January 3, 2026

JOURNALISM:

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

COMRADE MAMDANI SLAMS TRUMP’S ILLEGAL MADURO ARREST ON BEHALF OF NYC VENEZUELANS. (WHO WANTS TO TELL HIM?)

 

Exit questions about that “briefing:”

Mamdani is governing in the media capital of America, so he will have a very loud microphone; the Democrats will position him as a shadow president based upon how well things go in Fun City under his regime. But as Noah Rothman wrote shortly before Mamdani’s election, the right will be happy to let him broadcast at full blast as well:

If Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City, Republicans plan to highlight that fact in their midterm campaigns against Democratic lawmakers nationwide.

That entirely unremarkable observation is the subject of an item in Axios in which the GOP is accused of plotting to “weaponize” New York City Democrats’ voting preferences, which, we should observe, consists entirely of noticing them.

For years, says reporter Kate Santaliz in her scandalized dispatch, the GOP has made former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into a “bogeywoman.” Her capacity to “rile up the base” was unrivaled. But with her diminished role, “GOP strategists are testing new symbols of the party’s left, and hope Mamdani will fill that void.”

Based upon the past couple of days – and much of 2025, that’s looking like a pretty safe bet.

Posted at 5:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISAPPOINTING: Our Yearlong Review Mazda CX-70 Has Left Us. We Are Not Sad. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it: After a year behind the wheel, the Mazda CX-70 wasn’t what I expected at the beginning of its loan. It ended up being one of the worst long-term vehicles I’ve chaperoned during my time at MotorTrend.”

Ouch.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA, YOU DON’T TUG ON MEME-SUPERMAN’S CAPE:

Posted at 4:38 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PAST PERFORMANCE DOES NOT GUARANTEE FUTURE RESULTS:

Besides, I don’t see what people are so upset about.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

WHY DON’T PEOPLE CARE ABOUT MEN? The Kosher Clinician and I will talk about men, politics, dating, and my new book today, Jan. 3rd at 2:30 eastern. You can join live here.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Helen Smith

NEW YORK PARTIED LIKE IT WAS 1975. IN EAST BERLIN:

I guess this is part of that whole “warmth of collectivism” vibe:

Related: Jonah Goldberg: Collectivism, Warmed Over.

When I first heard Mamdani refer to the “warmth of collectivism,” I immediately thought of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History. In one scene, she describes how a slave-laborer fell in the snow from exhaustion. The other slaves—and they were slaves, owned by the state, as Chamberlin would put it—rushed to strip the fallen man’s clothes and belongings. The dying man’s last words were, “It’s so cold.”

Collectivization under Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” led to millions more Chinese famine deaths from 1959 to 1961—from a lowball estimate of 20 million to a high of 45 million.

Now, I don’t for a moment think Mamdani has anything like that in mind. Moreover, even if he did, nothing like that can be orchestrated from New York’s City Hall.

But here is what I do think is interesting and worrisome about his use of the term “collectivism.” I can only think of three possibilities for it: 1) Mamdani is ignorant of the term’s historically grounded connotation, 2) he knows it and doesn’t care, or 3) he knows it and does care.

Under the second and third options, he could be trying to reclaim the positive connotation of collectivism—a connotation it has not had for at least a century. Or he could be trying to troll people—like me—into attacking him and overreacting to a word his fans have no problem with.

I suppose there’s a fourth possibility. He has a bad speechwriter—or is one—and just made a stupid, lazy mistake. After all, he could have used “community,” “communal,” “solidarity,” “cooperation,” “shared sacrifice,” or some such treacle.

But this mistake is essentially no different than ignorance. That it didn’t stand out to him is a form of ignorance. After all, if the draft referred to the warmth of “Stalinism” or “National Socialism,” Mamdani would certainly have said, “Whoa, we can’t say that. Let’s talk about the ‘warmth of community’ instead.”

Mamdani’s fan club were certainly choosing that fourth option yesterday:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FINALLY: The Nicolas Maduro Memes Are Already Here.

Did you say Cuba?

Speaking of Rubio:

But won’t somebody think of the poor beleaguered drug addicts?

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BEN “LONESOME” RHODES HAS A SAD:

FLASHBACK: Former Obama Official Ben Rhodes Can’t Bring Himself To Give Trump Credit For Israel-Hamas Deal.

During his time at the White House, Rhodes was one of Obama’s closest advisors and masterminded the public relations push behind the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He told The New York Times in 2016 that he “created an echo chamber” of experts who would feed reporters positive analyses of the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes stated.

Rhodes was a strident critic of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly earning himself the nickname of “Hamas” in the White House. In his 2019 book The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, Rhodes wrote that Israel was “driven by the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox emigres” and that Netanyahu used “political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing Palestinians.”

As Lee Smith wrote at the beginning of 2020: Obama Passed the Buck. Trump Refused to Play. “The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch.”

But does the husk of another former Obama operative have any thoughts on this matter (or any thoughts at all)?

UPDATE: Another Obama official has a serious case of amnesia:

Posted at 12:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

ED MORRISSEY: Trump Captures Maduro, Wife; Both Face Trial in New York.

Nicolas Maduro could have left like Bashar al-Assad. Instead, he chose the Manuel Noriega option – an option he apparently never considered.

Overnight, Donald Trump ordered special forces into Caracas, backed by strikes on Venezuela security assets, and captured Maduro and his wife. Trump announced the capture on Truth Social, along with a presser to be held in a couple of hours:

The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

The announcement came shortly after John’s overnight post, when news of the attack on Caracas first emerged. At the time, John noted that “no one knows where Maduro is,” which apparently was almost literally true. The Venezeulans at that time had no idea that Maduro and his wife had been captured and removed.

No word yet on when Judge Boasberg will order Maduro’s release. And as Ace writes, “This is a sad day, per Tucker Carlson. Why, the parade of paid Venezuelan spokesmen he ‘interviews’ on his propaganda show say that the narcoterrorist communist dictatorship of Venezuela is secretly very ‘conservative!’”

“And he pushes obvious lies like this because 1, he’s paid to, and 2, he thinks his audience is actually so stupid they are diagnosably learing disabled (yes that was an intentional mispelling) and he has absolutely zero respect for his Pay Pigs who he assumes will believe literally anything as long as it’s wrapped in ‘anti-establishment’ tissue paper.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

Posted at 12:36 pm by Charles Glasser

UKRAINE’S REAL SUPERPOWER: LEARNING AND BUILDING FASTER THAN REALITY CHANGES. “Ukraine is not winning the drone race because it found one brilliant design, it is winning because it built a ruthless innovation loop where reality at the front instantly reshapes what gets built next.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll