This year is lit! I just hope that Kiss for Damocles and Storm Dragon, and Planting Life: shut the kingdom, and of course my own No Man’s Land all make it to finalists. I’d be very proud to stand in that slate. All amazing books. (I’m sure the other nominees are too, I just haven’t heard who they are yet. And pardon me, I prefer the books I’ve read and like.) And remember, if you want to have a say join the Libertarian Futurist Society.
January 7, 2026
SALENA ZITO:
Yinz guys!!!! Please read this labor of love series #america250 I am doing ever day now until the 2nd of July when the Declaration of Independence was signed! https://t.co/xUEzasa5Pi
Venture aloud that the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, might just have a touch of the communist about him, and you will run immediately into a wall of indignant pedantry. “He’s not a communist,” his apologists will insist. He’s a “communitarian.” Other preferred substitutions include “collectivist,” “Fabian,” “democratic socialist,” and, in the less intellectually inclined depths of the well, “just, like, someone who cares about other people.”
Whatever. A commie by any other name still smells as foul. Besides, far more important than whether Mamdani wishes to be more closely associated with the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea is what he is actually doing with his power — and, alas, what Mamdani is actually doing with his power is appointing lunatics such as Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Given that New York City has more people living in rented housing than any other American city has residents, this is a position from which a great deal of mischief can be made.
If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States.
New York City’s new renters’ tsar wasted no time in outraging locals by vowing to make life harder for whites in the Big Apple over their role in ‘racist gentrification.’
But Cea Weaver has kept strangely quiet about her own mother – a white professor who owns a gorgeous $1.4 million home in America’s fastest gentrifying city, where longtime black residents are quickly being priced out.
The hardline leftist’s mother Celia Applegate, a professor [of] German Studies at prestigious Vanderbilt University, resides at a pretty, roomy 1930s Craftsman home in one of Nashville’s leafiest neighborhoods.
The history of Germany in the 20th century is one of massive state-sanctioned property theft in both err, post-Weimar Germany, and the Soviet satellite state that succeeded it in East Germany. How much does Cea Weaver root for the Stasi when she pops The Lives of Others into the Blu-Ray player?
Is Weaver mentally unstable? She certainly seems unprepared for the job, which is public-facing and substantial enough to deal with the media. Weaver was adept enough to scrub her social media after the election, but it turned out to be too late. Michelle Tandler kept a lot of receipts, which she posted in a lengthy thread on Monday. However, the first tweet has the right context for today’s events, given the “gentrifier” declaration she made in 2018:
A few months ago, I dug into Cea Weaver's Twitter history because she was Mamdani's housing advisor.
I had a hunch she might get a position on his team.
Well, she did, and she deleted her X account, accordingly.
Ed asks, “Was that aimed at her parents? Or was it just empty sloganeering from someone who never imagined that she would be held accountable for her public statements?”
It could be the former: Newsweek notes that “Weaver’s father, Stewart Weaver, was reported in 2023 to own a home in Rochester, according to real estate publication The Real Deal. At the time, a spokesperson for Housing Justice for All, an organization Cea Weaver worked for at the time, told the publication that Stewart Weaver ‘manages an additional rental property with a family member.’”
More on Weaver and her astonishing vocal fryyyyyyy from Megyn Kelly and Mark Helprin:
UPDATE:
Apparently, she even wants white people to stop reproducing, and be banned from planes…
"came across a mob of 11 year old white boy children… i dunno why we keep procreating."
To be fair, that’s a slightly less extreme aviation position than AOC, 2019’s New Socialist It Girl, who wanted to ban commercial flight entirely that year: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal. “Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out ‘highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.’ Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains that run on fossil fuels will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?”
IGNORANCE, THY NAME IS TUCKER: In a segment of his interview with Ted Cruz last summer since deleted from his platforms, Tucker Carlson expresses incredulity when Cruz notes that Iran was trying to assassinate Trump (X link).
Well, it’s not like Biden-appointed prosecutors indicted an Iranian agent, who is still at large for trying to murder Trump, and Biden AG Merrick Garland announced this with great fanfare. Oh, wait, it’s exactly like that. Somehow, this very public (and important) story either eluded Tucker’s attention, or he purposely chose to mock it, knowing that it’s true. Neither speaks well of Tucker.
SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW:
Agitated & organized by large networks of communists & leftist extremists, a large crowd gathered in Minneapolis where the car-ramming anti-ICE rioter was shot dead. They chant about how every person must be allowed in because the US is "stolen land." pic.twitter.com/kkVvJ0YGmK
Come spring however, and as Jon Gabriel wrote in 2024: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
TO BE FAIR, THE DAVIDIANS WERE MORE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE THAN PERPETRATORS:
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) January 7, 2026
ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Walz: Minnesota Is at ‘War’ With the Federal Government, Calls Out National Guard; More Violence? “From everything I can see, Walz and Frey have been egging on the confrontations to distract from the disastrous fraud investigations and have been cooperating with the very people who have been assaulting officers and impeding operations. Mayor Frey, just the other day, threatened violence, and here we have it.”
Insurrection Act time?
Related question: I suppose there’s no chance we could trade Minnesota for Greenland …
“Top Gun: Maverick” actor Miles Teller shared an emotional promise during last year’s FireAid benefit concert.
“All of the money raised will go directly to people who need it now.”
Early reports suggested that was hardly the case. Last September, The New York Post revealed that of the $100 million raised by musicians such as Joni Mitchell, Lady Gaga, John Mayer, Billie Joe Armstrong and more, some of the funds went to nonprofits with very little connection to fire safety or reparations.
The Ohio Republican’s assessment confirms that some of the money in question didn’t go directly to the victims of last year’s Palisades fire as promised.
A friend sent a video showing police joining protestors as a sign the regime was crumbling.
Tiny problem: The city of Ilam is overwhelmingly Kurdish and very far from Tehran. So we can’t use Ilam as proof that the mullahs are on the brink of losing power, as much as that is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But it’s an interesting data point, as is Kanal 13’s video on the Islamic regime losing control of Abdanan as well.
More at the link, but until Khamenei is confirmed on a flight to Moscow, I’m not getting my hopes up.
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