CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Identity Thieves.

Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—two of America’s most prominent socialist politicians—have committed identity theft. No, they did not pilfer a Social Security number or swipe the digits of someone else’s credit card. They have done something more subtle: stealing the image of the oppressed for personal and political gain.

It’s an old trick. Just as Elizabeth Warren claimed Native American heritage as she ascended the ranks of academia, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez adopted the identities of the poor and downtrodden as they ascended the ranks of politics. Both built their political personas on a small kernel of truth: Mamdani claimed on his college application to be black because he was born in Uganda, despite being the son of two famous, affluent, and educated Indians; Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be a “Bronx girl” because she lived in the borough until age five, when she moved to a tony corner of Westchester County. Both have structured their identities around grand narratives of oppressor and oppressed, which they hope to convert into power and prestige.

The truth is that both Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez belong to groups—Indians and Latinos, respectively—that do not fit neatly into America’s deepest historical binary, that between white and black, colonist and slave. Though both could doubtlessly point toward some personal slight or past injustice against their ethnic group, neither Mamdani nor Ocasio-Cortez can lay a real claim to historical oppression. Indian Americans are among the most educated and affluent groups in America, and the vast majority of Latinos arrived in the United States after desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The very fact that millions of people uprooted themselves from India and Latin America to try their luck in this country indicates that they considered America a land of opportunity, rather than injustice.

For Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, however, the myth of post-Civil Rights Act discrimination must be maintained at all costs. Both use their privilege—Mamdani, graduate of Bowdoin and son of a professor; Ocasio-Cortez, graduate of Boston University and daughter of an architect—to advance their narrative of oppression.

They do it because it works.

Read the whole thing.

I SUSPECT THE INVESTIGATIONS HAVE BEEN GOING ON FOR A WHILE: FBI launches criminal investigations of John Brennan, James Comey over Trump-Russia probe: DOJ sources.

HMM: Cough Medicine May Protect Against Some of Parkinson’s Worst Symptoms.

HEH: Let’s Talk About ​Trump’s…Er…Obama’s ICE Raids.

THEY’RE SMART, AND TRYING TO JOIN THE WINNING TEAM: Killer Whales Are Giving Fish to Humans Worldwide – What’s Going on?

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VIDEO: I talk about Elon’s third party plan and why it’s a mistake.

THEY HATE YOU AND WANT YOUR LIFE TO BE WORSE.

This is not just a minor quirk. This is the manifestation of their hatred for normal people and a desire to cause them harm. We see it. https://t.co/iRJr6bQjuv

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 7, 2025

ANOTHER WIN FOR TRUMP, AND CONFUSION TO HIS ENEMIES:

🚨 OMG: Now a LIBERAL Supreme Court justice is trying to teach Justice Ketanji Jackson how this whole "judicial" thing works…

Jackson is the ONLY dissent. Sotomayor has to remind Jackson, for some reason, that the case before them is NOT about what Jackson thought it was.

My… https://t.co/XC1BkhrMs3 pic.twitter.com/FFGFz41Ous

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 8, 2025

I don’t know what happened behind closed doors in the Supreme Court over the last month, but it seems like everyone has had more than enough of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nonsense. https://t.co/h21mylbCc0

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 8, 2025

Though the enemies seem to have supplied the confusion themselves.

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities.

There was a time, not long ago, when Americans — regardless of region, class, or politics — shared a common cultural foundation. From the Saturday morning cartoons children watched to the nightly news programs adults relied on, mainstream culture was both a mirror and a glue: it reflected our values while keeping us tethered to the same national experience. That era is over.

We have entered the Age of Alternative Culture, an era defined by fragmentation, algorithmic echo chambers, and cultural isolation masquerading as global connection.

The culprit is not a single villain but a confluence of forces, chief among them the rise of the Internet and the omnipresence of algorithmically curated content. Social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram don’t just reflect our preferences; they shape them, refining our tastes and beliefs into niche categories optimized for engagement. Every scroll reinforces what the algorithm thinks you want, narrowing your worldview under the guise of preference.

We are becoming numbers on a screen in an illusion of mass connectivity, our eyes more valuable than our minds. The consequence is a culture atomized into digital micro-nations, where people live in parallel realities consuming different music, news, humor, and values. There is no longer a mainstream — there are now only streams, and each of us is drowning in our own.

This is the downside to the end of mass media. It united us, but it also made us vulnerable to whatever the elites’ obsession du jour was. The original television networks still do everything they can to keep the idea going: that’s why with the exception of Greg Gutfeld, all late comedians lean hard to the left; and why the news media circled the wagons to protect Biden from 2020 to the summer of 2024, until they all circled the wagons to protect Harris until November. That’s why Silicon Valley tried to replace the Blogosphere with the walled gardens of Twitter and Facebook. While I wish we still had a shared pop culture, I’m not at all sure I’d want it to be what was left of it by the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web began to become ubiquitous, eventually supplanted by the smartphone.

MARK JUDGE: The Real America: Instapundit, Nancy in Nebraska—and Rick the Bartender.

I recently wrote that I’m going to be leaving journalism soon. I want to thank people who’ve helped me survive and produce work the last few years. One of them is Glenn Reynolds, otherwise known as Instapundit. Instapundit is a conservative American political blog created by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor. It launched in August 2001 and is now one of the biggest and best sites in the world.

It’s also the place that helped me finish my book. In the summer of 2020 I was about halfway through my book The Devil’s Triangle when the small advance I received ran out. I didn’t mind going back to work at Home Depot fulltime, but there was no way I was ever going to finish the book. Instapundit came to the rescue. He put out an appeal to readers, who boosted the crowdfunding site I was using for donations. People even sent checks to my UPS box. Because of them I was able to finish the book. I won’t forget that.

There are people like Instapundit, who aren’t elites, who’ll offer support when all other options have run out. That was the position I found myself in in 2020. I’d been the target of a nasty attempted political hit in 2018 when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her in 1982. Ford claimed that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place. It was a set-up, an opposition research hit that invoked criminal activity. It was also traumatizing.

Exit quote: “Then a [Washington] Post reporter made the mistake of showing up at Rick’s home, the rural Virginia house where he lives with his wife and dogs. Rick was bartending at the time, but a neighbor tipped him off to some loser with a notebook and a ponytail who was snooping around. Rick told the neighbor to feel free to arm himself. Rick’s phone rang. It was the Post reporter. ‘I just have two things to say to you,’ Rick said. ‘Everybody on my street hates the media, and everybody on my street owns a gun.’ At that point the reporter saw the neighbor approaching, locked and loaded. The reporter fled.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

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AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Man Wants However Many Deportations Are Needed For Him To No Longer Have To Press 1 For English https://t.co/XFY5sxiinU pic.twitter.com/V0LuSvAYmI

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 8, 2025

OFF-ROAD: I Took the 2025 GMC Sierra 2500 HD AT4X AEV Ultimate Build on Overland Expo PNW’s Rigorous Off-Road Course. Here’s How It Went.

SPACE: Did something just hit Saturn? Astronomers are racing to find out. “Around seven asteroids or comets are thought to hit Saturn every year, but we have never spotted one in the act. Now, it seems one astronomer may have caught the moment of impact and the hunt is on for other images to verify the discovery.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: About That Kamala Harris Comeback…

PRIME DEAL: Apple Watch Series 10 [GPS 46mm case] Smartwatch. #CommissionEarned

FIGHT FOR FREEDOM: Women for Gun Rights Takes The Fight To Washington D.C.

HOUSING: Delistings Surge Nearly 50% as Sellers Who Can’t Get Their Price Quit the Market in Frustration.

Delistings jumped 47% nationally in May from a year earlier, in a sign that sellers would increasingly rather wait than negotiate, according to the Realtor.com® economic research team’s latest monthly housing trends report. Year to date, delistings are up 35% from the same period in 2024.

The increase is partly due to the overall expansion in active inventory, which was up 28% in June from a year earlier. Newly listed homes increased 8.8% from a year ago, but remained flat over the past two months.

Still, delistings are outpacing new listings, with 13 homes delisted in May for every 100 homes hitting the market—up from 10 in the spring of 2024 and 2023, and just six in 2022.

A rate cut or two might help.

SAVE ON CONDITIONER FOR PRIME DAY: Bumble and bumble. Super Rich Hair Conditioner For Every Day. #CommissionEarned

WISH-CASTING: The Trump Administration Responds to Amnesty Rumors.

DECOUPLING: Trump admin to ban China from buying US farmland. “The policy is part of a wider multi-agency approach to protect America’s farmland, foods, as well as other critical infrastructure from Chinese influence. ‘American agriculture is not just about feeding our families, but about protecting our nation and standing up to foreign adversaries who are buying our farmland, stealing our research, and creating dangerous vulnerabilities in the very systems that sustain us,’ Rollins added during the press conference.”

‘IT WAS A PRIVILEGE:’ Mamdani visited controversial NYC mosque on campaign trail — just months after the imam called for the annihilation of Israel.

LOL, “REAL VICTIMS.” YOU MEAN PERPETRATORS. No, British Muslims were not the ‘real victims’ of 7/7: Two decades on, Islamist extremism remains a far more urgent threat than so-called Islamophobia.

REVEALED: The Six-Page Memo That Conned Biden Into Debating Trump Early (So That the Democrat Party Could Force Him Out).