u/Pemulis_DMZ

This is a sentimental post after a weekend of enjoying gorgeous weather, good family and friends, and patriotic celebration. So I’m not gonna lay out the arguments for the haters. They have their blinders up no matter what and will cling to their reasons to hate on this country.

But this country is a miracle. One I’m proud to live in, especially now after having just moved back after several years abroad.

America was, is, and God-willing, will continue to be a miracle. And it all started with the truly enlightened Founding Fathers.

No other country like it on earth.

This will probably get taken down and I'll probably be banned for a week (again), though I genuinely don't think I'm breaking any rules. To try and not break rules I'm going to avoid discussing details of the case, which you can all easily look up yourself.

And when you do, look at the 6-3 split, consider which side dissented, and then consider that this is the same side that insists the SC is politically-driven as long as there's a conservative majority.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Conservative judges generally rule according to what they think the Constitution and the law says. Liberal judges rule according to what they think it SHOULD say.

EDIT: and I realized right after posting that the decision was Tuesday, not yesterday.

This isn’t complicated. Rent stays the same. So taxes and maintenance costs go up. New housing costs go up. Owners stop doing maintenance. They stop renewing leases and keep apartments empty. Investors stop building new houses.

Rent freezing does not work. It makes the problem much, much worse for anyone aside from the minority affluent white people who aren’t searching for housing and will benefit from it. This has been proven time and time again.

The concept - that you could reveal unconscious bias through small words and actions that would marginalize others - is just about the most insulting thing to all involved. It presupposes the worst about the alleged perpetrator, infantilizes the supposed victim, and removes anything resembling grace, good will, or forgiveness.

No wonder the perpetually aggrieved, self obsessed “social justice” class loves it. It gives them what they love most: an excuse to turn any and every thing into a reason to shame, preach, and bully while presenting themselves as bravely persevering against a wave of racist onslaughts that never really existed.

The first time I ever heard of Zohran Mamdani was in early February 2025.

Donald Trump had just taken the oath of office for the second time. Democrats were still emerging from the malaise induced by 2024’s myriad debacles for their party. Internally, they fretted over their institutional sclerosis, concluding with some reluctance that their gerontological establishment must be sidelined even as none of its septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders were eager to volunteer for the ice floe.

Into this milieu stepped Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who openly sought the support of other democratic socialists in what was then a long-shot bid to take New York City. His first ad was revealing.

The spot featured a young couple cringing into their phones as they watched Chuck Schumer try and fail to project enthusiasm. “God damn Democrats,” said one of Schumer’s youthful critics. “I’ve never been prouder not to be one.” She did like Zohran, though. “He’s running on freezing the rent, union-built housing, city-run groceries, universal child care, free buses,” our heroine, “Harmonia,” confessed. Her boyfriend was easily persuaded to back Zohran, but she explained the practical step they’d need to take: “This is the Democratic primary, so if we want to vote for Zohran where it really counts, we have to change our party affiliation.”
Neither of the ad’s protagonists identified themselves as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, but it was also made clear that they were not “truly independent.” Indeed, they were enlisting themselves in a crusade to capture the party from without, and they made no secret about their intentions. That project is well underway today.

The time for former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison — or any other Democratic institutionalist, for that matter — to defend the party from outside forces that “hate the Democratic Party” was then. And with its successes in this year’s primary elections, the DSA has grown bold enough that its operatives are no longer being coy about their aims:

https://x.com/NotTheirScript/status/2069913469009178762?ref\_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2069913469009178762%7Ctwgr%5Eac30311be51309b4ea873cd5bdb5e473865be69d%7Ctwcon%5Es1\_c10&ref\_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Fthe-hostile-takeover-of-the-democratic-party-that-everyone-but-the-democrats-saw-coming%2F

The DSA’s elected officials are, according to the NYC-DSA’s co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, Schrödinger’s Democrats. “When they’re in the legislature, they’re part of the Democratic Party caucus,” he said. But outside that setting, Democratic Socialists want little to do with the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted.

The DSA doesn’t “agree” with “the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus,” Gordillo added. What’s more, to the extent that the Democratic Party draws its funding from well-heeled donors, it has a conflict of interest that prevents it from advocating socialist policies. Therefore, the DSA’s focus is on moving “independents” into positions of power within Democratic ranks.

So the DSA doesn’t like how the Democratic Party is organized or run. DSA leaders don’t like how it raises funds, and they dislike the policies it advocates. They don’t even seem to have much respect for registered Democrats, establishmentarian or otherwise, and are therefore invested in overhauling the party’s demographic makeup — transforming it from what it is today into something entirely different.
Certainly, with this usurpatory agenda laid bare, there is now some belated grumbling in Democratic ranks. “Centrist Democrats, normie Democrats, need to realize we’re the insurgents, and they’re the new establishment,” one center-left organizer told Politico.

Matt Bennett, “co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way,” agrees. “It is vital that Democrats do not mistake the radicalism of a very small electorate in very blue places with the desire of the larger Democratic Party to move sharply to the left,” he warned.

An intrepid few have gone further than that. “I’m not in that f***ing political party,” spat the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville. He said accurately of the DSA that “these people are not Democrats,” and “there’s just some s*** I can’t be in the same tent with.”

But these are rare expressions of dissent. By contrast, Democrats in elected officeare making accommodations with the socialists on the rise within their ranks. Perhaps, after Democrats sacrificed their credibility in the all-out effort to drag Joe Biden into a second term, the party’s leaders were deprived of any argument in their favor. But the time to make that argument was in February 2025. That moment is gone.

Full stop. Unless your life depends on it - as in, you would cease to be able to maintain your ability to stay alive - cutting off a body part is always weird.

I’m not talking about abnormalities like tumors or a sixth finger. There are such extremely rare instances where surgical removal of a body par represents a return to a more healthy norm.

The two exceptions are excess skin removal for morbidly obese people who have lost a lot of weight and a preventative breast removal for people, almost always women, who have a history of breast cancer in the family.

Otherwise, I don’t care what body part we’re talking about, if you’re removing a part of your body - no matter your rational - that’s weird and should be considered self harm.

You see it on Reddit time and time again: when anyone suggests that the Left has become increasingly hostile toward white males in countries across the West, the Reddit faithful come out in full force to say that it’s a victim fetish worthy of mockery, that the Left has done nothing to alienate White males (and if they are it’s a good thing).

Henry Nowak is dead because the nation he lives in is infested with the same intellectual rot found in the US, one that insists Western culture and history are things to be ashamed of, and that white males are always the oppressor, never the victim. If you’re a white man, your guilt is a forgone conclusion.

And then they call anyone who talks about what happened to Henry Nowak a “Right-wing rabble-rouser”.

The Left’s hatred of white men is very real and has been for many years. The incompetency of Right wing leaders like Trump has kept Left wing parties like the Democrat Party on life support, but that isn’t going to last forever.

If they don’t face up to this clear bigotry within their ranks, Left-wing parties are going to go extinct, if they don’t take down their own countries with them first.

Hey everyone I’m back from a 7 day ban for daring to suggest a designated victim class might not always be just blameless victims.

Fuck the moderation on Reddit and all the people who come here to call anyone who disagrees with them brainwashed or cultists then turn around and get more talking points from r politics or r news.

Teen takeovers, like this one, are all happening in blue cities where law breaking in general is tolerated and there is an obvious racially driven two-tier system of justice.

If these were great crowds of marauding, looting, and pillaging white kids it would make the news and police would be cracking down. The fact that this is generally black kids causing these problems means that anything other than the perpetrators themselves are blamed.

Dem politicians don't want to upset the people they count on to mindlessly vote for them no matter how unliveable their cities become, so they talk about "cries for help" or "the lingering effects of Covid", anything to avoid saying what everyone knows: there is one demographic doing this shit to an absurdly disproportionate degree. If their parents won't stop them, then the government programs enabling them to have so many kids they refuse to discipline needs to end, the children arrested, and the parents held criminally liable.

They’ve lost the mantle of the party of change because the party is so settled in its identity.

Donald Trump is a mysterious figure in political life. It has become a cliché to say that in 2015 he launched a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He questioned its commitment to free trade, to muscular military intervention abroad, and to its embarrassing tolerance of mass illegal immigration. It was broadly believable that he could win the nomination, so long as there were multiple “Republicanism is just fine, thanks” candidates dividing the anti-Trump vote. The more shocking thing was that he could then swiftly win the loyalty of most of the party that he had been beating up for nine months (including its donor class) and defeat a candidate the opposition party had sheltered and consolidated around as early as was practicable.

But sometimes families are at their strongest precisely because they’ve just come through a knock-down, drag-out argument over the Thanksgiving table. There’s energy, passion, and even a renewed affection among those tilting at each other, a feeling that what you said, even if it didn’t triumph, mattered.

There are long-term structural reasons related to globalization that caused Republicans to enter into a state of civil war then. They are the same reasons why populism has divided right-wing parties across the West in the past decade. In fact, this fight for the soul of the party is ongoing. One hears the battle cries among those who are already partisans for Marco Rubio or JD Vance as a successor to Trump.

This civil war within the GOP has, of course, hampered Trump in setting his own agenda. He has often settled for passing the priorities of his party adversaries. But it has also helped to keep him “the main character” in American politics even as his poll numbers dip.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have a serious brand problem that hasn’t been solved by Trump’s foray into Iran or the unpopularity of his tariffs. A 2025 CNN poll found that only 16 percent of Americans said Democrats had stronger leaders than Republicans. Even then, more respondents saw incumbent Republicans as the party of change. Maybe Democrats lost their brand as the party of America’s future because they’ve stopped debating about how that future will look. They’ve lost the mantle of the party of change because the party is so settled in its identity.

Right now, the Republican Party uneasily, but noisily, accommodates people with differing views on how the global economy should be engaged. Can Democrats even accommodate voters who think girls should compete only on the girls’ team? It’s not clear.

What are the Democratic ideas about America’s role in the global economy or as a geostrategic actor? Well, you can have every flavor of globalism offered by the Kennedy School of Government.

Sometimes it seems like Democrats have a more progressive and less progressive wing. Sure, AOC and Abigail Spanberger have different priorities. But, for the most part, Democrats revert to a hive mind. In 2020, during the Covid emergency and in the weeks after the death of George Floyd, that meant everyone in the party shifted dramatically to the left and started sharing their pronouns.
I think if Democrats want to fix their current brand, when 70 percent of voters view them as “out of touch,” they need to start having big, public fights with each other that give more voters a stake in the party and its future. One of the downsides of the progressive faith that the arc of the universe bends their way is that it gives incumbents the sense that their triumph is assured by capital-H History. Anyone who thinks differently feels left behind.

First, economics isn’t a zero sum game. The money a billionaire earns doesn’t limit the amount of money you can earn.

Second, socialists conflate "earning money" with "labor", as though the only way to rightfully earn money is by grinding away for it. It's the entire conceit their world view is built upon. You can't personally physically do a billion dollars worth of work and therefore you can't earn it in the sense socialists believe one rightfully earns money.

The key mistake socialists make is that they do not understand that one can absolutely generate value to the economy that is worth billions of dollars. And this is what every self-made billionaire has done in one form or another. It’s the capitalist incentives which drive individuals to create that value which have allowed capitalism to thrive where socialism invariably fails.

And in creating that value, billionaires have absolutely "earned" it. I don’t want to live in a society that prohibits them from doing so.

Colbert knew he could gain esteem from Leftist elites if he made very simplistic jokes about Trump and Republicans.

At some point, appealing to cultural tastemakers became way more important to him than, you know, actually being funny or having an enough of an audience to make a profit.

This sort of mind rot is ruining higher education, media, entertainment, and just about any other industry where people spend a lot of time caring about what other people think of them.

And that’s what makes it so ironic. While those in his industry will give him a hero’s send off, to most of us he became what he used to satirize: an unfunny political hack.

I mean, did you see the dancing vax syringes skit?!

I thought Kirk used Christian teachings to cover for his rather simplistic takes on complex social issues. Like almost all online political talking heads, I thought he cared more about attention than constructive discourse. But he wasn't a political extremist. That would be one Hasan Piker, the increasingly popular far-Left provocateur.

Kirk called for free speech and defending conservative ideas on college campuses. Piker defends murdering CEOs.

Kirk advocated for traditional Christian values. Piker says shoplifting is actually a noble protest against capitalist overlords.

Kirk promoted conventional American patriotism. Piker said "America deserved 9/11."

To many on the Left, Charlie Kirk was an extremist whose rhetoric supposedly begot his assassination. Funny how those same people rarely seem interested in applying that standard to Hasan Piker.

Because I remember it used to be a great place to see game highlights. Now it’s all hot takes and drama. Why can’t it at least be both?

He’s relatively young, pragmatic, and a good communicator, which would make him the first presidential nominee on either side to be able to say that since Obama.

He’d win Pennsylvania, and would stand a much stronger chance in other rust belt states where voters are alienated by Leftist elitism in the Democratic Party.

But there’s just one small problem: he’s Jewish. That doesn’t play too well with the young, far Left base of the party, the type of people who would read NYT’s recent farcical reporting (stemming from Hamas-linked sources) of trained “rape dogs” used by the IDF. This isn’t opposition to the war in the Gaza Strip or how it was conducted, it’s hysterical antisemitism, and that’s something that’s rampant in today’s Dem party.

So instead we’ll get Newsom, or AOC, or some other Dem who alienates the hell out of most of middle America who don’t live in online bubbles like Reddit.

Which is a shame, because Shapiro is exactly the type of guy the Dem party needs.