January 7, 2026

SALENA ZITO:

Posted at 10:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHECKING IN WITH THE THEATER KIDS: Mamdani’s Commie Housing Official Is a Lunatic.

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.

That may be close to what happened to Weaver. According to the Daily Mail, in their article yesterday headlined, “Breathtaking hypocrisy of woke NYC mayoral aide who says whites owning homes is racist… as her $1.4m secret is revealed:”

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.

Here’s the Webpage for Celia Applegate, Professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt:

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?

So what about dad? In a post headlined “Crybully: Mamdani’s Tenant Advocate Breaks Down When Confronted About Hypocrisy,” Ed Morrissey adds:

Sohrab Ahmari asks the right question:

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:

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:

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?”

Posted at 9:16 pm by Ed Driscoll

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.

Posted at 9:00 pm by David Bernstein

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW:

Indeed:

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.’”

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THE DAVIDIANS WERE MORE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE THAN PERPETRATORS:

Posted at 8:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IRAN:

(That’s the old Monarchy’s flag, not the Islamic Republic version.)

Posted at 8:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PAYBACK IS A BITCH:

Posted at 7:59 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NEWS FROM THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF MINNESOTASTAN: Minneapolis Protester Shot Dead; UPDATE: Car Apparently Hit Agent; Riots Soon? I dunno, but it’s not 2020 and riots won’t play out like they did then.

UPDATE: Walz Threatens Civil War.

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 …

Posted at 6:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: FireAid Funneled Cash to Podcasters, Illegals and Fungus Planting.

“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.

Think:

  • The Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation
  • Podcasters discussing the wildfires
  • Sanitizing pre-schools
  • NAACP Pasadena
  • My Tribe Rise
  • The CA Native Vote Project
  • The Los Angeles Black Worker Center

Now, Rep. Jim Jordan has released a scathing update on the FireAid money matter.

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.

Indeed:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOTHING IS CERTAIN: Is Iran Losing Control Of Kurds and Lurs?

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.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Air Force says AI tools outperform human planners in ‘battle management’ experiment.

In the service’s latest “DASH” experiment this past fall, the Air Force pitted AI tools from half a dozen companies against military personnel from the US, Canada and UK and asked each to solve hypothetical “battle management” problems, from standard Air Force tasks like planning an airstrike or rerouting aircraft whose home base had been damaged, to more obscure scenarios like gathering intelligence on an anomalous electromagnetic signal or protecting a disabled and drifting Navy vessel.

When the Air Force evaluated the resulting proposed Courses of Action (COAs), it found that at least one of the AI algorithms not only generated more COAs in less time than the humans, but it actually made fewer errors than the humans did as well.

“These machine-generated recommendations were up to 90 percent faster than traditional methods, with the best in machine-class solutions showing 97 percent viability and tactical validity,” said Col. John Ohlund, director of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System Cross-Functional Team (ABMS CFT), according to an official article published by the Air Force on Monday about DASH-3 (Decision Advantage Sprint for Human-Machine Teaming).

The article said that human-generated courses of action took about 19 minutes, with 48 percent of the options “being considered viable and tactically valid.”

“And our team didn’t observe hallucinations during the experiment,” Ohlund said.

This is exactly why the AI arms race with China is real, and not just something dreamed up by sci-fi writers.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green