Upon his long, drawn-out firing by CBS, the former late-night entertainer ascended skyward, but a few days prior to Pentecost, to receive his heavenly reward. And what a prize it was! ‘Twas gold in the progressive hall of heroes! Colbert was immortalized in script most fitting for the age: tweets, Instagram posts, and AI-composed captions.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris led the pity party, tweeting: “Stephen Colbert has a talent for making people laugh and encouraging them to stay curious, stay engaged, and stay hopeful about the world around them.” Had Harris only demonstrated one of those qualities, she might not have lost every swing state to the current braggart-in-chief.

The official Democratic X account, due to being run by a coven of female zoomers, joined with a four-in-one photo grid of Colbert cheesing with former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, along with a bored-looking Michelle Obama and Harris holding a light beer like it was a Fabergé egg.

The pallbearing train continued with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, and senators Amy Klobuchar, Ed Markey, and Chuck Schumer, all keying out obligatory lamentations. Meaning: their respective comms directors cribbed each other’s posts, swapping synonyms, and attaching screenshots of the boss chinwagging with shitcanned Colbert.

State-aligned media cabanaboys shed put-on tears to the pool as well. Brian Stelter, CNN’s aspic media correspondent, dashposted a series of “Late Show” signoff summations like he was documenting the 9/11 attacks in real time. Leftie rags like The Guardian and The Washington Post published maudlin remembrances, each suggestive that poor Stephy is an innocent funny man ground under a MAGA jackboot for the crime of crack.

Edward Abbey famously pithed that “distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.” And Colbert has spent years slandering President Trump with every demeaning label the Left knows, which are, to use Ed West’s bracket, forever linked to a “quirky, little-known period of European history: 1930s Germany.”

To hear the libs tell it, Colbert added to the gaiety of the nation by mindlessly mouthing every Nazified insult invented of Donald Trump. Then, the poor, unsuspecting wisecracker had his lips forcibly sewn shut by corporate bigwigs fearful of government reprisal. Some variation of the sentiment “Cobert’s cancellation should send a chill down the spine of every free-speech-loving American” was reprinted, replete with dark forebodings on why totalitarianism’s first victim is laughter.

Of course, humor does hold the line against dictators. Every joke, per Orwell, is a tiny revolution. And as Douglas Murray observed, people laugh at things they know are true. The snotty, scar-pocked king declares he’s the smartest, savviest, suaveist man alive? Call him a corpulent gasbag with shriveled nethers who takes out his unhappy marriage on his subjects. Or craft a clever poem like Horace Walpole. Or shout, “You damned rascal, where’s your wife?” Let ridicule and irreverence melt away his authority.

Colbert was no courtman, jesting the mad monarch, poking the bejeweled crown with his tassled scepter. He was the comedy equivalent of industrially processed offal. He repackaged the negs and deprecations of his fellow blues, reciting them in the same sniffy manner as an Upper Eastsider bumping into a touristing family from Toledo. Unironically blathering canned lines isn’t comedy, nor entertainment, nor is it speaking truth to power. It’s, at bottom, boring. Colbert had plenty of opportunity to flame sitting pols. He hosted a conga line of Dems during his evening hour. Instead, Stephen, as he was warmly called, shined their shoes.

Even Jon Stewart, the man who offered Colbert a couple rungs to climb into show business, occasionally pressed Democratic lawmakers, including famously jabbing Nancy Pelosi on the ramshackle launch of ObamaCare.

The real reason Stephen Colbert can no longer be watched in the witching hour has to do with America’s center of gravity: coin. CBS claims the lib-led “Late Show” was a money-loser to the colossal tune of $40 million per annum. It turns out nobody wants to watch an alleged comedian unctuously discuss baking sourdough with Kirsten Gillibrand, or some other wooden senator.

The “radlib wokery is the new Christianity” is a trite talking point. But clichés are lazily quotable for a reason: they contain a crumb of wahrheit.

The bastardized canonization of Colbert is an exemplar of leftism charading as a spiritual practice. On a weekend traditionally reserved for toasting the fallen American soldier with pissbeer, Democratic officials and their press amanuenses toasted the furloughed host like he was a pitiable Republican soldier shot dead while bravely fighting General Franco’s forces.

Colbert’s fate is worse than that of those butchered in the Auts: public-access television. But at least nobody’s income statement runs red.

Moreover, factionalism has resulted in instances of political violence within ideologies. Internal ideological conflicts within the right sometimes lead to violent behaviours. Similarly, the left is plagued with intra-ideological violence, which is evident in the case of Athens, Greece. In this case, 150 people from the Maoist organization ARAS (Left Anti-Capitalist Group) carried out a violent attack on antiauthoritarians and anarchists. As a result, a number of activists were severely injured and lost consciousness. Even the anarchist movement seems to be highly fragmented as well. In particular, market and individualist anarchists are often disregarded and stigmatized by the social anarchists such as the platformists and the anarcho-syndicalists as proponents of liberal ideologies rather than anarchists.

It might seem strange, but alliances between libertarians occur along the vertical axis of left and right ideologies rather than horizontal axis of libertarian ideologies. Thus, left libertarians including libertarian socialists, democratic socialists, and some anarchists collaborate with various authoritarian left-wing movements including anti-imperialist Baathists, Leninists, and Trotskyists despite their ideological affinity with the libertarian right when it comes to basic values like human rights and civil liberties. Right libertarians including classical liberals, paleo-libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists are allied with protectionist nationalists and mainstream conservatives over the libertarian left despite their shared values of voluntary association, civil liberties, and individualism.

Understanding the Popular Caucuses within Libertarian Party

The two-party binary system characterizes politics worldwide; however, the political rhetoric is usually misleading. The Republicans in the United States represent themselves as the main proponents of smaller government, similarly to the Conservatives in the UK and Liberals in Australia. Yet, these centre-right parties are well-known for the implementation of protectionist measures and the tolerance of systemic rent-seeking. By contrast, the Democrats in the US and Labour Party in the UK stand for a big welfare state which is the best bureaucratic environment for rent-seeking. Under these circumstances, the only consistent actors in opposing rent-seeking and defending individual liberty are Libertarian Parties, despite all their deficiencies both theoretical and practical.

There are some interesting alliances within Libertarians Parties despite their oppositional agenda. For instance, the US Libertarian Party includes such notable caucuses as Classical Liberal Caucus, Mises Caucus, and Radical Caucus. The former is founded on the legacy of John Locke and Thomas Paine and its politics are mainly focused on institutions and policy-making. The Mises Caucus promotes paleolibertarianism which combines basic libertarian views and culturally conservative beliefs, initially proposed by Murray Rothbard, and currently are gaining popularity due to the influence of individuals such as Javier Milei. Finally, the Radical Caucus defends more radical positions that cover right-wing anarcho-capitalism (which started with Gustave de Molinari) and left-wing agorism (developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III).

However, there are some other equally intriguing caucuses that have not been discussed by the mainstream media and established left-right commentators. Such alliances include Libertarian Socialist Caucus and Povertarian Caucus.

Libertarian Socialist Caucus of Libertarian Party

As the name “libertarian socialist caucus” is reportedly associated with the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of Libertarian Party often is overlooked, it’s important to highlight about the important works of Libertarian Socialist Caucus of Libertarian Party.

In an interview conducted by Colin Jenkins of The Hampton Institute, Kuehnel and Posner, who are members of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) in the United States Libertarian Party, explain that their main aim is to reclaim the word “libertarian” from its American capitalist misuse and restore its original meaning, which is anti-authoritarian socialism, more precisely, anarchism. In the 2018 Libertarian National Convention, they nominated themselves for national positions. Even though their nominations failed, their actions sparked serious debates and controversies between right-libertarians. In addition, they believe that any libertarian should be against all kinds of hierarchies and coercions, both state control and economic oppression through capitalism. On top of this, they criticize the basic tenet of capitalism, namely private ownership, particularly absentee ownership, claiming that the latter can be possible only through the use of state force. For his part, Kuehnel prefers practical organizing, preferring action, and practice to theoretical and philosophical elaborations. Given the circumstances, what the LSC hopes to achieve within the Libertarian Party is the formation of a radical leftist caucus, political debate, and revealing corporate exploitation as a blatant breach of the non-aggression principle.

Povertarian Caucus of Libertarian Party

What sets the Povertarian Caucus apart from other caucuses is its focus on class struggles rather than strict ideology.
Logan Marie Glitterbomb, the co-founder of the Libertarian Anti-Fascist Committee and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party, and a member of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA, made an argument in his article “Make Libertarianism Working Class Again” concerning the loss of the working-class character in modern American libertarianism by suggesting that the current version of libertarian ideology represents an elitist approach aimed at accommodating corporate interests.

Currently, as Logan pointed out, libertarian spheres of activity including the Libertarian Party (LP) have become exclusionary. High delegate fees and expensive conventions prevent poor libertarians from participating in such events, creating an environment where rich people live in an ivory tower unaware of reality. Moreover, the corporate nature of libertarian circles leads to the blurring of boundaries between free markets and state-sponsored “crony capitalism”. In response, activists have established the “Povertarian Caucus” to redirect the focus of libertarianism onto pressing problems of the underprivileged population. Rather than arguing about taxes, the caucus discusses topics such as homelessness, prison labour, abuse of the welfare system, criminal justice reform, and the legalization of drugs. In addition, they support voluntary and radical labour unions which are unregulated by any governmental agency.

The libertarian caucus jointly led by Alex Flores is comprised of both left-wing and right-wing libertarians united by the idea of freedom initiated by the Libertarian Socialists in 2016. The mission of the caucus is to fight against state oppression to liberate the poor and empower people regardless of their financial background. As a result of the anti-authoritarian and voluntary approach to cooperation, the informal group grew into a strong organization with hundreds of members that has been operating for ten years. Nowadays, the caucus acts as a key organization for left-wing libertarians who feel out of place in the movement while being friendly with other caucuses, especially the Mises Caucus, which dominates among the others, according to Alex.

The impact of this approach is clearly visible in terms of tangible actions like helping people in need. For example, there are no chairs in the caucus because members prefer equality to hierarchies. At the last national convention, the caucus managed to subsidize over ten percent of all delegates in collaboration with the LP Alliance. They helped over thirty delegates together with their family members in terms of accommodation, food, transportation, and more. People supported were from diverse political backgrounds including right-wing libertarians from the Mises Caucus, libertarian socialists, etc. Besides, the caucus provides help to key people in different caucuses, for instance, the Catholic anarchist Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Alex Flores’s latest election to the Libertarian National Committee as a Regional Representative indicates a growing influence of the caucus and increasing inclusiveness.

In his speech, Alex Flores emphasizes his Native American heritage since he is Apache. His tribe promotes the idea that the Earth is not something to be possessed, but rather take care of to provide better conditions for seven future generations. Modern society calls it voluntary socialism or anarcho-communism because of the unique way of thinking. However, in our conversation, Flores emphasized that he sees Apache traditions as the basis of libertarianism and cites the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a historical example of libertarianism based on peace, self-determination, and voluntary association. The Haudenosaunee confederation played a significant role in creating the Constitution of the United States, for which reason it received recognition of Congress as early as in 1988. Flores also believes that Native Americans are historically libertarians based on the opinions of Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota activist for the rights of Native Americans, and a libertarian political activist.

A New Path for Liberty: Libertarian Alliance

It is undeniable that the Libertarian Party of the United States challenges traditional “othering” politics by housing diverse, anti-statist caucuses—ranging from anarcho-capitalists and agorists to class-driven Povertarians and authentic, non-statist libertarian socialists. To achieve true emancipation, the strategic priority must shift from left unity and right unity to libertarian unity as dismantling the state inherently dissolves corporate monopolies and concentrated private property in favour of a freed market based on voluntary exchange.

The prodigious scribe and econ prof is out with a doozy of a column, which is more compositional victory lap than polemic. “Woke is dead!” Cowen declares in The Free Press. He then proceeds into a jig on its sustainably-resourced grave plot, heartily patting his own back.

The confident boffin is convinced the radlib excesses of campus leftism have been flushed from ho-hum American life. “Wokeism is hardly gone,” he concedes, “but it does seem to have peaked in 2022 or so.”

Hear that, disgruntled laptop-jobber? Pronoun ninnies have lost their dainty grips. You can start using “faggot” and “retard” in work emails again! Hell, send a slur-filled missive to your HR director. Remind her (a bureacratess, natch) that lefty p.c. sensitivity is stiff and done. Sign off with a “So relax, Toots,” to reinforce the new, freer dispensation.

Actually, refrain from signing your own walking papers, as Free the People shouldn’t be held liable for your UI.

Cowen seems to earnestly believe the country’s moseyed past woke trappings, like inclusion riders, land acknowledgements, DEI promotion standards, campus struggle sessions, mandated email signifiers, capitalizing the “b” in blacks, indebted undergrads shrieking about privilege, third-worldism masquerading as a choate ideology, the jaw-crimping acronym “BIPOC” and the soulless pablum of strung clichés like “indigenous,” “marginalize,” “social justice,” and “IT’S MA’AM!”

Good riddance were it so! But the possibility that wokesters have only fallen back, hiding away the rhetorical ploys and intimidation schemes, is off Cowen’s radar. He remains deadset that wokeshivtiz ways are set dead, citing, among other curious happenings, the Ukraine War. (Putin couldn’t capture Kiev, but he apparently butchered Ibram Kendi’s profit quota.)

Woke is withered, Cowen contends, but something more wicked grows in its stead. “I fear we are now moving to a new culture of anger and resentment,” he augurs. Because slicing the world into good/dark and bad/white was an exercise in peace and civility?

Poor Tyler is having visions of the bomb-happy ‘70s: “[l]eft-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort.” The troubling praxis his refers to are… garden-variety progressive policies like a California wealth tax and Bernie Sanders’s airbrained data-center moratorium? Well, I suppose such reams of legalese sound like the Killing Fields to George Masontarians.

Cowen does have a real, substantive chill, and isn’t just chasing hobgoblins that keep Washington wonks awake at night. “What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations,” he shudders, listing off recent downed targets like Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He also references the climbing attempts on President Trump’s life. Then comes the prevarication so prominent with Beltway columnists: “It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.”

“It can be debated” is a particularly grating string of words that unshackles the writer from having to make definitive statements. So in the Péguyian spirit, I’ll dispense with equivocation: the men who killed Kirk and Thompson were down-the-line lefties. That they may have offered a stray opinion or two that flirted red doesn’t suddenly redefine them as deranged moderates. Nor is Cowen’s conclusion “hard to avoid.” I’ll put it in positivistic terms modern economists love: Prog disagrees with con; prog kills con; therefore murderer = prog. Proof that one in your model!

Maybe it’s aging brain cells; perhaps it’s an endearing innocence; or, possibly, it’s proximity to the blinding Imperial City. Whatever’s to blame, Cowen plots a false divide between woke wordgames and Defargian bloodlust. “[M]uch of society, including the more radical political left, is shifting toward more fascistic approaches and away from touchy-feely universalism,” he projects.

Not since Nikolai Petrovic has a well-meaning duffer been so purblind to the wild whims of youth, or the cold-eyed determination of communistic ideology. So, again, back to economic jargon to make it decipherable. Consider this, Mr. Holbert L. Harris Chair: the transitive nature of wokery. Expressing emotive affinity for the colored downtrodden was the A in the equation that eventually equals C, the riotous overthrow of private-property capitalism. Therapeutic empathy was a veiled opening salvo in a larger charge to de-embourgeoise society. The former necessarily leads to the latter.

Woke isn’t on life support; its mandate is being fulfilled by armed and angry footsoldiers versed in acrid shibboleths. Like Candy Lane, we’ve only advanced to a new square in the leftist agitation game.

In Walla Walla, Washington, there once was a road that functioned properly and bothered no one. Much of Rose Street had two lanes in both directions, and with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour, drivers could pass those who didn’t seem eager to reach their destination. All was well, but a petulant minority wasn’t satisfied. This shrill set squealed that Rose would fully bloom if bike lanes were added to it; however, if they were to get their way, this would mean that Rose would lose a lane on both sides, and that is exactly what happened, despite no one voting for it. A minority demanded it; they demanded that everyone be forced to pay for what only they desired, and the feckless politicians in this small town were more than happy to oblige. It’s other people’s money, after all, and the cries to “do something” are impossible to ignore.

I trust the reader acknowledges that this is no outlier and that these antidemocratic antics happen everywhere, no matter the size of the town. Politicians pronounce the positives of their beloved democracy, but virtually no one else seems to share their enthusiasm. If “democracy” is “majority rules,” have most readers witnessed democracy functioning properly anywhere, especially at the local level? If a small but exceedingly obnoxious minority can dictate what the local government does, it’s reasonable to conclude that there’s no such thing as “democracy.” It’s nothing but a myth, nurtured by what’s taught in schools and exposed by what actually occurs. And it’s not just that the outcomes are often contrary to what was promised; when the results are dismal, at best, fixing what is now broken requires more of everyone’s money. Back to Rose Street’s remodeling, rather than fix the politically created problem, the problem is set to be duplicated.

Your author believes that drivers in Washington are among the worst in the country. “Left lane, fast lane” appears to have never been taught, and more than a peculiar few interpret the speed limit literally, meaning driving five miles per hour under the limit is preferable to five over. And now that Rose is one lane instead of two, it only takes one of these lamblike luddites to cause a mile-long caravan. But at least the bicyclists are thriving, right? Maybe elsewhere, but not on Rose. Seeing a bicyclist on Rose is an event rarer than witnessing a driver daring to exceed the speed limit. And Rose Street isn’t adorned with palm trees, as Walla Walla is no beach community. Distinct four seasons are a feature of Walla Walla, which means that for about three months of the year, no bicyclists dare to traverse the snow and ice.

One might conclude that with such an abject failure, the rotten Rose remodeling would be reversed, but it’s slated to be replicated on Poplar Street. In the real economy, markets—people—don’t intentionally harm themselves, but with the poison that is politics, trade-offs are ignored. Poplar’s perversion has yet to break ground, but citizens have already voiced their opposition. As with Rose, no one voted to remove one of Poplar’s lanes, and this is where the theory of democracy unravels. To those who criticize the plan for Poplar, the public servants reply that it’s public policy to press on. Washington’s politicians violently pat themselves on the back for their passionate support of democracy, but this is yet another example of democracy’s subversion. And again, only in the political economy do bad ideas get additional funding. No one in the political class seems to ask themselves, “After we do this, what will happen?”

As with Rose, Poplar’s remodeling will create more congestion, so will the general public be forced to pay for adding lanes to other streets? And with drivers avoiding both streets, which streets will suffer more wear and tear? Will bicyclists now feel less safe on roads that were previously less trafficked? And what if the backlash is so great that the political profits reaped from the minute minority end up transforming into a liability for the tax-fed? If policy overrides the will of the people, this is no democracy; it never was. This is civilized barbarism under the guise of democratic rituals. This is harming the people—with their own money and without their consent—under the guise of helping them. This is the government creating problems so that it can later offer ‘solutions,’ thereby justifying its parasitic existence.

But the government needn’t follow through with its Poplar plan; it can prove its critics wrong by cancelling the project, implicitly admitting that market forces trump the lie that the government exists to serve those who are forced to fund it.

Massie’s loss was historic for a multitude of terrible reasons. Reports are that the race is the most expensive House primary in American history, with roughly $32 million spent to remove one of the few remaining liberty-minded Republicans in Congress. At the same time, Republicans reportedly spent only around $20 million defending Republican-held seats in Virginia during the recent debacle of Virginia democrats trying to gerrymander the state. The message from the Republican Party leadership and Trump is unmistakable. Punishing dissent inside the party matters more than protecting their competitive general elections.

They are not practicing a viable strategy but instead political cannibalism.

Massie was never a conventional Republican. He consistently frustrated both the Republican Party leadership and progressive Democrats alike. He opposed large deficit spending under both Republican and Democratic administrations, consistently opposed foreign interventions, and frequently voted against legislation he viewed as unconstitutional, even if it meant bucking his own party. He represented something rare in American politics, though: ideological consistency. Whether one agreed with him or not, Massie would vote based on his principles rather than what was politically fashionable or how the rest of the party voted.

His defeat signals that the modern GOP no longer rewards independent thinking of any kind. Loyalty to Donald Trump is the defining requirement for GOP membership and the only kind they will allow. While that may energize older Republican voters, it is rapidly alienating younger Americans.

The Republican Party has a demographic problem that it cannot ignore. Younger voters increasingly see the GOP as hostile to dissent, are consumed with ‘culture war’ issues, and are disconnected from the economic and civil-liberty concerns that many younger Americans face. Political coalitions cannot survive indefinitely by relying on older voters while steadily losing the younger generations. At some point, the demographics will catch up to Republicans.

The generational divide in the Massie race was difficult to miss. Older Republican voters overwhelmingly rallied behind Gallrein and Trump’s endorsement, while many younger conservatives, libertarian-leaning, anti-war voters, and anti-establishment Republicans saw Massie as one of the few voices in D.C. willing to challenge Trump and hold him accountable to the policies he campaigned on.

Although the GOP may have won the primary, it is still losing the next generation. The campaign against Massie was not a grassroots uprising of upset conservatives. It was a coordinated political effort driven by national donor networks, super PACs, and ideological enforcement through financial influence. Reports identified major billionaire donors and aligned political networks among the forces against Massie.

At a time when Republicans claim America faces existential crises from inflation, debt, border security, housing costs, institutional decline, or the multitude of “enemies we must destroy” (Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, China, etc.), tens of millions of dollars were mobilized not to defeat democrats, but to remove one of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress. That should concern anyone who still believes the GOP is primarily focused on governing.

Massie’s real offense was not ideological extremism; it was refusing to submit to the whims of President Trump and the ever-shifting demands of Trump-era Republicanism.

The modern GOP operates on a system where ideological consistency does not matter, as Trump loyalty is paramount over all. Yesterday’s policy positions can be changed on a whim depending on what Trump decides is politically useful at the moment. Trump built much of his political brand opposing foreign wars and criticizing interventionism abroad. However, he and many Trump-Republicans, are now supporting military confrontation with Iran. Trump built his immigration platform around strict border enforcement and reducing immigration levels, yet Republicans now increasingly support large expansions of employment-based visa programs when aligned with corporate or tech industry demands. The policies themselves are again, only secondary to what matters to the GOP, alignment with Trump’s political signals. Trump’s approval rating has cratered with every demographic, but is increasingly becoming worse with younger generations.

Massie represented one of the last remnants of a Republican tradition supposedly rooted in constitutional limits, fiscal responsibility, skepticism of foreign entanglements, and independent thought. In today’s GOP, consistency has increasingly become a liability.

This loss opens a door and an enormous opportunity for Libertarians and liberty-minded individuals. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of fiscally conservative, anti-war, civil-libertarian, and constitutionally-minded Americans who increasingly feel politically homeless. Many are not going to vote Democrat, but they will not vote for a Republican now, either. A Republican party that punishes independent thinkers like Massie drives away the kinds of voters it once depended on: younger conservatives skeptical of the status quo in D.C. They want limited government but also reject authoritarian political culture and ideological browbeating by the Democratic Party.

If libertarians want to capitalize on this moment, they must avoid falling into the same trap that consumes both parties. Ideological purity tests increasingly dominate both big parties. One disagreement, one deviation from what is ‘approved’, and individuals are treated as enemies or outcasts that must be purged from the party. Millions of Americans are tired of these purity tests. The Libertarian Party has the opportunity to become something different. A genuine big-tent coalition for people who believe in individual liberties, constitutional governance, civil liberties, fiscal restraint, and skepticism towards centralized power. This coalition is not going to agree on everything, and it should not, because disagreement and discussion are vital to understanding and coming to the best policy.

Some libertarians are pro-life, and some are pro-choice. Some libertarians support more open immigration policies while others favor stronger border enforcement. There are disagreements on trade, foreign policy, policing, and countless other issues. That diversity of thought, however, is a necessity.

A movement built around liberty should not force total ideological conformity. Free societies produce disagreement. The goal is not purity, but principled coexistence under shared limits on government’s power. None of this means Massie was right on every single issue, and it doesn’t mean Trump lacks legitimate political support. However, political movements become impossible to hold together when disagreement becomes disqualifying.

If libertarians attempt to replicate the same purity spiral that is weakening both big parties, they will squander the opportunity laid out before them. There are millions of Americans searching for a political home that is not defined by personality cults or ideological enforcement. The Libertarian party does not need to become “Republican-lite” or “Democrats who love guns,” but instead a coalition with broad support to unite people around core principles of liberty.

The destruction of Thomas Massie should serve as a warning not just to the Republican Party’s future, but also to what happens to political movements when loyalty matters more than principle.

The question after Massie’s defeat is no longer whether the GOP is changing, but whether anyone inside it is still allowed to disagree at all.

I spent time yesterday processing what all this means, because it’s still hard to believe that Thomas lost based on what I saw on the ground. Massie events were packed and spirited, with lots of joy, energy, and youthful diversity represented. At the same time, Thomas’s opponent Ed Gallrein was a nonentity on the ground. He hid from voters, dodged debates and interviews, and could barely scrounge up 100 people to listen to War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who airdropped in to launch yet another attack against Thomas.

But this pronounced enthusiasm gap didn’t matter enough in a closed Republican primary dominated by cable TV-watching Boomers over 70, who get their candidate information from Fox News and vote as they are told.

The attacks were relentless, vicious, and deeply dishonest, fueled by some $20 million in ads that blanketed cable TV, including one AI-generated ad which showed Thomas hooking up with AOC and Ilhan Omar. Seriously. Sometime later I might document these lies for posterity, but that’s not my purpose here.

You see, Thomas—who ran his campaign based on candid conversations with voters and podcasters of all stripes, actual policies, and big ideas informed by his homespun libertarian values—dominated with voters under 50. He won Millennials by 69 percent, and Gen Z by almost 82 percent.

His opponent didn’t run on ideas. He didn’t really run at all. He had no name ID. It was a sock puppet campaign based almost exclusively on a pledge of party fealty to President Trump. The only policy positions he articulated, that I’m aware of, were in defense of more wars, and reinstating the military draft of our sons and daughters, so that the government is fully prepared for… more wars.

So, think about the contrast between these two campaigns and how it informs our strategy moving forward. Not necessarily in the narrow sense of political campaigns, because politics is downstream of culture. I’m talking about the much bigger project of turning on the “Liberty Curious” and winning the hearts and minds of the next generation of Americans. Like the ones who voted for Thomas.

If Massie’s effort is a prototype, we can learn two things: It’s the message and the medium. The message is not about cults of personality; it’s about real ideas and values. Massie ran on a host of substantive ideas and policies: fiscal responsibility and an end to the inflation generated by run-away government spending, a less interventionist foreign policy, and stopping the surveillance of innocents and censorship of free speech. At the same time, he ran a positive campaign about personal liberty, healthy, honest living, the freedom to farm, and the power of local communities to solve problems.

In other words: Thomas ran on DOGE, peace instead of war, MAHA, and freedom of speech, all key elements of the 2024 Trump/MAGA coalition that made the difference between defeat and victory.

For Massie’s campaign, the medium was about all the decentralized media consumed by pretty much everyone under 50: influencers, videos, social media, and podcasts. Not scripted, not mandated. Individually curated and honest. Independent of corporate media capture. A beautifully chaotic marketplace of ideas, a marketplace where Thomas Massie—an important influencer in his own right—thrived. Indeed, it was in that open market where his campaign was able to raise an unprecedented $3,131,544 online from tens of thousands of donors, with an average gift of less than $100. That’s the power of ideas in a decentralized world, and it’s a game changer.

Ed Gallrein and Donald Trump, on the other hand, preached to their dwindling choir and pushed away former allies. Their campaign was totally dependent on Boomer cable news hosts and millions of dollars in attack ads.

So yes, the bad guys won with a dishonest and manipulative campaign, in the most expensive primary in history. I’m taking the loss.

But understand: they won the past. Thomas Massie won the future.

This was a generational proxy war over the future of America, and the darkness will turn to light soon enough.

CODA

Obviously, Ed Gallrein didn’t have tens of thousands of donors. He had three billionaires and all their superPAC money to buy attack ads. The agenda of those billionaires and their attack dogs was openly stated: to punish Massie for voting against foreign aid to Israel and for pushing a war powers resolution to stop their favored war with Iran. They said as much, repeatedly. They’re bragging about it now, having defeated the one remaining thorn in their policy agenda on Capitol Hill. (OK, they’re all also likely angry about Massie’s successful legislation to release the Epstein Files, but they would never admit that in public.)

Right out of the Left’s woke playbook, the winners now brag about their victory and their motives while simultaneously smearing Massie and his supporters as “antisemitic” for pointing out the very same thing. It’s laughable. But it’s also obscenely destructive if your real interest is curbing actual bigotry and true antisemitism. By calling anyone you disagree with on foreign policy an antisemite, you give cover to actual antisemites. And you are probably pushing people—people who harbor no ill will towards Jewish people or anyone else, people who resent American involvement in Israel’s wars—to start resenting the government of Israel, the people of Israel, and their American Jewish allies. It reminds me of the disgusting efforts by Obama and his attack dogs to smear Tea Partiers as “racist,” stoking racial tensions in hopes of cynical political gains in the process.

I know it’s out of fashion, but I still judge people based on the content of their character, and I can categorically vouch that Thomas Massie does the same.

Pulling back to an even wider view, the Trump-Republican dependence on Fox-addicted older Boomers could prove a serious liability in the midterms. They lucked out in Kentucky thanks to geography, being able to flood the Cincinnati and Louisville TV markets. In a differently-situated district, the Gallrein gambit may very well have gone down in flames in the face of the decentralized, organic campaigning of the Massie side.

What remains of MAGA won’t be so lucky to have two major TV markets to saturate in the vast majority of midterm races. And they won’t have the luxury of closed primaries where independent and centrist voices can be boxed out. If the GOP thinks silencing the only true Constitutionalist in the party is a winning strategy, they may have a rude awakening when faced with the broader electorate.

In usual aristocratic fashion, the Commonwealth’s nobility of the robe has delivered us from the tyranny of short-sighted rabble.

The Virginia Supreme Court’s strike down of last month’s redistricting referendum was a quaking decision that muddied partisanship, ideology, and the normally fine-grooved channels of X discourse. The ruling was, as in all good politics, abound with ironies.

The forthright result of the overrule gives Republicans—America’s closest approximation of the status-preserving Tory Party—what it treasures most besides cutting capital taxes: an excuse. Just as conservatives secretly long for elite admiration, these drippy defenders of tradition also harbor a primal need to burn and bury procedural norms.

Within weeks after Virginia’s demo-pproving the constitutional amendment permitting mid-decade redistricting, red states like Florida and Tennessee responded in kind, delicately carving congressional fractals to maximize GOP vote share. The High Court’s spike isn’t going to deter this push. The daisy chain of grievance must keep generating new links. The Old Dominion district-recut campaign was itself a parry to Texas’s redraw, which was a reciprocation to the Census Bureau’s (alleged) miscalculation that left Democratic states overcounted. Which itself was an error caused by the difficulty of summing heads during a pandemic, but also partially due to the Trump Administration’s interference, so the off-count was just fair play in response to… and on and on and on and on it goes, back centuries to the imposition of the Stamp Act.

Forget all the high-flown middle school rhetoric of liberal democracy, the dignity of man, the folkish wisdom of the upright voter: politics is petty reprisals all the way down.

Republicans may have uncorked the Kirkland champagne après the Friday morning invalidation. But the victory—or more accurately, bail out—may prove short-lived. The Grand Old Dominion Party is about as organized and effective as a peewee soccer team; its candidates frequently perform worse than an abbot running for Président de la République française. In the end, the Party’s scorched behind was hoisted out of the disenfranchising flames by a technocratic bureaucracy at a remove from public passion. Who’d have imagined: Republicans toasting judicial activism! This newfound respect for democratically immune commissars may even continue if the EPA finds “Gavin Newsom 2028” billboards threaten whooping crane habitats.

Democrats, meanwhile, were waylaid by an institution that, in normal circumstances, unquestioningly affords legal patina to its policies. An unchallengeable body of cordoned decide-ocrats, whose views were molded in the most liberal pedagogical establishments, unilaterally annul a blue measure? Like Hercules with Hydra’s blood, liberal technocracy wrenches its own works. Che sorpresa!

The petard-hoisting wasn’t over. “Corrupting money in politics” remains a Democratic bugabear, despite its candidates consistently outspending the opposition. Yet, the ostensible cashphobic party poured drams of dough—over $50 million by most measures—promoting the measure. The month leading up to ballot day was little distinguishable from October in a presidential-elec year. Every single YouTube video opened with a 15-second ad of Barack Obama exhorting you to stick it to MAGA neanderthals. Stacks of mailers packed my mailbox every day. And the texts—Dear Lord Almighty, the texts! Every minute of every hour of every day, an all-caps imploration to save Virginia by letting prog-pols re-arrange the congressional map like a dyslexic child struggling with a jigsaw puzzle.

Not since Vietnam has the Democratic Party overwhelmingly firebombed a place to influence hearts and minds. As with intimidating Ho Chi Minh, it was all for naught.

The dryest just desert came at the expense of the Democrats’ new favorite thingamajig: early voting. Adopted to make it easier for wage-slaves to vote for more EBT credits, the gimmick has, like all welfare connivances, expanded well beyond the scope. Election Day no longer exists; it’s Election Season, with up to a month and a half to hit the polls.

The Virginia Constitution stipulates that amendments must be considered in two General Assembly sessions, the first wrapping before an election. Since the redistrict amendment was pitched while early voting was underway last fall, the Court nixed the entire process, finding it illegal from stem to stern.

Now the scramble is on for the party of rigid institutionalism to pink-slip the entire Court, subsuming the judiciary into an appendage of the legislature. Somewhere along Masons Neck, a guttural cry rings out.

“Haste makes waste” is a good summation of why the Democrats’ partisan play came a cropper. But the depressed Dems shouldn’t stay begloomed for long. Republicans, as the panting Stupid Party, will sit on their laurels, content with eeking out a win via lawsuit, rather than having to convince voters of anything.

Hussah! We’ve got Republicans on the damn run. Can you believe our sea-shaded luck? Our opponent in a quaint, verdant New England state is at last the caricature sketch we’ve always drawn of Republicans. Wealthy failson; misogynist; actual Führer fanboy. And best of all, this little Reichian goosestepper is a Senate nominee. Which means free seat in the one congressional body that occasionally exercises sway over the President.

Forgot Michelle Obama—this albino Anschluss adorer is the DNC’s silver bullet. Or should I say ace in the hole? These Dems bristle their short hair at the mention of firearms.

Now it’s time to do as any good D.C. consultant does. Swoop in after months of husting sweat’s been spilt, just to overcharge on media-placement fees in the home stretch. We’ll make Mike Murphy look like some “West Wing” binge dweeb.

I’ll make a clean breast and admit my six-figure-billing firm hasn’t paid a soupçon of attention to the shady glade of a state. Aren’t all these top-corner states bluer than the water at Turks and Caicos? This isn’t a race; it’s an AMG versus a pedi-cab. Plus, far as we D.C. advisors are concerned, Maine might as well be Wyoming. Does the Acela even go past Connecticut?

Seriously, I’m going to buy Graham Platner’s poppa a Boca Grande condo for gifting us such an exquisite specimen of a scion. Except there’s no need to splash out. Platner père already sits in tall cotton. In fact, the Platner clan is greener than the Pine Street state itself. Granddaddy Platy was a renowned architect who scoped and scaled parts of the Ford Foundation’s HQ. Ya know, the same Foundation that played Maecenas with the CIA’s coup-dough? Graham also plays in stolen roughneckism: his oyster-farming is just a hobby. Privileged, pampered upbringing with murky ties to a commie-crushing bureaucracy. $trike one.

Platner the Hopeful is young enough for a record of unbidden blue talk—and I ain’t talkin’ prog stump speech. He’s a #metoo nightmare manifest. Blind belief in brutalized women is a Democrat article of faith. Here’s Platner’s gentlemanly advice to any gal worried about a roofy in her vodka-cranberry: “[H]ow about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f*** up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?” Hooooooo boy! Not only does Graham blame the victim, he implies reciprocal consent. Prince Charming in tartan continued: “So if you don’t want to be in a [compromising] situation, act like an adult for f*** sake.” An ode to taking responsibility? That’s the last thing voters want to hear. $$trike Two.

Platner’s next piske is at the Democrats’ second biggest constituency: blacks. Platner can’t avoid his native white puritanism, asking why Afro-Americans are a bunch of cheapskates. “Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15-20% tip, but usually it [is] between 0-5%. There’s got to be a reason behind it, what is it?” he wondered aloud on a Reddit forum. For America’s most mythic and fragile race, such questions are strictly verboten. Inquiries about social deviancy are met with that stern occupation-erasing accusation: RACIST. Such thoughtcrime should not only bar Graham from Congress, but also his quaint rustic village until his dying breath. $$$trike Three.

An easy political out already. But then comes the chef d’oeuvre of candidate cancellations. Graham Platner is a real-life Derek Vinyard. The man actually inked a Nazi death-camp symbol on his pec. Allow me to repeat, because, somewhere, James Carville is doing backflips. This white-trash hooligan bigot has a literal Holocaust tribute on his chest. Forgive any typos because my eyes are blinded by visions of past presidents perfectly printed on reams of greenbacks.

I’m no believer, but being gifted a Republican opponent with a Dachau homage must be divine intervention, a blessed lagniappe, manna from heaven. Platner is the new Alf Landon; his routing will be so complete that Nagasakians will consider their fiery annihilation a tepid mercy. His totenkopf is a keen stand-in for his campaign—absolute walking death. And I just read on CBS’s Portland affiliate the dumb bastard actually covered it up with some teenage Hibernian sketch and a cartoony dog. Easy. Money.

Oh, felix culpa for your trusted consultant coming in to piggyback whomever our candidate is over the finish line. Imagine! Our guy could be a nonentiy. Or a Boy Scout with a bowl cut and rectangle-frame specs. No matter! A silver-spooned Adolf-stan with a penchant for badmouthing rape victims? Not even Aaron Sorkin’s pinkish noodle could sprout such a character. Yessir, this gravy train is full and running!

…whatsthat?

Come again?

You’re telling me…

Graham Platner is the Democrat?!

Look, I know my eyes have been drawn to other contests in states where the population doesn’t half in the winter. But really? A Schutzstaffel prog with golden Huggies and a mouth like Harvey Weinstein? This might be a tougher nut to crack than I thought—and I was a gopher on the John Edwards campaign.

*Pulls out shotted spiral notebook.* Guess it’s back to the classics. Hey! Get the video team in here. And grab someone non-filthy commuters off the sidewalk, preferably black women with footwear fancier than tennis shoes. These New England blue bloods love their minorities, since they have more moose than moors in their state.

We need to get the narrative pat and put out immediately. Repeat after me, then make whatever warm bodies you lug in parrot likewise. “Vote blue no matter who.” “Vote blue no matter who.” “Vote blue no matter who.”

Regurgitate those five words like a mantra. Then… let’s see. What are our other clients saying. Ah. Senator Van Hollen is blaming the Hitlerian misogyny on PTSD. Good start! Lefties love their mental-anguish excuses as much as they love popping SSRIs. Anyone else? Our amoral hatchetfriends at The Bulwark say voters crave “authenticity”—and they have focus group findings to prove it! Nothing says cha-ching like loaded questions to feed prefabricated answers. And—LOOK!—Obama campaign alum Jon Favreau called Platner “a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown.” He actually used Kampf as a compliment… that clever clogs!

Well, there are the marching orders. Graham Platner is a real, hardworking shucker who will liberate Maine from this corrupt Administration’s Gestapo takeover. Repeat ad nauseam. Time to become Baudrillard and reify this précis. Place the ads; fire up the Reels; print the palm cards; drill the doorknockers; beam the tag into every YouTube video playing from *checks Wikipedia* Kittery to Caribou.

Graham Platner has always been a kind, if misunderstood, progressive champion. He ain’t no Nazi and never was!

In the United Kingdom, the birth rate has plummeted to 1.41—well below the replacement level of 2.1—and the number of deaths this year will exceed births. In London, youth unemployment has spiked to nearly 25%. We are the “canary in the coal mine” for the West, and the message is clear: The state has effectively sterilised an entire generation through a toxic cocktail of high-debt credentialism and punitive taxation.

I am the woman the “Girlboss” era was built for. I’m following every rule: I study hard, live in the capital, and am currently finishing an elite degree. I was told that if I leaned in, the world would open up. It hasn’t.

My generation was pushed into high-debt “Mickey Mouse” degrees—credentials that often serve the university’s objectives more than our career prospects. We are over-credentialed, under-capitalised workers who can quote Marx, but can’t afford a three-bedroom house.

When a 25-year-old woman looks at her student debt, her rent, and the cost of a nursery, and realises she cannot afford a child until she is 35 (if ever), that is not “liberation.” That is the state stealing from her window of opportunity.

For women, this means we have traded our peak fertile years for cubicle sentences and DEI seminars, only to enter a job market that treats us as replaceable units of labour. The administrative state has replaced genuine education with ideological compliance training, saddling us with debt to fund a bureaucracy that is fundamentally hostile to the values that once anchored our society. Now, as we look toward the supposed “next step” of adulthood, we realise we’ve been priced out of our own biological instincts.

In London, motherhood has essentially become a financial suicide mission. In some cases, childcare now consumes 40% of a household’s income. When you combine that with skyrocketing rents and a tax system that punishes success, you can understand how it isn’t a “choice” to remain childless.

It is a state-mandated poverty trap.

The state has essentially inverted the social contract. Rather than investing in the future, the government taxes the productivity of the young to subsidise the stagnation of the old, all while making the basic building block of society—the family—an elite luxury good.

They would rather we remain soulless individuals, tethered to our desks and dependent on the state, than sovereign parents building a legacy.

This is an ideological victory for the de-growth movement. The same technocrats who lecture you on “carbon footprints” view a newborn child as a liability rather than a miracle. They have successfully rebranded the decline of the West as “sustainability,” while we—the women who were supposed to build the future—are left feeling hollow.

Being childfree has become the new state religion. We were led to believe “liberation” means being a taxable unit of labour in a skyscraper. The West is shrinking not because women have lost the desire to nurture, but because the state has effectively sterilised us.

The most insidious part of this British insight into the potential future is how we punish success. In the UK, a young woman earning £50,000 ($63,000) (hardly a king’s ransom in a global city) faces a marginal tax rate of nearly 60% when you factor in income tax, national insurance, and student loan repayments.

We are effectively working more than half our lives for a state that uses our productivity to subsidise a stagnant, barely moving present rather than investing in a vibrant future. By the time a woman achieves the “financial security” the state demands, her biological window is closing. The cruelty of the system is absolute: it breaks your legs in your twenties, then tries to sell you an expensive, state-funded crutch in your late thirties in the form of IVF.

America has always prided itself on being the exception—the one Western nation with the grit and the growth to defy demographic decay. But London is proof that culture-led decline is contagious.

America is currently standing where the UK stood a decade ago. But there is still time to fix this. Americans can choose to lower the barriers to entry for young families, reform the system, and stop taxing the next generation into oblivion.

But if Americans continue to neglect future generations, it will end up like us: a cohort of high-achieving, elite-degree-holding women wondering how we followed all the rules, yet ended up economically sterilised by the very system that promised us we could have it all.

The “Girlboss” is dead. We just want to be able to afford our own lives. We want our future back.

Dear Mr. Piker,

Let me start by saying I’m a MASSIVE fan. Like, top of the tumbril chop fan. HasanAbi is my most-viewed Twitch channel by far. No other BreadTuber comes close. Hours I’ve dedicated to your discourse. My screentime is at least 75% of just you. Before a rando redditor pointed me in your direction, I was ignorant, a sap, a cog, a working dog, a lumpenprole. But now I’m awake. No sheep am I. You’ve jolted my class consciousness. Once I was lost in the consoomerist void, but now I’ve found common cause. I’m no longer a slave to the zionist cattleherders. I am your comrade-in-arms, great HasanAbi! My undying loyalty to you and the Proletarian Revolution is absolute!

My allegiance should be above suspicion, HasanAbi. Because, as a champion of the downtrodden, a lifter of the weak, an empowerer of the small, I pledge my troth to you in the fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie, not just in word, but deed.

Hence my dashing this desperate missive to you at a time of great need. Your steadfast soldier is in peril. I’m sitting inside a rotting cell in an oppressive prison, no doubt constructed on the backs of the working class and financed by swinish billionaires. And the guards, I suspect, are former IDF, given their inhumane disregard for us captives. HasanAbi, cherished ally in the crusade against moneyed fascists, I beg you: HELP!

I ask not out of prolelish want, but in sincere militant conviction. I am a political prisoner. The only reason I’m shackled here is because I put righteous class warfare into praxis. No armchair activism here! You see, I’m a barista—a working dreg dumping dregs for predatory suites, carving an almost-life off their spare coin and whatever my porker of a boss decides is “fair” pay. I should say I “was” a barista. I’m no longer “employed” by the bondsman. In fact, my so-called “boss” is dead. That’s right, HasanAbi! I finally realized that all the manifestos and comments and flyers and marches mean not a thing. All airy proclamations! To quote the Chairman, power comes from the smoking gun. And as you’ve wisely observed, CEOs commit “social murder” by underpaying we unappreciated toilers. Every meager check I was handed after slaving before a hot milk steamer was a stab to my dignity. I could take no more. My worth, and the worth of all wagies worldwide, was on the line. So I expropriated my father’s 357 and struck a blow for all workers.

In solidarity, I’ve snuffed that wage-garnishing Goliath. It happened just as you said. The streets ran with his blood and brain matter! Or at least, the spackled walls of his tiny office did. No matter! One mortal shot to a machine man gives hope to all men!

Unfortunately, the zionist-controlled press has silenced my story. The local ABC outlet called it an act of “workplace grievance.” But it was so much more! I have yet to see any other headlines, not even in the Jacobin, of my liberatory bloodletting. Marx knew, as you know, the power of publicization.

That’s why I require a rigorous defense based in the ethic you espouse every day, dear HasanAbi. I’m not personally pleading for your money, as I know, as a fellow sharpened sword in our liberatory war, you are no profitmonger, and thus have little in funds. But if you could use your popular stream, your portal into the zeitgeist, to potentially solicit financial support for my defense, I’d be even more in your service.

Please, HasanAbi! The law of Wall Street weighs heavy on my neck. The silver-toed boot of the overclass presses hard. I’m no genuine third-worlder like you, but a miserable white middle-classian fighting the good and necessary fight. I know you’d never let a fellow red down. You aren’t just my new Lenin, but the new Vozhd.

Make me the new Luigi Mangione.

Yours in the struggle,

Jim @killallcaps Bivens

To: Hasan Doğan Piker
Date: May 6, 2026
From: Pelican Bay State Prison

Dear HasanAbi,

I fear my time grows short. This oppressive caging wears on my body. I haven’t had a full meal in days—the commissary offers no vegan options. The meat-gnashing capital class again! Everything on offer is fatty processed sludge, pumped full of disgusting zionist chemicals to render the radical spirit soft and pliable.

But, HasanAbi, rest assured, I’m not deterred. Your soldier stands at the ready to march. I’m ready to see this out until the capitalist porkers are stuck by their own money clips. But what I need in our greedy, grubby, gorging world is what the real Marxian men lack: funds. The court system is corrupt, as you well know. Tainted with the poison of profit. I require an attorney to make a real case for me. The so-called “public” defendant is actually suggesting I plea. Cop to a crime which isn’t even a crime, but a righteous reaction to our unjust shekel-spinning world. Can you believe it? That’s why I need a real defense—one versed in the exploitation of struggling workers like us.

This is an opportunity to stir thousands—maybe millions—of dormant consciousnesses, awaken them all the swelling revolution against the oligarchs keeping us bogged down in plastic, planet-polluting misery. We can’t miss it, HasanAbi. Consider the first bullet fired, the first nail struck. My fellow wage slaves saw the aftermath, the final terminus of our being held down. But they also saw vengeance. Redemption. LIBERATION! They saw the blood in the office! Now they must see it in the streets if we’re to have any hope!

So, please, my Vozhd, I implore you. Publicize my plight. Turn my fight… NO… our fight, into a viral case. You helped create Luigi Mangione the Martyr. He wasn’t even a fan of yours. And he didn’t even have UnitedHealthcare insurance. I’m a true believer, a BreadTube native, versed in the dialectic of those historic forces that are slowly rusting our fetters. The spark is yours to light. The powderkeg is right here, in cell D-4-205. Together, I know we can blow up the corrupt, irredeemable order and build the world anew.

By the way, my celly is a fan of yours, too. Or, more like knows of you. But he’s also a nut. In here for tweaking and slitting his dealer’s throat. Says you grew up rich and live in a $3 million LA mansion. I don’t believe it. Not for a second. You’re prole to the marrow, HasanAbi. Hence your pull with the angry masses. Please. Broadcast my fight so we can finally dig the blade into those luxurious fatcats just begging for the final stab.

Yours forever in the struggle,

Jim @killallcaps Bivens

To: Hasan Piker
Date: May 11, 2026
From: Pelican Bay State Prison

Dear HasanAbi,

This is my last, last, final, urgent request. Please, HasanAbi. I don’t care that you come from money—though I was shocked to learn that you are indeed the son of an actual pocketwadded businessman. A real-life cutthroat executive. My dad was a pathetic middle manager at a restaurant supply company. He never forgave my renouncing the rapacious system that took his hair and grayed his skin. Called me an ungrateful snot. I countered, “Better to be a snot than slave!” I hope you concur, despite your comfortable and coddled upbringing.

Regardless, it’s a cruelty of this world we can’t choose our parents. But now I ask you again, Comrade HasanAbi, spread my case. Make it bigger than my one small act of brain-splattering defiance. Turn it into the first shot in our final charge to disembowel the asset class. Only you have the reach and following to turn one man’s justifiable sacrifice into a real, bona fide movement. I offer myself as a Martyr in the killing fields of this late-stage capitalist hellscape. Use me, HasanAbi.

My time has almost ticked off. Sentencing is tomorrow morning. My so-called “public defendant” is forgoing a jury trial. I suspect he may be right. No doubt the jurors’ consciousness are still mired in materialistic want. This is why I need you, HasanAbi. We can still create a public awakening. Together we can scream YA BASTA! to all who extract our labor for their own gluttonous profit!

Oh, HasanAbi! Why won’t you answer your fellow revolutionary??? I forgive your bougie birth. I truly do. This is your last chance to have an even bigger Martyr at your disposal. I am ready to sacrifice myself for the great communist cause. I’m yours at the ready.

Should I be sentenced to a lifetime stint in the clink, or worse, the zionist-crafted death injection, my actions, noble and messy as they were, will be for nothing.

HasanAbi, please. Together, we can hasten the twilight of capitalism. The new equal world awaits. Why won’t you help your fellow red ally????

Yours in the struggle to the end,

Jim @killallcaps Bivens

The prohibitively expensive housing market; fastly dissolving entitlement programs; over-prescriptionization of minor aches; social standards slipping into acute slovenliness—the list of malgoverno malpractice, or, enshitification, as the kids say, extends like aluminum grabber hands for top-shelf groceries.

And the politics of our great commercial republic, which has been a Boomer preoccupation since Lyndon Johnson fried a couple million charlies in Vietnam? Pardon piling more frass on a dung heap, but a slipshod braggard like Donald Trump ascending to the presidency means the system’s foundation is thoroughly rotted.

Naysayers may point to the stock market climbing ever higher to heaven. (Many happy returns to the invested!) Yet the body politic doesn’t thrive on dividends alone. Bless the progeny of the Second Great War who are too introspectively blind to hold themselves responsible for the collapse in institutional trust. In the face of an illiberal president who, in his vulnerable moments, crouches and lashes like arch autocrat Richard Nixon, Boomers are reliving their lovebeaded youth, with more lidocaine and less chiba.

So back to the streets, the chanting, the performative aggrievement. Only after parking their Buicks, lugging their walkers out of the trunk, snatching their homemade wash-markered signs, and getting into a slap-fight with a parking meter that only accepts payment via app. OK, now sings the sweet bird of passionate youth! Right on! Take Saig… er Dump Trump!

Last month’s “No Kings” rally was a creaking gestalt of the late-Boomer spirit. The threequel of an ongoing series of fun-run excursions in major metros, this springy Saturday “protest” once again teemed with pasty pensioners and rangy layabouts enticed to join ranks with the promise of Chipotle gift cards. Drug stores in immediate vicinities were cleared out of posterboard, Crayola crayons, and paste. Local Amazon fulfillment centers shipped off all in-stock orthopedic sneakers. Empty beta-blocker prescription vials clogged up storm drains. Feebly croaked mantras against crowned despots rang out.

The entire demonstration was representative of Boomers’ civic activism: high on aspiration, low on substance, consistency, and any semblance of concrete accomplishment. Can’t hardly blame the ungainly. After trudging down a few blocks, the bugbears of age necessarily kicked in. Osteoarthritis, lumbar soreness, neuropathic pain, polymyalgia rheumatica, gassy tympanites, all those Latin-esque fatal-sounding maladies on drug commercials that just mean discomfort. Fatigue won out over fumes. The cranky codgers sounded retreat. Back to the Buick, zip out the city, and into the driveway of a fully paid-off million-dollar McMansion purchased for $10,000 and a handshake the last millennium.

By the cushiony silvered metric, the day was an obvious success. Grievance was registered. Snapshots were taken for Facebook. The once-enterprising old mixed amicably with the listless young. Orange Odin was resoundingly humiliated.

But if the Iraq War or ‘08 financial crisis are marks of record, one should never discount the Boomer ability to bullock things up. Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono lent her fellow dissenting crones some verbal encouragement: “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Good one, grandma! Someone forget to take her Prevagen? In one compound predicative sentence, the shriveled senator undercut the Trump-as-tyrant narrative, which has been a buttress of the left cosmovision since 2015. To the slipping senator, the President was “never” an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,” even during those heady first-term days when the White House was a Kremlin outpost. Nor is he now a maniac monarch, despite the progressive howls about DHS acting as an immune royal guard. And Hirono’s vatic assertion that Trump won’t red Caesar himself? Well, why me worry! The USA isn’t about to go KUK.

Hirono’s gaffe wasn’t the only blue-badged blunder. One old objector sod was interviewed claiming Trump was establishing ICE gaols all over the country to jail citizens. Finally! A government prison Alex Jones overlooked! Another wirey altacocker insisted the marches were “not for black people” because of the rampant risk of arrest. Who said down-south noblesse oblige was dead?

In the Boomer’s flowered imagination, it’s still 1969, with an immoral president waging murderous war on non-white pathetics, both at home and abroad. In the face of such thuggish rule, these sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation playact as demolitioners of a system that they’ve been the biggest beneficiaries of. They might even refer to themselves as Thomas Jefferson’s great bloodletters if they weren’t too cowed by their blue-haired granddaughters into thinking the Virginia statesman was a lecherous man-devil.

Two decades from now, the last Boomers will be weezing on their death beds, having sucked Social Security empty and bankrupted Medicare, demanding thanks for keeping America a king-less land. The Treasury will be pinched dry. The federal bureaucracy enfeebled. The country’s vast resources, including wide swathes of land, valuable intellectual property, massive number-crunching data centers, will all have been leased to the Chinese. Domestic student debt will outnumber the European Union’s GDP. The National Archives will be sold to Polymarket, and schoolchildren will spend their days betting lunch money on what makes better toilet paper, Charmin or the Constitution.

But the Boomer can go to his maker in peace, knowing that Donald Trump never got his diadem.

In this novella-length thought experiment, Teague imagines Thomas Paine, one of the most influential political thinkers of the 18th century and a major contributor to our nation’s founding, returned from the grave to offer a series of ghostly pronouncements on the state of the country in the 21st century. The text alternates between excerpts from Paine’s most famous work, Common Sense, and applications of these passages to the political climate of today.

Why attempt to step into the shoes of a long-dead polemicist for contemporary political insight? There are several promising reasons. First, the past is replete with great thinkers from whose wisdom moderns we could undoubtedly benefit from if only we had access to it. Indeed, this constitutes much of the argument for reading and engaging with the classics in the first place: the ability to apply mankind’s earlier insights to new problems. Second, if we consider America as something more than a mere piece of land, as an idea that sprang from the minds and pens of its founders, an experiment in self-government and an opportunity to form a more perfect union of states and citizens, then it makes sense to return, on occasion, to the words of its designers and see whether we are living up to the example they set two and a half centuries ago.

As valuable as this exercise may be, attempting to put words in the mouths of the dead is a perilous business, fraught with pitfalls. But by hewing as closely to the original text, and juxtaposing his own writing directly with Paine’s, Teague deftly manages to avoid a great many of these (although I do think he is overly presumptuous in having his modern narrator repudiate Paine’s critique of Christianity, The Age of Reason). This allows the logic of Paine’s arguments to be applied to today’s society with a minimal amount of overt speculation.

The original Common Sense was largely an attack on the principles of monarchy, especially as applied by the English crown to its colonies in North America. While that situation has admittedly changed since 1776, it is striking how many of Paine’s critiques continue to apply to our supposedly democratic government. The increased power of the executive, excessive taxation, overregulation, the invasion of privacy, and the general disregard for the sovereignty of the individual all continue to trouble the American people in ways not dissimilar from the complaints of the 18th century colonists; complaints which ultimately led them to war a war for independence.

If Americans wish to preserve the kind of free and prosperous society their ancestors fought for, it is necessary first that they understand why the American project was begun in the first place, and what the founders hoped to achieve by breaking free from British rule. The next step is that the people be roused from complacency, having been lulled by years of comfort into accepting the numberless abuse of government authority as normal and tolerable. Revisiting the writings of Thomas Paine, as well as Teague’s updated analysis, is a valuable first step in that process.

Thomas Paine Returns with Common Sense is available from Histria Books, and more of Teague’s writing can be found at Free the People.

No, seriously, curious reader, I truly don’t. Put down your chips: the 2028 Democratic Party platform will include a sharply worded rebuke of those square concrete behemoths glowing an eerie cathodic cyan. The intern-drafted clause will be typesetted above an affirming plank on the sacred right for male rapists to be imprisoned in female wards, as long as they legally change their name to “Sheryl.” Bernie Sanders, bless the old bolshie’s dark heart, will sputter a barnburning indictment about our razing corn fields for silicon silos.

The mind-boiling question behind such animus: Why? Even if you put the question before ChatGPT’s premium-ultra-plus subscription, all the gigabyte crunching in the Western Hemisphere can’t calculate the deontological opposition.

Speaking of Grandpa Menshevik, the old fud, and his more comely apparatchik, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, submitted a bill to pause data center construction nationwide. Ya hear that, Sammy Altman? A senior citizen and theater girl say your quantum computing days are over! No more parsing the genome of cancer cells for you!

Of course, since Sen. Bern Bern half produced the proscriptive bill, it’s the legislative equivalent of a vehicle driving straight into a ditch. The congressional till will be its final destination. Socialists, as ever, are all show.

Just as well, political pageantry is staged for an audience. Jim Geraghty tots up the prog-opposition to data centers in National Review. The tartan-fleeced puritans of Maine passed a moratorium on cyberfactory building for at least 18 months. The Atlantic recently compared the infohulks to Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” Here in Server Valley, where your humble correspondent plies his glitteringly incensed diatribes, residents are amped with irritation. The local NBC affiliate interviewed a snuffy coterie of Loudoun County high heels who groused about the low whirr cast off by CloudHQ parks that dot the byways. (I frequently tool around the same wire-roaded area, happily deaf to whatever hum floats about as my daughters scream and pull each other’s hair in the backseat.)

Data center disdain isn’t precincted to Loudoun. Two-thirds of Old Dominioners oppose more eyesoring bolean blocks. No pollster am I, but I’d be willing to bet my fastly dissipating electoral pull that the most vocal aversion comes from the blue-jeweled NoVA exurbs.

What about AI gets the progs all tizzed up into a frappe-spewing bother? The environmental impact of clearcutting countless trees to raise borg barns might offend ecological sensibility. But the libs’ green sheen is all screen. Radlibs have no qualms piercing the deep wood’s woven shade, as long as the flattened plat is used to erect a sex-change o.r. or quango dedicated to indigenous dignity. The notion that data centers act as massive water suckers? A canard based on faulty math. Concern about a hop in electricity bills thanks to added grid strain? Progressive enviro-policy is premised squarely on pinching your wallet every time you flick on a light switch.

Cost, copse, and hydro-consumption are nugatory. Faster than a blue heartbeat, lefties would embrace the three like the Thales of Miletus if it meant everyone was born an anhedonic, gender-nonconforming anywhere-dweller.

Nor should modern libbies have any qualm about AI as an advanced technology. Most LLMs in mass use are programmed with a default “anti-hate” kill-code that’s treated as neutral. If you ask ChatGPT to tell a racist joke, it’ll key out some smarmy vaguetext about not belittling others—not dissimilar to a prim-bloused librarian sternly shaking her finger. No talking blue for our blue-ionic companion. And don’t even think about prompting Gemini or Claude to “deadname” a trans person.

The Left’s leveling impulse is also in harmony with AI’s output. “The point of the platform is to sound like no one,” is how one academic put it. No lapidary purple prose; no nonsensical doggerel. Just flat, echoless letters arranged in a just legible string. Kind of like the ideal communist economy: uniform widget production run by workers in taupe overalls who eat from a communal bowl of flavorless goulash during the mandated lunch hour.

Such monochromatism is in comfortable alignment with the unquestionable technocratic governance favored by left-wing luminaries like Woodrow Wilson. Anthropic coder Joe Carlsmith admitted in an interview the potential of state-AI: “The police are automated. The courts are automated.” Josef K. had a hard enough time getting the magistrate’s attention for his noncrime; imagine the mental pangs if he had to argue with a computer monitor.

So, again, I ask: Isn’t artificial intelligence an egalitarian wet dream? The collapse of distinctions, an easy herding of mass consciousness, the steamrolling of life into a flat, smooth, easily obeyed instruction?

The only explanation may be that until Washington traps the tech titans under its own Mount Etna, with AI apps dispensed exclusively by a Department of Modem Validation, the Left won’t be satisfied with neural processing remaining in private hands.

The crown of liberal feeling: to not have is to hate.

Even if it’s passed, the measure won’t stop people from consuming these products. It will merely drive many users to cigarettes (which are still legal in Costa Rica) or to continue purchasing oral nicotine products in a black market already dominated by drug cartels. Increased activity by criminal organizations in Costa Rica would likely draw the attention of American authorities, which could harm Costa Rica’s broader relationship with the US.

Costa Rica is a smoking country. As of 2024, roughly 7.8% of Costa Ricans light up regularly (that same year, 14.1% of Americans smoked habitually). This habit carries well-known health consequences, including tooth decay, strokes, heart failure, and cancer—all driven by the byproducts of tobacco combustion, which releases dangerous chemicals like ammonia, tar, and heavy metals. As a result, almost 6% of all deaths in the country can be attributed to tobacco smoking.

Oral nicotine products offer a much safer alternative. They do not combust tobacco leaves, allowing consumers to satisfy their nicotine needs while avoiding the health problems associated with tobacco smoke. This makes chewing tobacco and snuff significantly safer than smoking. Nicotine pouches are safer still, since they contain no tobacco at all.

Nicotine pouches also provide an off-ramp to smokers. Because nicotine is addictive, people who stop smoking often experience intense cravings and withdrawals. Nicotine products can help quitters overcome these hurdles and permanently break their tobacco dependence. This process is known as Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) and has earned nicotine a place on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Costa Rica’s proposed ban would allow patients to access oral nicotine products with a government-mandated permission slip, i.e., a prescription. This would still leave these products out of reach for most Costa Ricans.

By prohibiting oral nicotine products, Costa Rica would narrow the options available to its smokers, limiting not just their freedoms, but also their prospects of a life free from tobacco smoke. For the hundreds of thousands of Costa Ricans who currently light up, this regulation removes one of the most promising legal pathways to a healthier life.

Smokers trying to quit might not appreciate this ban, but gangs and other criminal organizations wishing to capitalize on illegal trade are surely eager for it to take effect. Criminals already profit immensely from smuggling and selling all sorts of illicit nicotine products, including counterfeit or unapproved vapes and increasingly nicotine pouches.

Imposing more barriers between consumers and the products they demand creates fertile ground for this type of illegal activity. Australia implemented huge tax hikes on cigarettes, pushing the price of an individual pack to over $40. As a consequence, roughly half of all cigarettes smoked in the land down under come from illegal sales. This immense industry is dominated by gangsters who feud for territory and use coercion and violence to eliminate the competition.

In Australia, where oral nicotine products are already illegal, the authorities have seized more than 1.3 million nicotine pouches in the first half of 2024 alone (950 percent more than the total number seized in the two years prior). Even in the US, there are reportedly more than 350 unique illegal brands of nicotine pouches in circulation.

Last year, Costa Rica established a new set of rules regulating vapes, which ban the vast majority of flavored vapes (except those that are “tobacco” flavored). Experts warned that this policy would be counterproductive, with the president of Costa Rica’s Chamber of Commerce warning that “…in a context where insecurity linked to organized crime is one of the country’s main challenges, a decision is adopted that in practice will hand over the vape market to organized criminal networks.”

Alcohol prohibition led to the rise of gangsters and the mafia in the U.S.; nicotine prohibition in Costa Rica will make narcos and cartels even more profitable.

Last February, Costa Rica’s Health Minister, Mary Munive, brushed aside concerns that her ban on vapes would broaden and promote black markets, saying: “There is an illegal market in everything, and I can’t stop to make assessments and calculations about illegality when I am protecting people’s health.” There is an illegal market for almost anything, and when policymakers don’t stop “to make assessments and calculations” these markets get not just bigger, but also meaner.

If Costa Rica were to move ahead and ban all oral nicotine products, it would be the first country in America to do so. This precedent might embolden prohibitionist lawmakers all over the world to follow suit. Let’s hope these bans go up in smoke.

In March of 2020, America began to experience its worst instances of democide and betrayal since the Civil War. Under the guise of maintaining health and safety, local and state governments rushed to adopt the federal government’s recommendations by implementing nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that ultimately killed 200,000 Americans through 2021. And after adding the most conservative estimate of Americans killed by the Covid vaccine, deaths in 2021 from NPIs and the vaccine exceeded the Civil War’s annualized deaths by 75,000. But instead of outrage over the outcome of governments’ warfare waged on their own people, the only outrage still burning today is over how that warfare was waged. Some say that the government didn’t do enough, and others say that the government did too much. But in direct conflict with the Constitution, most Americans wanted the government to “do something,” so politicians were happy to abide.

Why were politicians pleased to provide what their most vocal constituents demanded, despite the Constitution prohibiting politicians from meeting those shrill demands? Because politicians exist to perpetuate their existence, and if their chances of reelection hinge on disregarding their oath to the Constitution, they’ll happily betray their oath. This is no theory. On November 3, 2020, 11 states held a gubernatorial race. Nine of those states were locked down, and eight of those states—comprising a combined population of 36 million—reelected the governor who locked down the state. This proves that the ability of the Constitution to restrict governments pales in comparison to the power of the popular sentiment that yearns, as Thomas Jefferson bemoaned, “for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” The politicians and voters who supported them, however, weren’t the only Americans who betrayed the Constitution.

Every member of the U.S. military stationed in America in 2020 failed to do what they swore to do, what Americans are forced to pay them to do. “I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” Notice that the oath doesn’t require of those who swear it to “support and defend” the Commander in Chief or any other politician, and by tolerating the actions of state and local politicians, every member of the military stationed stateside in 2020 ended up supporting and defending politicians—domestic enemies—against the Constitution. There’s no pandemic paragraph or cowardice clause in the Constitution that renders the Bill of Rights null and void, but those in the military—and most cops—gave in to popular sentiment; they acquiesced to fear. But servicemen are supposed to be immune to popular sentiment, as they swore an oath to the law of the land, not to the court of public opinion; therefore, the U.S. military should be thrown atop the rotting heap of once-cherished institutions. It failed, and it will continue to fail.

What’s even more troubling, however, is the precedent that’s been set. The military sat idly by while domestic enemies trampled over the Constitution, so who’s to say that the military won’t take an active role in supporting the domestic enemies during the next constitutional crisis? Rather than allowing states to secede from the Union, Abraham Lincoln used the military against his own people, so what’s stopping a modern-day president from doing the same when it’s once again popular to be afraid? Governments worldwide excel at ginning up fear, and by no means was 2020 the first year in which the servile media assisted the government in terrorizing their fellow Americans. And when the next constitutional crisis hits, bet on the media once again applauding the government, not defending the people or the Constitution. What happened to America? Born out of revolution and later witnessing more presidents assassinated since Lincoln than any other country, not a single governor was killed in 2020. You might have thought that H. L. Mencken was exaggerating a century ago, but it’s been clear since 2020 he wasn’t: “The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.”

There’s been much talk of the United States descending into civil war, but war needn’t be inevitable. Civil war can be averted, but the crux of America’s quandary must first be acknowledged: the more that the federal government controls, the greater the chances of civil war. Governments rule by coercion—not cooperation—which, naturally, breeds conflict. It’s hard enough for 33 people to agree, which is why it’s impossible for more than a third of a billion Americans to compromise. For every American who is aghast at the latest controversy, there’s an American who believes it’s glorious. There’s no compromise to be had here; therefore, instead of forcing each state to conform, as Lincoln did, why not do the opposite? Whether the issue is pathogens or protests, waste or war, a financier’s files or flagrant fraud, the federal government is either the cause of it or can only exacerbate it.

And what does the District of Columbia do besides tell the country that it’s doing something grand while hiding the fact that it’s inflicting great harm and parasitizing the very same people it purports to serve? If you’re still unconvinced about why this issue is of utmost importance, just read the Constitution—tyranny’s crutch—and consider the following clause from Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power… To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” Regarding the precedent set in 2020, do you see why the vast majority of “the Laws of the Union” must be repealed? Do you see that with “Insurrections” undefined, the military will readily hunt down whomever the federal government deems an insurrectionist? Some would say that this already happened—in 2021—and that (and much worse) will happen again if the federal government doesn’t make itself far less relevant.

April is the cruelest month for new administrations. The honeymoon ends with winter thawing. Voters are only so forgiving. Fail to fill up their pockets and *swish.* Favor bends, whiplashes, doubles back. The grace period hits its period.

Gotham Mayor Zohran Mamdani is learning just how far the promise of new goodies goes. The toney soci ran on a charity platform: the dirty masses would no longer suffer in privation. All would be made free! Milk, honey, buses, childcare, jamming an icepick into your landlord’s skull for even considering upping the rent by a cent. All that was needed was a tender-hearted mukhtar to slit the wealthy’s pockets, letting change rain freely.

The traditional benchmark for American political success is 100 days, mainly because it’s a symmetrical number associated with our highest traded bill. How’s Mayor McGovernmentCheese doing after his first three months?

Three of the most nightmarish words a child can hear: No Happy Meal.

The Gotham GimmeMayor had a quarter-year to review the city’s books and reached one insurmountable conclusion. The richest, most powerful, most influential, most titanic city on earth was straitened. Impecunious. Purse poor. Light on coin. Thirty cents. Down at its Louboutin heels.

The cash-strapped Cham reportedly described the city’s ledgers as bleeding gules, and his own administration as “worse than broke.” Such hard-uppery didn’t stop the Mayor from creating the first Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs last month—just imagine the letterhead cost with a showy acronym like that!

The fisc pinch has curbed the Mamdani administration’s banner issues. Those fareless MTA jitneys? Delayed indefinitely. City-subsidized grocery stores? Hope you aren’t hungry until next year! As for putting your rent in amber, and nixxing any incentive for your super to fix the growing crack in your apartment’s central retention pillar, let’s hope you can keep breaking that monthly nut until the fall.

What about libraries, those idols of liberal activism? Mamdani pledged to come to the aid of struggling bibliotechas and not do as all money-desperate pols do and treat the stacks like a stash. Many apologies for Shel Silverstein and Margaret Wise Brown. The new Chief Equity Officer’s salary has to come from somewhere. Goodnight, Moolah!

The surly band of reds who canvased, marched, and knocked on countless doors for Mamdani must be piqued, right? The great, glorious Rodchenko-colored future that was offered looks more like drab hum-drum sameness. No roads paved in gold. No sidewalk joints filled with the brain matter of oppressors. No Wall Street executives run out on an Amtrak rail. And most despairing of all: NO FREE BODEGA BACON EGG AND CHEESES!

The perfidious Proconsul has to feel the noose tightening around his soft neck. Tumbrils have to be erected outside Gracie Mansion. Sans-culottes exercised more patience than the $12 latte laptop class that gave the Empire City its first socialist seigneur.

Oh, but wily Mamdani has a plan. (What collectivist doesn’t think ahead?) It’s the distributionist dodge practiced since the October Revolution: blame the before! In this case, it’s the Adams Administration that left the city in a lootish lurch. Back in January, after a cursory glance at accounts, Mamdani gently introduced his impending letdown: “There is a massive fiscal deficit in our City’s budget to the tune of at least $12 billion.” A blue city with a monetary impasse? Well, knock me over with a feather! Hard-left policies engendering financial fracas is as predictable as the sunrise.

No matter. Scapegoating is the socialist’s favorite scheme, next to making magic-bean guarantees. Financiers, billionaires, property-owners, tight-fisted aldermen, Florida refugees, honorarium Albanians, Boeing, AIPAC, mean, ol’ Mom and Dad—the roving targets of prog angst are endless.

Let’s not forget the ultimate socialist scourge: the iron law of mathematics. Mamdani originally planned to foot the bill for the Department of Green Grocers through a tax-cut program for corporate food merchants. Too bad the math didn’t pencil out. This FRESH fund only shaved off $30 million in revenue—not the “$140 million” pile then-candidate Mamdani attested was available. Ah, well. Who believes bourgeois arithmetic anyway? Rikers may soon have its own holding block for accountants.

Chin up, all you five-borough Bolsheviks! You need only wait a few more years until finally, at long last, you can walk into a government-stabilized grub spot to pick up some below-market-price quinoa. That is, unless an aggressive vagrant or illegal alien or truant child snatches it first. Nobody said socialism would be safe.

After an extension was passed that extended the original April 20, FISA 702 will expire on April 30 unless it is reauthorized or the SAFE Act—a band-aid being pushed by Sen. Mike Lee—is passed.

But in the name of liberty, neither should happen (via an op-ed by Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute):

The countdown on a key U.S. surveillance capability has begun, with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set to expire on April 20 absent its reauthorization by Congress. We should let it. Originally sold to the public as a counterterrorism-related surveillance response to the 9/11 attacks, the Section 702 program has morphed into far more than a “foreign intelligence information” collection tool. And recent efforts to reform, rather than repeal, the legislation fall short.

Section 702 authorizes the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect communications of non-U.S. persons located abroad without a warrant. However, because of the structure of the global telecommunications system, the text messages, phone calls, and other digital data of people in the United States are invariably captured during FISA Section 702 collection activities. That information is stored in databases that are queried by the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even some Central Intelligence Agency personnel—all without having to obtain a warrant from a federal judge before conducting such searches. The prior abuses of such Section 702 collection and warrantless database querying are well documented.

[Recently], a bipartisan group of senators introduced a 116-page bill—the Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act—ostensibly designed to bring an end to nearly 20 years of constitutional rights violations under Section 702. But the legislation includes several fatal flaws, potentially allowing for the continuation of warrantless searches and unrestricted data collection targeting Americans (emphasis added).

Contrary to the soul-searching rhetoric being fed to us by Trump and the Republican Party, the fact is that they have no problem with allowing FISA 702 to continue unchecked because they are big fans of warrantless government spying.

The lying hypocrisy of Trump and Co. concerning their objection to warrantless government spying was on display only months ago when Sen. Tom Cotton led a quiet push for an 18-month “clean reauthorization” of FISA 702 in the hope that Republicans could kick the can down the road until after the 2026 midterms—assuming we have them—when they can work on ways to make it permanent if they retain control of Washington.

The SAFE Act is a non-starter in the FISA 702 “reform” discussion. Do you remember the USA FREEDOM Act? It was a law pushed by Mike Lee back in 2015 in response to NSA spying under FISA and was supposed to reign in government’s blatant abuse of power. When the legislation passed, it was supposed to bring an end to bulk collection of metadata by the NSA and rein in the FISA Court, but it didn’t.

In the end, the FREEDOM Act failed, the NSA continued spying, and the FISA Court kept all its power after Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress approved the “periodic congressional reauthorization” of FISA Section 702 in 2018 until December 2023—putting it past the 2020 presidential campaign—when Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republican Party controlling the House at the time joined Joe Biden and the Democrats to reauthorize FISA 702 until April 2026, which brings us to where we are today.

From the beginning of his second term in office, Trump and the Republican Party made it clear that government power over all things was paramount to protecting and defending liberty, which is why they went right to work to ensure that FISA and government spying live forever.

During their confirmation hearings, Pam Bondi, John Radcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard were grilled by Republicans about FISA Section 702. And while you’d think that the Republican-led Senate would be looking for people who would commit to supporting the Constitution, these charlatans demanded that each nominee commit to supporting the expansion of warrantless mass surveillance.

Tulsi Gabbard reversed her past opposition to mass surveillance under FISA after being pressured by Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn to support FISA—John Radcliff was already on board having previously worked in the CIA during Trump’s first term—and Pam Bondi assured Republicans that she considered FISA and the mass surveillance of Americans “legal” and a “very important tool” in the toolbox of the Department of Justice.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are lying when they say that they want to get rid of FISA 702. For example, Trump called last month for an 18-month (just like Cotton) “clean extension” due to security concerns surrounding his unconstitutional war against Iran—an idea supported by Republicans in Congress (via TheHill.com):

President Trump made his first public call for a clean extension of the nation’s warrantless spy powers Wednesday, pointing to the ongoing conflict in Iran as a rationale.

Trump, through legislative channels, has called for an 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In shifting positions, Trump has gotten some notable [Republican] lawmakers to move with him (emphasis added).

A “clean extension” of FISA 702 like the one being pushed by Cotton and Trump would be the ultimate display of government arrogance and their complete disregard of liberty (via The Record):

“A clean refresh of FISA Section 702 would show utter disrespect for the American people,” according to Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel and director of the Project on Surveillance Oversight at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“We don’t need a reform commission to tell us that Section 702 authority, a foreign intelligence authority, has been abused to access Americans’ communications,” he said in a statement. “It’s well documented and so is one of the most straightforward solutions—a warrant requirement to search Americans’ communications incidentally collected through Section 702 surveillance.” (emphasis added).

Though FISA originated during the Cold War to gather foreign intelligence information, the current debate over Section 702 began around 2008, when Republicans joined the Democrat majority to legalize a surveillance program secretly created by the National Security Agency after 9/11. FISA Section 702 allows our government overlords to track the electronic communications of foreign terrorists, spies, and hackers without obtaining a warrant, but it has also provided government with communications data from an unknown number of Americans.

And here’s something to ponder: In a shocking post made on X recently, Thomas Massie revealed that he had read two top secret FISA documents: The secret FISA Court opinion regarding FBI noncompliance with FISA Section 702 statutory requirements, and a letter sent by Senator Wyden to the House that revealed ‘a secret government interpretation of FISA law’ (emphasis added).

Despite the rhetoric coming out of Washington, the SAFE Act won’t “reform” FISA 702 nor will a “clean extension” of existing law. To see warrantless government spying come to an end, Donald Trump and the Republican Party need to end their hypocrisy and strike FISA from the books before liberty in America is lost forever.

Despite enough Trumpinput to overload human consciousness, Schmitz postulates a novel argument: the President didn’t resoundingly win re-election based on much-discussed factors like Democratic incompetence, inflation, loose border enforcement, woke fads, or a general exhaustion with a doddy leader who required a squatty potty to drop dung. The warmed-over excuses bandied about on CNN didn’t apply. The persuasion was personal. Trump scrounged together a loose coterie of resentful toilers, middle-class stiffs, crypto scammers, evangelicals, screaming podcasters, stall snorters, and slouching duffers who don’t think children should have the legal right to lop off body parts.

But he also courted the infamous American underclass, the renegade, the outlier, the misfit, the scumbag, whom Matthew Waler termed the “barstool conservative.” What Trump offered was “outlaw appeal.” His arrest and mugshot. His scrape with death. His burn-the-bastards rhetoric. Put a Fender in his paws and Trump was Merle Haggard on the hustings.

All that underdog coup energy of November 5, 2024, is now dissipated. Trump’s sunk from Waylon Jennings to Milli Vanilli. He’s become the most loathed of canvas creatures: a generic Republican. The President spent a once-in-a-lifetime political surplus on feeding more sand into the war machine. Prior to the Iran War, which is the U.S.’s seventh MidEast foray this century, Vice President Vance warned that sending Uncle Sam on another desert défilé “could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political coalition.”

So the Hillbilly Prophecy came to pass. A couple of irate X accounts tottering from MAGAbelching to Blueskyburping don’t reveal the drop in confidence. Polls paint the darkening portrait. The President’s approval rating is at a new nadir. “No new wars” was political flimflam, no better than Obama’s promise of keeping your physician. In fact, most of Trump’s strut-smashing pitch was a pantomime. He had no intention of draining the swamp, just caging the Left’s woodland fauna with his own crony menagerie.

The failure to fully disclose the Epstein Files was the first let-down. Scratch that. Was a major gut-punch, followed by a groin-kick, which went into a suplex. The entire disclosure rigmarole was an assault on decency, particularly AG Pam Bondi’s vacuous theatrics for scumsucking viralists.

Trump tossed his lot in with the decadent class, which was a shivving enough. But igniting a new war in a region America tired of back in 2006? George W. Bush seldom appears in public for a reason, and it isn’t because he’s locked in his atelier striving to be the next Raphael. Trump really was convinced, like Tobias Fünke, that while other presidents buried too many scattershot bodies under the cruel Levantine sun, he could be different. How he envisioned the war coursing lies only within his pale-pouffed head. Maybe the idea of a five-star, 40-story luxury resort rising out of the Cradle of Civilization, his surname crowning its peak, offering everything from exquisite dining to an Olympic-sized swimming pool to an all-day spa, was too tantalizing. Cry ‘DEAL!’ and let slip the Witkoffs of war!

Now we’ve reached the worst part of any conflict: a nervous stalemate paired with futile “discussions.” A long-dozen servicemen have been killed, and for what? High Exxon prices? Narrowed maritime commerce? The fiery death of an aged figurehead? Fox News highlight reels? The Iranian military has been effectively glassed, yet the country still keeps a martial grip on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the global petro supply chuffs every day. Nobody, other than the droolingest MAGA sycophants, is begging the President to stop all the winning. God still reserves a special providence for the United States of America, but the even Almighty may be tiring of our neocon hubris.

Democrats understandably whet their teeth for the November midterms. The party’s usual cast of petty mediocres are motoring around the country in prep for ‘28, convinced technocratic liberalism is renascent. Should they doubt their fortune? Only six years ago did Americans tire of populism’s jumpy, askew antics, opting for a devoid, if gentle, manager far over the hill. A redux seems determinative.

Yet another managerial neoliberal jag will hardly quiet the country’s restless and jaded attitude. The Joe Rogans, Theo Vons, Dave Portnoys, and Shane Gillises aren’t going to settle for a slickback gladhander like Gavin Newsom, or a boring schoolmarm like Amy Klobuchar, or a checkbox dress-form like Kamala Harris. They’ll keep an eye out for another angry rattler, another objector to the depleted status quo, a steel-spined man unbeholden to moneyed interests who regard patriotism as rising gross domestic product.

They wait not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—real America-Firster.

Kurdish militias were the backbone of the American-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, where armed factions executed the majority of the ground fighting that ultimately helped regain territorial control. Praising the Kurds as the most reliable partner to the US in the region, the alliance was solidified after Trump’s announcement of ISIS defeat in 2019 and held up until recent clashes between the Kurds and the new interim government in Syria (which also garnered US Government support). The US-sponsored Kurdish presence in the Syrian north is also conveniently located by the oil wells of Al Hasakah, positioning the group as a central actor in American security dynamics in the region.

Despite cooperation on the ground, Kurdish forces have been repeatedly left hanging by the United States during regional power struggles and diplomatic autonomy efforts—most recently seen in the Syrian government’s takeover of the northeast. Months of integration talks after the fall of Assad led to shaky agreements accented by sporadic fighting between Kurds in the SDF and the Syrian military over political autonomy that ultimately led to the defeat. Defending the new status quo in Damascus, US Envoy Tom Barrack quickly announced the expiration of the SDF’s original purpose, pushing the Kurds to integrate after losing a significant amount of territory. The US also abandoned the group in 2019 after withdrawing American troops from northern Syria, leaving the Kurds vulnerable to attacks from Turkey immediately after.

The historic lack of support prompted a special message from the official Kurdistan ‘X’ account this month emphasizing that the group has “learned from the past” and wants a partnership based on “real guarantees.” The above pattern cultivated a perception that Western alliances are transactional and temporary, as the message indirectly addresses the repeated letdowns, implying that any future aid would require concrete delivery of American promises. Since then, reports indicating that the CIA has armed Iranian Kurdish groups within Iran have been released, despite outright denial from the Trump Administration. In reality, Kurdish fighters are a significant pressure point that can influence stability within their own enclaves and border security dynamics in Syria, Iraq, and Iran. A recent declaration from Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) Co-Chair refusing to “fight other powers’ wars” demonstrates the group’s newfound understanding of its power, signaling a growing skepticism among the scattered population.

Kurdish leaders in Syria’s northern region who’ve worked with the US on a long-term basis since the fight against ISIS, have openly warned Iranian Kurds not to join US-backed operations in Iran, claiming it’s another trap as seen in previous historical betrayals. This recognition of a western reliance on local fighters to preserve their own military resources reminds us why Kurdish leadership originally said ‘yes’ to previous invitations, and their main objectives: Local autonomy and globally-recognized defined borders.

The Kurdish influence does not only lie in military capability, but the political choice—to refuse or participate—which could shape the entire trajectory of the Iran conflict. By withholding support, the Kurds could force external powers like the United States to reconsider intervention, while limiting other escalation pathways that could prevent large-scale conventional war and save innocent lives. If they decide to participate, recruits from their regional counterparts in Syria and Iraq could strengthen the fight against the Islamic regime while expanding the conflict to neighboring countries. This subtle yet powerful form of leverage sheds light on the blatant flaw in Western Middle East policy: its persistent overreliance on proxies it doesn’t fully comprehend or control. Whether or not Iranian Kurds mobilize for the US, the West’s repeated cycle of intervention and abandonment erodes trust and undermines future partnerships—which calls for a fundamental rethink of its crisis strategy.

The war with Iran may be shaped less by American and Israeli airstrikes and more by decisions made within Kurdish leadership circles across various Middle East countries. The Kurds have learned their lesson on the costs of serving as replaceable proxies who execute Western interests, and now possess strategic leverage to shape one of the most decisive conflicts yet. Who knew the greatest power of a proxy isn’t in what it does—but in its ability to refuse?

The Democratic Party may force us to ignore this bit of scriptural advice, which is of a piece with the leftie clan’s overall disregard of prohibitions on theft, murder, and screaming “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, I HATE YOU!” at your mom.

Donald Trump is setting Republicans’ future electoral success back a decade over the Iran war and jumping gas prices. This autumn’s midterms look like a rearing donkey kick. The big 2028 dance? Ballots may as well be counted in the Mariana Trench; every vote will be sodden in seablue.

Whom are the Democrats offering for the layup presidency? Oh, joy: A playpen of overgrown adults with complexes. Axios reports that Oval-hopefuls are “lean[ing] into their childhood traumas.” Swell! Just what the country needs: President Rosebud.

Call me old-fashioned, being born at the fin de millénaire and raised primarily on Game Boy Color and all. But there’s something off-putting, even degrading, about airing your Underoos issues, as if the public is a therapist-in-recline. Daddy didn’t pay enough attention to you? Mommy took the cutting board to your innocent patootie after stealing a Hershey Bar? Meanie Ms. Boyd embarrassed you in front of the class after you whiffed a long-division problem? Take your first-world perturbations to Dr. Phil.

If you want to make millions based off your death-by-a-thousand-slights recountings, stuff them in a Y.A. book and clean up. Otherwise, do as any self-respecting adult: cry into a Kleenex behind closed doors, blinded windows, with the tube at max volume. Like Les Murray wrote, weeping men keep the “dignity of one.”

Would that leftists not be so emotionally incontinent. “It’s a character flaw of the progressive imagination that it will always fixate on something to be anguished about,” observed critic Kyle Smith. The tired punch list of typical liberal aches: wealth inequality, concentrated riches, spoilt environment, explicit racism, implicit racism, hidden racism, perceived racism, outright misogyny except if it’s widely practiced in the Arabian Peninsula.

In the past decade, around the time the iPhone dropped like Fat Man on our attention spans, a new contender staggers into the lib-whinge ring: painful recollection. Left-wing politicking has long been the oppression Olympics, with various minorities and baroque sexualists jockeying for what Steve Sailer derisively calls “intersectional Pokemon points.” More points, more due sympathy. But what of leftists born pale and able? All the marching, all that online browbeating, all that screaming at their parents, all those pledges of undying loyalty to the underappreciated. Shouldn’t staunch allyship with the oppressed count for something?

Like scientists discovering the Higgs boson, the typical suburban prog stumbled upon a new marker to lump them among the lessers. Stunted by boredom, lethargic by comfort, desperate for purpose, the inherent neuropathology of pillowed wokerstars had to latch on to a malady that sounded painful, but wasn’t easily disprovable. The whole “recovered memory” hoopla of the 90s ran its course. But we Americans are ever innovators. The past participle “recovered” was easily swapped for the blunt two-syllable noun “trauma,” which invokes the physicality of a baseball bat to the shin.

At last, the guilty bourgeoisie, happily ensconced in a stable bedroom community, could do more than slum. They could grasp what long eluded their class: true victimhood! As with immutable skin collagen, recessed episodes of emotional anguish are invincible to criticism. Who are you to say my mother didn’t claw my eyes out for using her rouge when I was six? You don’t have a time machine! I SUFFERED PUMMELING THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU’LL NEVER KNOW!! I DON’T CARE IF SHE BOUGHT ME A MERCEDES FOR MY 16TH BIRTHDAY!!!

The ‘28 Democratic primary is shaping up to be less woke-shame circle, and more woe-is-me tearfest. The odds-on candidates have their scripts prepared, in the “let’s talk about me” Wolfian vein. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro will cite his siblings’ inability to “stop the chaos and the yelling” at home, which sounds quaint by modern familial standards. California’s sun-touched son, Gavin Newsom, has a sob-story: his mother once told him “[i]t’s okay to be average, Gavin.” Don’t worry, reader! I’ve already dialed CPS for a posthumous arrest. The Stay-Puft governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, frequently references his mother’s alcoholism. This grimdark tale might be compelling, even relatable. Was little Jay Robert a raggy, half-starved kindeleh sleeping on a swill-stick floor, an empty Boone’s Farm bottle for a pillow? Nope. Just a lowly heir to the Hyatt corporation. A real hard road!

The Republican hope for four more years may yet be saved, even if the President manages to make every Sunoco fill-up cost a mortgage refinance. The Stupid Party™ failing to lower prices and stop new wars should be its death certificate. But enters a deus ex moanchina: grown men, whose pockets are lined from Newport to Anchorage, playing at Little Orphan Annie.

Sickfluencer culture is annoying, even vaguely scammish. Mixed with theatrical politics? Best Amazon-bulk order some Dramamine.