Hasan Piker, the leftist influencer, has millions of followers across Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms. And so it is not without interest that he has described Mao as “one of the great leaders of this world” and that, when challenged about this, he conceded that “there was a lot of f***ing excesses, let’s be real, but. . . .”
Ah yes, there is always a “but.”
The “but” in this case was that “the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.”
True enough. Then again there were tens of millions of Chinese who would have existed for quite a bit longer were it not for Mao or his republic. And many of those did not meet their deaths because of yet another catastrophic communist “reform,” but because they were, in one way or another, murdered.
The easy response to Piker’s comments is to write him off as a provocateur or a nut. But the wiser course is to take him seriously, to believe that he either believes what he says or, at least, that he wants his followers to believe what he says. If that’s so, he will want them to agree with his comment about the greatness of Mao, and to join with him in dismissing those millions of dead as “excesses,” a blot on a glorious record. It’s an old argument. To borrow from a notorious phrase, those millions were the eggs broken to make an omelet.
In addition to the fine art of omelet making, Piker also enjoys celebrating urban renewal:
The ChatGPT-maker said its agent – an AI system which can operate alone after some human instruction – was being tested in a controlled environment, but found vulnerabilities and managed to escape.
They targeted Hugging Face, one of the world’s largest hubs for sharing AI models, gaining access to some internal company systems.
OpenAI said the incident was “unprecedented”, and it was conducting an investigation alongside Hugging Face, whose boss Clement Delangue said in a post on X it was “mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously”.
“The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind,” Delangue added.
I get why Mamdani thought becoming mayor made him the generalisimo president of New York. Growing up in a fancy Ugandan compound with its own private militia will do that to a person.
In 2012, Behar still wouldn’t shut up about the 2000 election even though it was fully legitimate. In an interview with disgraced former New York Governor and prostitute aficionado Eliot Spitzer (D), she griped: “I’m still ticked off about the 2000 election.” Adding, “I’m still ticked off about the 2000 election.”
It was rich for Hostin to open her mouth about it too because she spent years insisting that Trump’s victory in 2016 was illegitimate, only to change her mind six years later when her friend Karine Jean-Pierre was getting flack for spewing the same non-sense.
Just last month, Hostin argued that it was understandable for people to be suspicious of the results of the 2024 presidential election.
Additionally, throughout 2025, The View repeatedly suggested Trump stole the 2024 presidential election, without evidence and without even a theory about how it could have been done.
Over the years, Behar has repeatedly and erroneously casted doubt on every Republican electoral victory. In 2023, she asserted that the only why Republicans win elections was by “cheating.”
AN ARMY MARCHES ON ITS STOMACH, BUT A WAR RUNS ON CREDIT: Buddy, Can You Spare 1.5 Trillion Rubles? “The Kremlin’s borrowing for this quarter was supposed to bring in 1.5 trillion rubles, or about $19 billion. But lenders didn’t like the risk, and — brace yourself for this one — Moscow raised a piddling 8.8 billion rubles. That’s a little under $112 million, or just six-tenths of one percent of what Moscow needs.”
The boom in data-center construction is one of the most important economic developments in recent history, helping to power the promise of AI-enabled growth. Yet opposing data centers has rapidly become a unifying cause across a broad coalition of some of the nation’s most ardent left-wing activist groups, who have made it their mission to disrupt this innovation at all costs.
Organizers for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) link data-center growth to rising utility costs and concentrated Big Tech power. “Anti-imperialist” groups portray AI as a tool of surveillance and militarization. Anti-ICE activists argue that data centers enable immigration enforcement and expand domestic surveillance.
Together, these strands are converging on the proliferating facilities as a target, making data centers a potent tool for drawing everyday Americans into the web of left-wing activist groups—and creating opportunities for “direct action” against increasingly vital infrastructure.
Read the whole thing.
CAN’T STOP THE SIGNAL:
🚨WOW: President Bill Clinton has COPIED President Trump's signature red 45-47 hat, now wearing a red 42 hat.
Trump owns our culture and style, and if you can't beat them, join them!
The auteur behind “The Odyssey” leaned on feminist author Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s epic poem to shape his film. That’s the honor of a lifetime, full stop. And, apparently, Nolan’s stamp of approval led to her book climbing the charts anew.
She called some of the film’s messaging “incoherent,” questioned the absence of Zeus and Poseidon and attacked Penelope, a key character played by Anne Hathaway.
Wilson even found the dog portrayed in the film as pandering of the highest order.
Best of all? She gave the film’s marketing team the worst quote possible to use on the movie poster moving forward.
I didn’t feel it was pulling teeth to engage with it.
A simple “thank you” note would have sufficed. Instead, she found the nearest rhetorical dagger and plunged it into Nolan’s back.
Emily Wilson is palpably disappointed that the Odyssey wasn't a masculine blood orgy she could spend the next 10 years criticizing. https://t.co/lnS2YhQabN
“The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he’s done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring … Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer’s Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.”
The Delta House would like a word here:
While the Critical Drinker loves to riff on Hollywood screenwriters arbitrarily going woke to appease mythical “modern audiences,” a literal interpretation of The Odyssey might not have made for an enjoyable night at the movies:
Was [Nolan] really supposed to show, among other things, the mythical Greek hero slaughtering unarmed suitors, ordering the execution of the household maids (after forcing them to clean up the gore from the massacre of suitors), sleeping around with nymphs, and abducting women from Cicones?
And we are supposed to believe that these gaps are offenses *against Western civilization*? That stringing up enslaved women by a ship’s cable or physical intimacy with a witch are what made the West great, such that it speaks to Nolan’s hostility to our own culture that he left them out? Please.
Now, the director does significantly soften Odysseus in ways that I think go too far, but, as has been widely noted, Nolan changes him in a generally in Christian direction, which isn’t anti-Western, either.
Citizen Vigilante star Armie Hammer is out spreading the word in Woke Hollywood that he considers his own movie to be “hateful” and “disgusting.”
“The first time he saw it, he was in tears,” someone described as a “source in Hammer’s camp” told the far-left Puck. “He called me and said, ‘Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting.’”
“I think he knew it certainly leaned toward the right, but Uwe works in a very frantic way,” the source added. “It’s not like he sent him a hundred-page script. When he saw the final product, he was, ‘That was not the movie I thought we made,’ and he freaked the fuck out.”
So this is the thanks Citizen Vigilante director Uwe Boll gets after he lifted a broke and broken Armie Hammer up out of the #MeToo Gulag and paid him $250,000 when, as Hammer himself pointed out, he was in such dire straits, “I would have done a fucking cat food commercial.”
What’s happening here is not rocket science…
Not at all. As John Nolte writes, the actor, who supported Biden-Harris in 2020, “is having these comments leaked to a left-wing publication like Puck because that’s how desperate he is to appease the very same people who blacklisted him over nothing more than five years ago.”
Last night, in a short video statement, Mamdani acknowledged that he has no authority, and never had any authority, to carry out his campaign promise.
“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,” Mamdani said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”
No Shinola, Sherlock.
Nothing changed between last fall and now; the only difference is that the U.N. General Assembly is in two months, and Netanyahu intends to be there. (The Israeli leader may feel that he must attend the UNGA this year, to prove the point that no one has the authority to arrest him on U.S. soil.)
In the end, Mamdani is like the kid who runs for middle-school student council promising to replace the school lunches with McDonalds and Chick-fil-A and ban homework. He either didn’t know, or more likely, didn’t care that he didn’t have the authority to keep this promise; he just wanted the applause and to look like a tough guy.
Mamdani added, “The federal government, however, does [have the authority] — and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.”
No, the U.S. government does not have the authority to execute that warrant, at least not without repealing the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act and recognizing the authority of the ICC, which would give the ICC the authority to indict and arrest U.S. government officials and members of the military.
Roger Simon adds: International Criminal Court: Bad from the Start. “Israeli journalist Amit Segal and others have noted, Mamdani’s overstated attacks only serve to improve Netanyahu’s reelection chances.”
NIFTY: Firefighting drones in the works as wildfires plague US nearly year-round. “Most drones are significantly smaller than crewed aircraft and have shorter flight ranges, meaning they cannot replace large airtankers in delivering massive payloads of water or other fire-suppressing payloads to remote wildfires. But companies and fire agencies—along with organizers of the $11 million XPRIZE competition—are testing whether drones can help firefighting crews respond more quickly to small fires and put them out before they become more destructive.”
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