassador Says. “Barrack’s post is the first official signal from the U.S. side that talks about a return to the F-35 project could be underway. Turkish media had previously reported it would be discussed when Erdogan and Trump met in the White House in September. Asked by a reporter if he could revive Turkey’s cancelled F-35 deal shortly after the September meeting, Trump replied: ‘I could do so easily if I want. We may do that. Well, it depends. [Erdoğan’s] going to do something for us.'”

Is Erdoğan going to stop playing footsie with the Kremlin? Because that would be nice to see from an ally.

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM: AOC splurged nearly $50K on pricey hotel stays, dining and renting Puerto Rico concert venue where Bad Bunny performed.

In all, the campaign forked over $15,489.77 for lodging in Puerto Rico between July 1 and Sept. 30.

At least $10,743.13 was spent on meals and catering services on Aug. 25 and Sept. 29, per the FEC filings for that period.

Elsewhere on the island, the 34-year-old Bronx and Queens Democrat danced alongside Brooklyn Rep. Nydia Velázquez at an Aug. 10 Bad Bunny concert held in San Juan as part of the anti-ICE rapper‘s “Residency tour.”

Is this some sort of On the Beach-style last minute blowout decadence while waiting for the world to come to an end? Because otherwise, based on her many doomsday pronouncements in 2019, it doesn’t sound like an environmentally friendly way to spend one’s free time. To coin an insta-phrase, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. And in the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOODER AND HARDER, SILICON VALLEY:

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and tech employees are fleeing California. That’s all you need to know about communism.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

REMEMBER PACIFIC PALISADES? Newsom wouldn’t budge on his duplex ban for the Los Angeles wildfire rebuild. So, a YIMBY group is suing him.

The lawsuit, filed by YIMBY Law on Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges the governor unlawfully restricted homeowners’ ability to rebuild after the fires by allowing local governments to set aside Senate Bill 9, a 2021 state law that permits duplex construction and lot-splitting on single-family-home parcels.

Newsom issued his order in July in response to lobbying from property owners in the Pacific Palisades, the coastal L.A. community that was largely destroyed in the blazes. Palisades residents argued that allowing duplexes and spitting lots into two parcels would undermine the neighborhood’s character and worsen evacuation efforts in the event of future disasters. Following the governor’s order, all the jurisdictions affected — the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu and Pasadena and L.A. County — banned SB 9 rebuilds in high-risk fire areas. The suit includes each local government as a defendant as well.

YIMBY Law, which is based in San Francisco and sues public agencies to clear the way for more housing, had agreed in discussions with high-level Newsom staffers late last week not to file its suit if the governor allowed duplex construction again after a year, the group’s executive director Sonja Trauss told POLITICO.

When Newsom did not act, the group turned to the courts.

They f***** up — they trusted Newsom.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

HISTORY:

Posted at 3:04 pm by Stephen Green

2026 PREVIEW: Don’t Expect Jasmine Crockett To Waltz To The Texas Senate Nomination. “I suspect that people outside of the state haven’t heard of Talarico, who fills the Beto O’Rourke mold as a white guy with a vaguely Hispanic name. But he’s clearly the anointed choice of Texas Democratic Party insiders, to the point that he has been out-fundraising Allred (the man who raised over $94 million in his futile attempt to oust Ted Cruz last year) by more than $1 million, which was probably a contributing factor in Allred dropping out.”

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

NEW CRITERION: Other people’s money.

As we await Mamdani’s socialist dégringolade, it is worth keeping in mind two points from his victory speech. One was the grateful praise he lavished upon “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” Note the group he omitted: Americans; indeed, no form of the word “American” occurs in his speech.

The second point to bear in mind from Mamdani’s speech concerns coercion. Frantz Fanon taught that “decolonization” always requires violence to succeed. Mamdani’s frequent deployment of the word “mandate” in his speech, despite receiving votes from only a million New Yorkers (in a city of 8.5 million), should give us pause. He had, he said, been given “A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.” The word “mandate,” we note, comes from the Latin verb mandare: to order, command. Who can doubt Mamdani’s implicit understanding of that etymology, given his devotion to Fanon?

When you strip away whatever emollient rhetorical packaging in which it is delivered, socialism rests on two basic demands: the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. The more aggressively those demands are pushed, the more severe will be the imposition of state control by those working the levers of power. We write a few days after Mamdani’s victory at the polls. Already the cultivated nice-guy rictus of his campaign countenance is disintegrating, replaced by something harsher and more grasping.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

BREAKING: Senate Rejects Extending Obamacare Subsidies.

So they’re saying that the Affordable Care Act didn’t actually do anything to make health care more affordable, but just threw other people’s money at the problem?

Posted at 1:57 pm by Stephen Green

UGH: Open AI, Microsoft face lawsuit over ChatGPT’s alleged role in Connecticut murder-suicide.

Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.” It is one of a growing number of wrongful death legal actions against AI chatbot makers across the country.

“Throughout these conversations, ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life — except ChatGPT itself,” the lawsuit says. “It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him. It told him delivery drivers, retail employees, police officers, and even friends were agents working against him. It told him that names on soda cans were threats from his ‘adversary circle.’”

Among other things, LLMs are highly effective engagement tools, feeding back what the user wants to hear. But it also helped back when we still maintained enough asylums for people with paranoid delusions.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green