The Social World

Category: Policy

  • ‘Nuking’ the filibuster would only aid Democrats

    ‘Nuking’ the filibuster would only aid Democrats

    Donald Trump keeps going nuclear. First it was his demand on Thursday that the Pentagon resume nuclear testing. Now he’s declaring that the Senate must abolish the filibuster in toto. In a post on his social media site, Trump announced: “THE CHOICE IS CLEAR – INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,’ GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER.”

    Are Republican senators seeking to duck and cover in the face of Trump’s exhortations? Not a chance. Rather, in an unusual turn of events, they are defying him.

    Senate majority leader John Thune issued a statement on Friday morning indicating that he has not altered his views about amending the filibuster. Meanwhile, Senator John Curtis of Utah posted on X Friday morning that the filibuster “forces us to find common ground.” He added, “Power changes hands, but principles shouldn’t. I’m a firm no on eliminating it.” The votes to abolish the filibuster don’t exist no matter how much Trump himself may complain about this procedure.

    There is an incongruity of interests between the White House and Capitol Hill. Now that he has basically precluded running for a third term, Trump has a different set of priorities than his Republican allies. He wants to rule, not govern. But polls indicate that the GOP continues to take on more water than Democrats over the government shutdown. At some point, Trump is going to have to dicker directly with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a fate that he presumably regards as only slightly less horrifying than the release of the Epstein Files.

    Republicans are worried about a future Democratic administration passing sweeping legislation that would fundamentally alter the American economy and political system. The Republican party may control all three branches of government, but it’s overreach under Trump is more than likely to result in a backlash in the midterm elections. By 2028, Trump, whose popularity ratings are currently sagging, could be one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. This is why House speaker Mike Johnson stated that while he understands Trump’s vexation over the government shutdown, the “safeguard in the Senate has always been the filibuster.”

    Trump’s impatience, however, is understandable. The notion that almost any legislation can be stymied because it requires a minimum of 60 senators to advance it is fundamentally undemocratic. Trump may well increase the pressure on Republicans in coming weeks as Americans become increasingly restive over the shutdown. Flight delays are bound to increase. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are about to expire. Alaskans are stockpiling caribou and moose. And so on.

    If Trump were to prevail in overturning the filibuster, he would be doing Democrats an inadvertent solid. They could disclaim responsibility for the federal budget and point to the mounting healthcare costs that consumers are about to experience in the coming weeks. Above all, they would be positioned to enact their own sweeping reforms in the future. Say hello to statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico and to sweeping firearms restrictions, among other things.

    For now, Republicans are in lockstep – against Trump. As Senate Republicans refuse to accede to Trump’s command, his lame duck stuck is coming more clearly into view. In seeking to eliminate the filibuster, he has not weakened the Democrats. Instead, he is exposing the limits of the Republican party’s fealty to him.

  • AOC and Hochul are crazy for Mamdani

    AOC and Hochul are crazy for Mamdani

    New York’s Kathy Hochul isn’t a good governor. But, like a particularly empathetic house pet, she’s finely attuned to any change in the weather. A huge crowd in a Queens stadium rallied last night for Zohran Mamdani and chanted “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” over and over again. So when Hochul said, “I hear you, I hear you,” you can be sure that she actually heard them, though today she said she thought they were saying “let’s go Bills.” Sure. Either way, she got to where she is by knowing how to back a winner. 

    The rich, meanwhile, are in the process of moving their family photos to the Palm Beach town home or shopping for McMansions in suburban Dallas. It’s obvious to all but the extremely deluded that New York is going to elect Mamdani mayor, and that he’s going to win big. “Elect Zohran,” Hochul said emphatically last night, “and we take back America!” Fat chance of that, but the Democratic Socialists are about to take control of America’s largest city.

    Any objective observer understands that the Mamdani administration will be a disaster, though the scope and contours of that disaster remain unclear. As for the tone of the vibe shift, let’s turn to Queens-representing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who bobbed back and forth onstage like a boxer. She excitedly sounded the clarion call of the people’s revolution.

    New York, she said, is “a city built by the sweat of immigrants, unionists and suffragists. From the Irish who fled famine, to the Italians who built our subways, the Jewish families who survived pogroms, the black communities who fought for every inch of freedom, the Latinos who harvest our food and care for our elders, the Asians who innovate in our labs and shops, and the indigenous peoples whose land this truly is – we are all here because New York has always been a beacon for the weary, the bold, and the unbreakable.”

    True, Italians did do a lot of labor on the subways, and I’m sure the Lenape, wherever they may now be, appreciate the land acknowledgment. The Jews who survived pogroms may soon find themselves surviving another; hopefully there’s nice housing for them in Orlando and Las Vegas. But one could also argue, as Republicans do, that New York as we know it was truly built by the likes of Robert Moses and Donald Trump. That might be AOC’s point, though. Capitalist development is exactly what she, and Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, are against.

    “We must remember,” AOC told the crowd last night, ”We are not the crazy ones, New York City. We are not the outlandish ones, New York City. They want us to think we are crazy. They gaslight us, they mock us, they call us socialists or worse. But we are sane. We are the ones seeing clearly.”

    I may be alone among my cohort but I don’t think AOC is crazy at all. If she is crazy, then she’s loco como un zorro. In fact, she’s quite clever, and knows exactly what she’s doing. For all the agitas that Mamdani (and AOC’s) New York is going to cause the building and finance class, it’s doing a service in some ways.

    As the likes of Kathy Hochul genuflect to the DSA, it’s clear that the old neoliberal Democratic party is on its final breaths. Last night’s rally was no Chuck Schumer chanting “we will win” and pounding his fists on the lectern like he’s demanding an extra pudding at the senior center. It was young, alive and done with the weak, sclerotic politics of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. At some point, progressives might find themselves turning to Mamdani and screaming, like Obi-Wan to Anakin, “you were the chosen one!!!”

  • Boomer New York’s last bellow

    Boomer New York’s last bellow

    New Yorkers received visits from two ghosts of Christmas past and one ghost of Christmas present at its last 2025 mayoral debate on Wednesday night. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and champion of himself Andrew Cuomo lobbed Grumpy Old Man insults across the stage at each other while Zohran Mamdani stood center stage, fresh and gleaming, deflecting blows and acting with all the confidence of a football team that has a three-touchdown lead at the two-minute warning. The historical turn, potentially tragic, that will lead to the Democratic Socialists taking over America’s largest city, is reaching its conclusion, and there won’t be a final twist.

    Sliwa, who won’t become mayor in this or any other reality, offered passionate proposals to reform the housing-court system and to protect New York’s forgotten animals. If cats and dogs could vote, Sliwa would be a shoo-in. He played the populist card in his opening, saying “it’s us versus them, it’s us versus the insiders and the billionaires. It’s us versus Cuomo, it’s us versus Zohran. We’re not going to be silenced any more, we’re going to fight.”

    Cuomo spent most of the night deflecting attacks on his now-settled sexual harassment allegations, on his mishandling of the MTA in the summer of 2017, and on his disastrous policies in the early days of COVID that led to the deaths of thousands of elderly New Yorkers. He countered by saying that if (when) Mamdani wins, Donald Trump will be running the city. “He has said he will take over New York if Mamdani wins, and he will. He thinks Mamdani is a kid and he’ll knock him on his tuchus.”

    Mamdani said, “My opponents, who spend more time convincing each other to drop out, speak only of the past, because that’s all that they know. I am the only one who speaks to the future of the city.”

    He had a point. At times, the debate was like watching a community-theater production of The Sunshine Boys. One of the moderators even said, at one point, as Sliwa and Cuomo carped at each other over some ancient issue that even they barely understood, “we’re going to stay in this century, guys.”

    The three candidates debated housing issues, transit issues, policing issues, education issues and various finer points of New York policy that matter to me only marginally, because I live in a state with no income tax in a city recently named the most-affordable housing market in the United States. Not my movie. But antisemitism is my movie, so my ears perked up substantially when the candidates started debating the “Jewish question” like this was Berlin in 1931.

    “I will be the Mayor who doesn’t just protect Jewish New Yorkers, but also celebrates and cherishes them,” said Mamdani, who hundreds of rabbis denounced this week.

    “Not everything is a TikTok video,” said Cuomo. “You’re the savior of the Jewish people? You won’t denounce ‘Globalize the Intifada,” which means “kill Jews.” Sliwa, who apparently has Jewish children, said they view Mamdani “as an arsonist who fanned the flames of antisemitism. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, a lot of apologizing to do.”

    Mamdani said he has never once “spoken out in favor of global jihad” and said that criticisms of him were, in fact, Islamophobic. “New York deserves a leader who takes antisemitism seriously, not one who weaponizes it to score political points.”

    Mamdani, who has an uncanny ability to wriggle out of tough spots, has run a slick campaign, but he’s also been fortunate in his choice of opponents. Sliwa is a quintessential New York tough-guy character, and might even be a good mayor if given a chance, but he’s also extremely goofy and there’s no way liberal New York will elect a Republican populist mayor in the age of Trump. And Cuomo is perhaps the most flawed candidate in a generation. This attempt to revive his political fortunes, given the disgraces he suffered earlier in the decade, has been a pathetic display of hubris. He touted himself as the candidate of “experience,” which led Mamdani to say,

    “We have all experienced your experience. We have experienced you taking a five million dollar book deal while sending seniors to their death in their nursing homes. The Issue IS your experience.”

    This debate was the last bellow of Boomer New York. The ghosts of Christmas past are vanquished and the Free Palestine Gen-Z TikTok kids are taking over. Winter is coming. To paraphrase Tiny Tim, God help us, everyone.

  • Trump knows personnel is policy

    Trump knows personnel is policy

    In May 1801, Thomas Jefferson wrote a complaining letter to a friend. “There is nothing I am so anxious about as making the best possible appointments.” Donald Trump would appreciate Jefferson’s anxiety.

    “Personnel is policy.” As far as I have been able to discover, that slogan gained currency in the Reagan administration. But it articulates a truth that political thinkers from Aristotle to Machiavelli to James Madison appreciated. The first line of Article II of the Constitution reads: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That’s “a President.” Only one. Not “a President and a bunch of district court judges.” Not “a President and sundry federal agencies staffed by unaccountable bureaucrats.”

    Over the course of many decades, the sublimely uncluttered principle articulated at the beginning of Article II has been undermined and stymied, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, by what we have come to call the administrative state. What is the administrative state? It is difficult to take precise measure of this amorphous, protean, self-engorging organism. But one salient characteristic is its habit of substituting judicial intervention for constitutional principle.

    “Personnel is policy.” Does the President have the authority to hire and fire his agents and underlings? The Constitution says yes. The administrative state, supported by a battalion of liberal judges and scrambling litigants, says “not so fast.”

    Does the President have the authority to hire and fire his agents and underlings? The Constitution says yes

    As I write, the Trump administration is contending with some 300 lawsuits. Many have to do with agencies he wishes to trim or abolish, previously appropriated funds he wishes to divert or sequester, employees he wishes to fire. So far, the Supreme Court has, if in somewhat piecemeal fashion, mostly sided with Trump. The executive, the Court has recognized, ought to be allowed to execute, viz “to carry out or put into effect a plan, order, or course of action.” Inherent in that power is the President’s prerogative of “making the best possible appointments.” Why? because personnel is policy. Agents of the administrative state also understand this principle. It’s just that they believe that power, or at least large swaths of it, should rest with them, not the President. They do not have the Constitution on their side. But they do have a litany of legal decisions which have accumulated like barnacles on the hull of the ship of state, rotting its timbers, impeding its progress.

    Piece by piece, the Trump administration is repristinating the underbelly of government. So-called “non-governmental organizations” are being taken apart and “independent agencies” like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being given the Augean stable treatment. In the process, two things that were hidden are revealed. One, that the acronym NGO is a sly, euphemistic misnaming. It is like “Eumenides” – literally, “the kindly ones” – the less fearsome word that the Greeks deployed for the Erinyes, the Furies. A second thing that the klieg light of Trump’s attention has revealed is the extent to which the ostensible independence of NGOs and the alphabet soup of “independent agencies” is spurious. Although some batten partially upon private funds, almost all are largely supported by the government, i.e., the taxpayers. To whom or what are they accountable?

    That is a question that hovers in the background as the Trump administration goes about the business of removing non-constitutional barnacles. Personnel is policy. In March 2025, Trump fired Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, one of the five members of the Federal Trade Commission. A lower court ordered her reinstated, citing a 1935 SCOTUS decision called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The FTC, established in 1914, is one of those “independent” agencies to which we are supposed to pay obeisance. There is some irony in the fact that its supposed independence was upheld by Humphrey’s Executor. The irony stems from the fact that a Court antagonistic to Franklin Delano Roosevelt upheld a law that prevented his firing William E. Humphrey, a commissioner of the FTC who stood athwart FDR’s New Deal initiatives. Humphrey died before his case was decided. His executors pursued the case, hoping to retrieve his lost salary. In the event, the Court, in a unanimous decision, said that the “experts” who staffed the FTC wielded power that was “predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative,” not “purely executive,” and were exempt from presidential authority.

    Thus did a conservative Court, aiming to deal a blow to the progressive policies of FDR, establish a precedent eagerly seized upon by progressives who sought to bolster the administrative state. The decision has long been subject to criticism, not to say ridicule. What exactly is a “quasi-judicial” or “quasi-legislative” power? How does “purely executive” power differ from executive power unadorned by such adverbial modification? Clarence Thomas, who continues to abide by the quaint notion that the Constitution provides for three, and only three, branches of government, called them “handwaving and obfuscating phrases.”

    In September, SCOTUS stayed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter’s reinstatement and scheduled arguments in her case for December. Many observers believe Humphrey’s Executor will be overturned. It should be. Not only has it functioned as a prop for the administrative state, it has also intruded on the President’s executive authority to hire and fire.

    When it is time to write the history of the second Trump administration, such achievements as sealing the border, ejecting millions of illegal migrants, and bolstering the US economy by reinvigorating domestic manufacturing will loom large. But from the perspective of restoring executive potency and good government, perhaps Trump’s greatest achievement will be seen to have flowed from his deep understanding of the principle that personnel is policy.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Why you need Big Balls

    Why you need Big Balls

    Big nicknames come with big responsibilities. And the owner of one of the mightiest monikers – Big Balls – feels the weight of his own obligations keenly.

    In a rare interview, Edward Coristine spoke about how his family fled to America from Russia after his grandfather was executed for spying for the US. Valery Martynov was a KGB officer who was recruited by the FBI in the early 1980s. He passed Soviet secrets to his American handlers until he was exposed by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, two of the most notorious traitors in US history. 

    Recalled to Moscow under false pretenses, Martynov was arrested and executed in 1987. His widow and children eventually sought refuge in America.

    Coristine, now Big Balls, says he was inspired by the same patriotic call to action as his grandfather, who “died so that I could come here and live in this free country.”

    “I feel this great responsibility to serve my country,” Coristine added. For him, his role at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), where both he and his nickname came to public prominence, was a way to repay the country that took his family in.

    “When I started seeing these problems that we’ve got as a government, this $37 trillion national debt and counting… I was like ‘This is insane, is there any way I can help solve this?’”

    Coristine, still only 19-years-old, has already lived several lives. Elon Musk’s presence has been unmistakable in his early years. Briefly, he interned at Neuralink – Musk’s brain-implant company – and launched his own LLC called TESLA.SEXY that dabbled in web domains and AI bots. 

    As the teenage tech prodigy mastered the tech world, Musk juggled a half-dozen projects that were not enough to satisfy him. His Ayn Randian revulsion to public spending led him to the one institution inept enough to merit his time: the federal government. And with his pal Donald Trump headed back to the White House, his DOGE meme dream was set to become reality.

    DOGE featured a team of young, brilliant tech geeks. Coristine was singled out by Musk himself for a job in the big leagues – and nothing in his world was the same again.

    The media seized on him early. Journalists scoured his online trail and discovered TESLA.SEXY, mocking its Russian-registered domains as proof of malintent. They dug into his Neuralink internship, highlighting that he was fired after allegedly leaking internal documents. Coristine denies these accusations. 

    When they discovered he had, for a joke, once called himself Big Balls on his LinkedIn profile, they sensed blood. They published profiles that called him a “concerning” addition to Musk’s team who potentially posed a national security threat. For them, Big Balls was an easy foil: young, reckless, inexperienced, a symbol of what they saw as Musk’s arrogance in reshaping government with MAGA youth.

    Still a teenager, Big Balls held a senior advisory role in DOGE, where he gained direct access to federal systems like the General Services Administration and the National Finance Center, and served as a senior adviser to the Departments of State and Homeland Security. He pushed career bureaucrats to justify their jobs, oversaw plans to close smaller agency offices, and supported the rollout of AI tools to replace clerical work.

    He racked up more accomplishments than career staffers twice his age, apparently, all before being old enough to buy a beer after work.

    Then came the night that made him a martyr.

    It happened during the dim hours of August 3rd in Logan Circle – one of Washington’s busier neighborhoods. 

    According to police, ten young punks closed in on Coristine’s car, surrounding it like a pack of wolves. Coristine got his girlfriend into the car to protect her. He then turned to face the attackers head on, who descended on him in a flurry of blows. Officers on patrol caught the chaos as it unfolded, managing to stop two suspects while the rest vanished into the streets. 

    He was left battered and bloodied, but still standing. Big Balls had earned his nickname.

    News of the attack traveled quickly – and ignited an unprecedented federal response. Within days, President Donald Trump announced that federal forces would be deployed to Washington to address rising crime. His critics decried the move as authoritarian. Supporters called it overdue. Either way, Big Balls’ bravery was the catalyst for the nationalization of DC’s police force and the swarm of National Guard troops now patrolling the nation’s capital. 

    The city went nearly two weeks without a single reported homicide, and over 1,000 criminals have since been arrested. 

    For Big Balls’ critics, diminishing him has been easier than grappling with what he represents. He, like many others, walked out of the US Government when Elon Musk left DOGE. Love him or hate him, Musk has revolutionized modern technology and is idolized by the next generation’s innovators. His ambitious, and often controversial, expedition into government auditing hit a nerve with the elite who rely on a tsunami of taxpayer funds to keep their cups overflowing. 

    As for Big Balls, the name remains, and perhaps that is fitting. He now lives larger than life in the MAGA memory – the kindle which sparked a military mobilization to restore order in the nation’s capital.

  • Mamdani declares war on excellence

    Mamdani declares war on excellence

    New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has a bold plan for the city’s schools: phase out the Gifted and Talented program in elementary education. His rationale is that these programs create disparities and feed inequality.

    It’s a familiar progressive argument. If some students are excelling, others must be suffering. If a child is recognized as gifted, it’s unfair to those who aren’t. The logic is as simple as it is destructive: equality means sameness, even if sameness means mediocrity.

    There is nothing wrong with recognizing giftedness. In fact, it’s common sense. If a child demonstrates unusual ability in math, science, writing, or the arts, you nurture it. You don’t bury it under a misguided notion of “equity.” Excellence, like athletic talent, must be cultivated. No one suggests we should stop training promising young athletes because not every child can make varsity. Yet in academics, this kind of reasoning now passes as justice.

    Mamdani’s proposal rests on a zero-sum view of education: if gifted students are challenged, average or struggling students are deprived. But reality says otherwise. The failure of struggling students has little to do with the success of gifted ones and everything to do with broken leadership, failing priorities and an education bureaucracy that confuses slogans for solutions.

    Worse, eliminating gifted programs doesn’t remove inequality; it cements it. Wealthy parents will always find ways to give their children an edge – through tutoring, test prep, extracurriculars, or private schools. It’s the working-class family, the immigrant striver, the ambitious child from a modest neighborhood, who loses the most when public pathways for talent are shut down. Mamdani’s policy would not reduce inequality; it would entrench it.

    Of course, defenders of his plan will say New York is already taking steps to help struggling students. And to some degree, they’re right. The city has launched NYC Reads, a phonics-based literacy initiative designed to reverse years of damage caused by failed reading instruction. It has trained literacy coaches and rolled out new programs to engage parents. Nonprofits and community groups also step in with tutoring and mentorship programs. These efforts matter – and they are a good start.

    But notice what’s missing. Schools still don’t give teachers systematic flexibility to intervene when students start falling behind across subjects. Mentorship and tutoring programs exist, but they aren’t scaled to reach every struggling child who needs one. And schools rarely celebrate excellence outside the narrow band of standardized tests. A student with a gift for music, or technical trades, or entrepreneurship is too often left in the shadows.

    This is where conservatives can make a real difference: by insisting that fairness doesn’t mean dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It means raising the floor without lowering the ceiling. It means holding onto gifted programs for those who excel, while building new ladders for those who struggle.

    Schools should focus on fundamentals. Every child deserves mastery in reading and math. Early phonics-based literacy and basic numeracy are the non-negotiable building blocks of opportunity.

    Teachers should be trusted and given the flexibility to intervene when a student is falling behind, rather than chaining them to rigid, top-down mandates.

    Families should be engaged. Strong families remain the greatest equalizer in education. Encourage parents to read with children, reinforce discipline, and support homework routines.

    Mentorship and tutoring should be expanded. Churches, civic groups and nonprofits should be scaled up so no struggling student is left without support.

    And excellence of all kinds should be celebrated. Not every child will ace calculus, but some will thrive in the arts, athletics, or skilled trades. Schools should dignify these gifts as much as test scores.

    The tragedy of Mamdani’s proposal is that it reflects a growing cultural fatigue with excellence itself. We live in a moment where fairness is too often defined not by how high the ceiling is, but by how low we can drag it. The logic is perverse: if some shine brighter, then all must be dimmed.

    But dimming the brightest lights does not make the room fairer. It makes the whole room darker.

    Excellence is not the enemy of equity. Real fairness comes when we allow the child who may one day cure cancer to reach his full potential, while ensuring the child who struggles with reading has every chance to catch up. Both deserve cultivation. Both deserve dignity. And both require rejecting the politics of mediocrity.

    New York’s future – and America’s – depends on it.

  • Andrew Cuomo is the lesser of two evils

    Andrew Cuomo is the lesser of two evils

    New York City politics has rarely offered voters a clean choice. This year, with Eric Adams out of the mayor’s race, the city faces one of its grimmest dilemmas yet: Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani.

    Let’s be clear – this is not an endorsement of Cuomo. The former governor has baggage that most voters can recite from memory. But politics isn’t about picking saints; it’s about survival. And when survival is on the line, sometimes the only responsible thing to do is choose the lesser of two evils.

    Cuomo may be corrupt, arrogant and heavy-handed. But at least he governs from a place of pragmatism. Mamdani, by contrast, represents the radical left’s fantasy of New York City – a city where utopian slogans replace hard choices, where affordability gimmicks mask fiscal chaos and where public safety is sacrificed at the altar of ideology.

    If that sounds harsh, let’s take a walk down memory lane.

    Do you remember the “Market of Sweethearts” in Roosevelt, Queens? That area became infamous for its open-air prostitution scene. It wasn’t just an embarrassment – it was a full-scale community crisis. Families couldn’t walk their own streets without being confronted by sex work, drug dealing and human trafficking.

    To his credit, Eric Adams at least tried to clean it up. Under Zohran Mamdani’s vision for New York, that problem wouldn’t just return – it would multiply. He would welcome prostitution zones as some sort of progressive liberation, never mind the devastation it causes to families and neighborhoods. Imagine the man in the mayor’s office not on your side, but on the other side of the football field, actively cheering on the breakdown of community values.

    That’s the reality New Yorkers risk under Mamdani. New Yorkers don’t need another cheerleader for decline – they need someone willing to stop the bleeding.

    Mamdani isn’t just another Democrat. He’s part of the Democratic Socialists of America, the same ideological club that gave us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He talks like her, governs like her and dreams of turning New York into a socialist laboratory.

    The problem is, New York is not a laboratory. It is a living, breathing city of eight million people – families, immigrants, small business owners, police officers, students – who can’t afford to live under ideological experiments.

    If Mamdani wins, AOC wins. And when the Squad wins, ordinary New Yorkers lose.

    Mamdani’s big-ticket idea of free buses sounds wonderful – until you do the math. The MTA already runs deficits and routinely comes begging for subsidies to keep the trains moving. Wiping out fare revenue would blow a hole in the budget the size of the Midtown Tunnel.

    Where would that money come from? Higher taxes, of course. The same taxes that already drive families and businesses out of New York. Mamdani calls it “affordability,” but in practice, it’s a recipe for fiscal collapse. Free rides today, higher taxes tomorrow.

    Then there’s his rent-freeze proposal, another crowd-pleasing slogan that sounds like relief but delivers the opposite. When you freeze rents indefinitely, you don’t just cap prices – you cap incentives. Developers walk away, construction slows and the housing supply shrinks. The result? Fewer apartments, higher competition and ironically, less affordability.

    For a city already struggling with housing shortages, Mamdani’s plan is not a fix but a death sentence. It’s economics 101, and yet the radical left refuses to learn the lesson.

    Crime remains the elephant in the room. Adams ran and won on restoring public safety, though his record is mixed at best. But at least Adams acknowledged the crisis. Cuomo, for all his flaws, has too.

    Mamdani? He wants to cut NYPD overtime, pair social workers with officers and further shackle a police force that, despite its imperfections, remains one of the best-trained in the nation. I am not opposed to accountability. No one serious is. But undermining law enforcement when crime is still a top concern is reckless at best, dangerous at worst.

    Ask yourself: do you want a mayor who takes crime seriously, or one who sees crime as a laboratory for social experiments?

    This is why Cuomo, battered and bruised as he may be, becomes the only defensible option. He won’t save New York. He won’t inspire confidence. But he won’t accelerate the city’s decline, either.

    Sometimes the best you can do in politics is buy time. Cuomo represents damage control. Mamdani represents a freefall.

    Conservatives understand this principle well because they’ve lived it. In blue strongholds, voters rarely get a candidate who reflects their values. But they can at least choose the candidate who won’t turn the city upside down. New York doesn’t need utopian dreams right now – it needs guardrails.

    Eric Adams’ collapse should be a wake-up call. His downfall wasn’t just about scandal; it was about a Democratic Party that no longer tolerates moderates. The radicals have seized the microphone, and their policies are poised to reshape the city.

    New Yorkers must now decide whether they want a radical experiment or a flawed but familiar pragmatist. That is not a glamorous choice, but it is the only choice.

    The “lesser of two evils” isn’t a rallying cry that stirs the soul. It’s not meant to. It’s the sober recognition that when faced with two bad options, responsibility demands choosing the one that will do the least harm.

    And in this race, that means Andrew Cuomo.

  • Why black voters won’t come around to Mamdani

    Why black voters won’t come around to Mamdani

    When Zohran Mamdani took the pulpit at Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church last Sunday, he had a golden opportunity. He could have spoken to the hopes of black New Yorkers, their resilience, their aspirations for safer neighborhoods, better schools and paths to prosperity. Instead, the first thing he brought up was police shootings.

    There is nothing wrong with addressing police shootings. They are tragedies that wound communities deeply. But it is telling that when Democrats step into black churches, their reflex is to start with pain. They do not speak to us as whole citizens with complex desires. They reduce us to our wounds, assuming that the surest way to earn our votes is to rehearse our traumas.
    This is what I call “pain politics,” and frankly, I am tired of it.

    Black voters deserve more than to be treated as symbols of suffering. We are fathers and mothers, students and workers, homeowners and small business owners. We want what everyone else wants: safety, dignity, prosperity and the ability to hand something down to our children. Yet when Democrats like Mamdani seek our support, they lean on two tired themes: racial grievance and short-term affordability gimmicks.

    Take his proposal to freeze rents across New York City. At first glance, it sounds compassionate – protecting tenants from predatory hikes. But we’ve been down this road before. Bill de Blasio tried his version of it, and rents still soared. Landlords gamed the system, units dried up and working-class families were left scrambling for fewer apartments at higher prices. A rent freeze does not build housing. It strangles supply, discourages investment and leaves those at the bottom of the market with even fewer options.

    This is where a conservative vision must be bolder. Instead of clinging to policies that punish landlords and stifle growth, we should be championing policies that expand opportunity for renters while encouraging ownership. That means building more mixed-income housing developments that integrate working families into thriving neighborhoods instead of segregating poverty. It means reforming zoning laws that choke off new housing supply and keep rents artificially high. It means offering tax credits for first-time homebuyers and easing the regulatory burden that drives up construction costs.

    Most importantly, it means shifting from dependency to ownership. Freezing rent keeps people trapped in cycles where they are always tenants, never owners. Conservatives should be the ones saying to black families: you deserve more than survival, you deserve a stake. Policies that increase access to homeownership, expand voucher portability and encourage private-public partnerships to build affordable units give families a chance to climb, not just tread water.

    Contrast this with Mamdani’s broader message. Here is a young man from a privileged background, parachuting into black neighborhoods with lofty talk about “racial uplift” while recycling policies that have already failed. His vision is not one rooted in respect for the agency of black voters but in drafting us into his ideological crusade. He talks to us about pain, then prescribes prescriptions that preserve dependency. It is a pattern as old as the Democratic machine: invoke the wounds of the past, promise relief through government intervention and then move on once the votes are secured.

    Black voters are growing weary of this routine. We have noticed that the politicians who show up to our churches rarely ask about entrepreneurship, trade schools, or ways to keep our streets safe. We notice that they have far less to say about the values of family, discipline and education than they do about grievance and redistribution. We notice when our role in their story is reduced to victims in need of rescue, rather than partners in building a stronger future.

    The truth is, we are not waiting for politicians to save us. Across the country, black families are starting businesses, homeschooling children, buying homes and investing in cryptocurrency and real estate. We are pursuing ownership and legacy because we know dependency is not liberation.

    What offends me about Mamdani’s performance at Bethany Baptist is not only that it was condescending, but that it was unimaginative. To walk into a black church and assume the only relevant message is about police violence is to see us as one-dimensional. To promise rent freezes as if that is the height of affordability policy is to underestimate our capacity and our ambition.

    Black voters deserve more. We deserve leaders who speak to our potential, not just our pain. We deserve policies that expand opportunity, not band-aids that entrench dependency. And we deserve to be treated as citizens whose vote must be earned by respect, not assumed through grievance.

    For too long, Democrats have relied on pain politics to hold the loyalty of black communities. But pain is not a vision. It is time we demanded more than ritual acknowledgments of tragedy and recycled affordability schemes. It is time we demanded dignity, ownership and a politics that speaks to our future, not just our wounds.

  • Gavin Newsom’s fossil-fuel flip-flop

    Gavin Newsom’s fossil-fuel flip-flop

    Gavin Newsom once touted California as the fossil fuel industry’s “foe.”

    In 2024 he declared energy workers “the polluted heart of the climate crisis.” Together with Attorney General Rob Bonta he famously filed an outlandish climate lawsuit in 2023 demanding oil majors pay the costs of climate change.

    And under Newsom anti-energy lawfare has been coupled with burdensome environmental regulations, delays in permitting and punitive legislation such as a pledge to end oil drilling across the state by 2045.

    But now, a decade since the madness started, the strategy has turned out to be a dud.

    The “bold” climate plan has produced no reliable or affordable alternatives to oil and gas – and has even forced major refineries to up and leave. Phillips 66’s and Valero’s upcoming exits from the state spell disaster. The two refineries represent a significant percentage of the state’s refining capacity.

    With less supply and demand only increasing, prices will likely rise even further for Californians who already face the highest gas prices in the nation.

    That looming crisis has forced Sacramento to reverse course. California state lawmakers recently agreed on a sweeping energy and climate package that focused on affordability – and included plans to ease permitting requirements for up to 2,000 new oil wells per year.

    The move is proving popular even with members of Newsom’s own party. Democratic State Senator Henry Stern: “Call me born again, but I have seen the light on exactly what you’re [Republican colleagues] talking about. Kern County should be unleashed.”

    Kern county, where the new wells will be created, is home to about three quarters of the state’s crude production, and the new bill locks in approvals through 2036. It is a small step of certainty in a state that has created one of the most uncertain environments for energy investment.

    Matt Rodriguez, a longtime Democratic consultant, outlined Newsom’s current thinking, especially as the governor is rumored to be considering running in the 2028 presidential campaign: “The reality is that gas prices are higher here than the rest of the nation. That’s just undeniable. If there are storm clouds on the horizon, you can’t just sit there and ignore it… Any way that he can keep gas prices from ballooning, that’s his imperative.”

    The state shift on energy followed other legislative attacks on oil and gas that died earlier this year. Two bills advertised as “Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act,” failed. They sought to impose retroactive fees on large fossil fuel producers operating in California.

    However, rejecting flawed ideas and passing emergency measures to keep refineries open will not, on their own, resolve California’s rising energy costs. Real solutions will require a more deliberate strategy, one that gives producers a clear reason to invest and operate in the state, rather than burdensome regulations and frivolous lawsuits that drive them away.

    Industry leaders saw this coming. Andy Walz, Chevron’s president of downstream, midstream and chemicals, told Politico that California officials have made the state “uninvestable” for companies like his and that it had been only a matter of time before a refiner pulled the plug. “I don’t think they believed the industry was in trouble,” Walz said of California officials. “I think they misread what was really going on, and it took some real action by some competitors to get them woken up.”

    California’s failed experiment should serve as a national warning. Newsom spent years pursuing lawsuits and bans instead of solutions, and Californians are paying the price. The Governor now faces a choice as he prepares for a likely presidential campaign: continue his pivot toward policies that stabilize supply and lower costs – or cling to failed experiments that leave Californians poorer and angrier.

  • Kamala blames race when it suits her

    Kamala blames race when it suits her

    When Kamala Harris sat across from Joy Behar on The View, the exchange revealed more than just political spin. Behar insisted Harris’ struggles on the campaign trail were largely about racism and sexism – that she “really lost” because of prejudice, not performance. Harris replied, “I’m not naive; race and gender do play a factor… I have never run as a woman or as a person of color. I have run because I believe I am the best to do the job.”

    That answer might sound polished, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Harris has built her career on identity politics. She was polling below four percent in the Democratic primaries in 2019 – a campaign so weak it collapsed before a single vote was cast. Yet when Joe Biden pledged to select a woman as his running mate, the Democratic Party base and the media made clear that race and gender would be central factors in the choice. Harris ultimately benefited from that push for representation – her candidacy revived not because she was leading in the primaries, but because she fit the historic profile many Democrats wanted to showcase.”

    Let’s be honest: without Biden’s pledge, Harris would not be vice president today. She was not propelled to the ticket because she outperformed the competition, but because the Democratic Party wanted to showcase representation. Identity was wielded as power. That’s the plain truth.

    And that is what makes her The View comments so hollow. Harris cannot run on her race and gender when it benefits her – and then dismiss questions about competence by claiming she never used identity in the first place. Voters remember the reality. They saw a campaign that leaned heavily on being the “first” – first woman, first black woman, first South Asian woman – without ever answering the more pressing question: first in what vision for America?

    The tired refrain from Democrats that every failed candidate was the victim of racism, sexism, or some combination of both has worn thin. Hillary Clinton blamed misogyny in 2016. Stacey Abrams has repeatedly blamed voter suppression for her gubernatorial losses. Now Joy Behar and Biden himself float racism and sexism as the reasons Harris couldn’t break through nationally. But at some point, the question must be asked: why can’t Democratic leaders admit when a candidate simply ran a poor campaign?

    Harris’ 2020 run faltered not because America is irredeemably bigoted, but because she never offered voters a clear or compelling reason to support her. Her positions shifted constantly – leftward on criminal justice, back toward the middle on health care, then left again on the Green New Deal. She struggled to define herself, and voters noticed. That isn’t prejudice; that’s politics.

    What makes this cycle especially insulting is the implicit message it sends to the electorate. If voters reject a candidate of color or a female candidate, Democrats too often suggest it must be because of bias. But that robs voters of agency. It tells them their decisions weren’t thoughtful or principled – just hateful. And it shields candidates like Harris from honest self-reflection about why they fail to connect.

    The irony is thick. Harris’ defenders weaponize race and gender as a shield against criticism. Yet Harris herself has never hesitated to display her identity as a credential when convenient. She has used it as her elevator to higher office. When it no longer works, she suddenly insists it was never about race or gender at all. That is not only disingenuous, it is corrosive to public trust.

    Black conservatives have been sounding this alarm for years. We understand that tying our worth to identity politics doesn’t elevate us – it reduces us. It reduces the black experience to a talking point, the female experience to a checkbox, and every election outcome to a morality play about prejudice. Booker T. Washington warned against leaning on grievance instead of competence. Shelby Steele has written powerfully about how white guilt sustains this very cycle. Yet Democrats remain stuck in it, because it offers them a convenient excuse for failure and a convenient tool for power.

    Kamala Harris wants it both ways: to be celebrated for breaking barriers, and excused for her failures by blaming the barriers. But leadership requires something deeper. It requires being judged on results, not optics. On merit, not identity. And on vision, not victimhood.

    In the end, what voters want is not complicated. They want candidates who are competent, steady, and clear about what they stand for. They want policies that keep their families safe, grow the economy, and restore trust in institutions. What they don’t want is another lecture that their skepticism of a weak candidate must be rooted in prejudice.

    Kamala Harris’ rhetoric isn’t just old and tired – it’s insulting. It tells the very people she claims to represent that their only role is to cheer her identity, not to question her record. That’s not empowerment. That’s manipulation. And voters are wise to it.

    If Harris truly believes she is “the best to do the job,” then let her prove it on the merits. Stop blaming racism and sexism for every political misstep. Stop reducing voters to bigots for exercising their judgment. Because at the end of the day, America deserves leaders who rise on vision, not excuses.