AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
L.A. Hosts Yet Another Pride Parade https://t.co/UpCjgKXOeQ pic.twitter.com/LzJugvgPAl
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 3, 2025
Archive for 2025
November 3, 2025
JOEL KOTKIN: Mayors to Cities: Drop Dead.
As jobs, talent, and investment head to Sunbelt cities or the countryside, some MAGA partisans may cheer the troubles of places like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. But their decline is no blessing for the United States. To see New York, or any of the other great cities, fall victim to the politics of grievance instead of pursuing growth, innovation, and advancement, would remove “a beacon of hope and opportunity for people around the world for centuries,” as the American Enterprise Institute’s Sam Abrams puts it.
Cities are hard to kill—they’ve survived riots, pandemics, and even, in Gotham’s case, Bill de Blasio. But they can’t mount a resurgence unless they abandon their ideological fixations and start meeting the needs of citizens, and at reasonable cost. “Excellence in governance is not impossible,” Rick Cole insists, as we walk through the crowded streets of Little Tokyo. The obstacle? “Cities have an arrogance that is almost nihilistic. People see the iceberg, but they don’t seem to want to avoid it.”
We’ll see how New York rearranges its deck chairs tomorrow. I’m sure it will be a night to remember.
TRUMP BACKS CUOMO AND THREATENS TO CUT FEDERAL FUNDING IF ‘COMMUNIST MAMDANI’ WINS NYC MAYOR RACE. President says he’ll provide only ‘bare minimum’ federal aid and urges voters to back Cuomo.
TEEN VOGUE IS TRANSITIONING: Teen Vogue Is Joining Vogue.com.
Teen Vogue is joining Vogue.com, a transition that’s part of a broader push to expand the Vogue ecosystem. The title will remain a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission; sitting under the Vogue umbrella will provide a more unified reader experience across titles.
Chloe Malle, Vogue’s head of editorial content, who was appointed to the role in September, will now oversee Teen Vogue. Editor-in-chief Versha Sharma will be leaving the company.
“I remember when Teen Vogue launched, I read every page on the bus home from cross-country practice. I loved it then and I love and respect it now and am committed to continuing and supporting its point of view and sensibility,” says Malle.
Flashback to September 11th, 2021: Teen Vogue Columnist Takes the Prize for Dumbest 9/11 Take of the Year.
“We have to be more honest,” Jackson wrote, “about what 9/11 was and what it wasn’t. It was an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity. It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect.”
Jackson went on to claim that she was “really disturbed by how many white pundits and correspondents talk about it.” In reference to an assertion that 9/11 was the first time Americans really felt fear, she said: “White Americans might not have really felt true fear before 9/11 because they never felt what it meant to be accessible, vulnerable, and on the receiving side of military violence at home. But, white Americans’ experiences are not a stand-in for ‘America.’ Plenty of us Americans know what it’s like to experience fear and we knew before 9/11. For a lot of us, we know fear because of other Americans.”
It is hazardous to one’s mental health and intellectual abilities to try to think rationally for very long about Leftist agitprop, but since Jackson’s words herald the Left cheering on the 9/11 attacks, they’re worth parsing a bit. 9/11 was an attack on “heteronormative capitalistic systems”? Does Jenn M. Johnson imagine that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by lesbian Communists? She may well. Or at the very least, she likely thinks that lesbian Communists and their allies were or will be the ultimate beneficiaries of those attacks. If the people who hold the ideology of the attackers ever take power where she lives, she will be in for a rude awakening at their hands.
Also from 2021: Teen Vogue Presents ‘Queer Muslim Heroes to Celebrate This Muslim Women’s Day.’
The previous year, the magazine declared: ‘America’s Values Are White Supremacy and Capitalism.’
And in 2019, the teen-oriented publication celebrated the holiday season in its own inimical way: Teen Vogue Pushes Anal Sex, Again, This Time on Christmas.
MORE:
How will Teen Vogue readers ever survive without articles glorifying communists and cop-killers now… pic.twitter.com/usDRbPGnoa
— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 4, 2025
DOC EDGERTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Trillionth-of-a-Second Camera Captures Chaos in Motion.
CHANGE:
And, without even a whisper or an acknowledgment, GLP-1 killed the fat positivity movement. They never believed any of it.
— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) November 2, 2025
Related:
Every single one of these celebrities like Amy Schumer and Meghan pretended like they enjoyed being bigger and told us it was “empowering “, once they got an easy solution to lose weight, they immediately took it. pic.twitter.com/XzicMMqbWo
— Sarah Sansoni (@sarahsansoni) November 1, 2025
Solo Stove Bonfire with Stand. #CommissionEarned
BLAMING THE INNOCENT PARTY: THE GUN. What Really Happened With That SIG M18 at FE Warren Air Force Base.
Two airmen at a Wyoming U.S. Air Force base have pleaded guilty to making false statements about the deadly shooting of a third that prompted the suspension of Sig Sauer M18 pistol use at nuclear weapons sites for a month, the Air Force said in a statement Friday.
The gun pause by the Air Force Global Strike Command after the death of Brayden Lovan, 21, in late July was lifted in late August after Air Force officials determined the M18 was safe to carry.
Lovan was an airman with the 90th Security Forces Squadron, 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne.
Details about his death were released for the first time Friday, including that the alleged shooter, Marcus White-Allen, had pointed the gun at Lovan’s chest in a “joking manner.” White-Allen after the shooting allegedly urged the other two surviving airmen to lie about what happened, according to the statement.
You point a gun at me in a “joking manner,” you’d better shoot me.
DON SURBER: Taking on foreign cash to Democrats.
Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.
Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.
The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.
“The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”
Don’t expect Alvin the Chipmunk to go after Mamdani because the DA is a racist who only goes after white conservatives like President Trump and Daniel Penny, the man who saved a subway carload of people from a crazy man. Bragg charged the hero with murder. A jury exonerated Mister Penny.
At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey asks, “Has Foreign Money Turned Democrats Into a Foreign Party?”
The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.
That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.
And among those, clearly, is the Democrat Party.
Democrats have acted like a de-facto foreign party for well over a century. Woodrow Wilson wanted to transform Congress into something akin to Britain’s parliament:
Wilson’s affinity for an historically contingent perspective on American government—one in which government was not grounded on certain unchanging truths about human nature but would instead evolve to fit ever-changing historical circumstances—can be seen from his earliest days of thinking about politics. During his legal education and then as a professor of jurisprudence, Wilson applied his evolutionary view to the question of how the law should be taught, adopting the approach of what is now called legal realism. Law, under this approach, is not so much a study of forms as it is a study of how the law evolves in response to changing historical realities.
This approach also helps to explain Wilson’s love for the British constitutional system, in which the role of government is not laid out in a single written document but instead comes from an ever-evolving set of laws and judicial precedents that are contingent on historical progress. It is not an exaggeration to say that Wilson was infatuated with the British system of government, and it is clear that he was deeply influenced by the celebration of Britain’s flexible constitutionalism offered in The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot, a leading liberal realist of the second half of the 19th century.
As a teenager and then in college, Wilson loved to read and remark upon the biographies and essays of great parliamentary statesmen, and he particularly enjoyed the speeches of Edmund Burke and John Bright. This experience is what seems to have led him, as a college senior, to write an article, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” proposing that the American separation-of-powers system be replaced by a parliamentary model. It was published in a prominent journal, and its ideas later found a place in Congressional Government, which excoriated the American Congress for its shortcomings when compared with the British parliament.
When Wilson himself entered government, he brought his cynicism about the separation of powers with him, seeing the chief executive (whether governor or President) as a kind of prime minister—not just an executive, but a legislative leader too. This is a perspective, of course, that is the standard view among American political scientists today. During his campaign for governor of New Jersey, Wilson even raised eyebrows by pledging to become an “unconstitutional governor,” by which he meant that he had no intention of keeping to the role outlined for the chief executive under the separation of powers. This was a pledge that he kept as Governor Wilson behaved very much like a prime minister in moving key pieces of Progressive legislation through the New Jersey legislature.
For Wilson, the separation of powers was the source of much of what was wrong with American government. As opposed to a democratic system that would efficiently translate the current public mind into government action, the separation of powers system, as Wilson understood it, was designed to protect the people from themselves by throwing up as many obstacles as possible to the implementation of their will. Such a system served only to impede genuine democracy, which Wilson wanted to restore by breaking down the walls between the branches, allowing them to work in close coordination for the purpose of constantly adjusting public policy to the current public mind.
In 1919, “Progressive” muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from the newly-formed Soviet Union and famously declared, “I have seen the future, and it works.”
After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, the worst that Steffens could bring himself to say was that the country was in “a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan.” The plan, the plan! It’s always the plan that matters to communists, socialists, and their fellow travelers. Visionaries with total power will somehow “plan” the rest of society into a blissful nirvana. Even if they must crack a few eggs along the way, the result will be an omelet that’s worth it (see Where Are the Omelets?).
Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek would later demolish such pretentious fairy tales. Hayek, for example, argued convincingly that “The more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual” and “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.”
In reviewing Peter Hartshorn’s 2011 biography, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens, Kevin Baker noted that “like any sucker, Steffens could not let go of his delusions.” He was “hornswoggled by the biggest lie of all,” namely, that Lenin’s Bolshevism would somehow morph into a socialist utopia. Baker wrote in The New York Times,
He became one of the first of that sad little band of Western intellectuals who fell head over heels for the Soviet Union. Unlike most of them, he did not deny the stories of atrocities leaking out of the workers’ paradise. Even more chilling, he simply believed them necessary to bring about the great changes to come. He never wavered from his infamous first impression of the U.S.S.R., “I have seen the future, and it works.”
In 1932, Stewart Chase, who coined the phrase “the New Deal” asked, “Why should the Russians have all of the fun?”
As Chase wrote in his 1932 work, “A New Deal”, “Why should the Russians have all of the fun of remaking a world?” Admiration was strong in the Roosevelt White House for the huggable Russian bear. Mandatory union membership was proposed, as a prelude to moving away entirely from the messy business of private business decisions, in favor of the more scientific State control of industry and trade. The only careful avoidance was the use of the “C” word, even though communism was unfamiliar to many Americans.
In 2009, Jonah Goldberg described the American left as having “Liberal Views, Belgian Brains:”
Also, one needn’t visit Europe to have a European mindset. The Pew Research Center, among others, has found time and again that the attitudes of American liberals and the attitudes of Europeans are converging on a wide spectrum of issues, from the role of government and charity to the value of religion and patriotism. In short, the more liberal your views, the more Belgian your brain. Maybe all of these millions of Americans studied in Europe and have Kerry-esque hair, but I doubt it.
More important, liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”
This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”
But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.
Pouring buckets of foreign money into the Democrats’ coffers helps to accelerate that process greatly, but then as with Britain and Nigel Farage, the American left shouldn’t be surprised when a figure like Trump emerges.
JOHN NOLTE: Box Office Has Worst Weekend of the Year, Worst Halloween in 32 Years.
Let’s take a look at this weekend’s can-miss titles, shall we?
Something called Regretting You.
A sequel to a fairly successful horror movie called Black Phone.
Something called Regretting You.
A sequel to a fairly successful horror movie called Black Phone.
Something called Chainsaw Man.
Something called K-Pop Demon Hunters — which, I think, was already on TV.
That Springsteen movie that came out 40 years after anyone would care.
Something called Bugonia
Something called Roofman.
Tron: Jared Leto
One Battle After Another.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You…
The result…?
Total weekend revenue came in at just $49.8 million, marking the worst weekend of 2025 and the lowest-grossing Halloween weekend in more than 30 years, according to Comscore. The last time October’s final weekend was this dismal was in 1993 — not counting 2020’s pandemic closures.
The few times I’ve gone to the movies this year, I’m astounded by how many trailers typically show before the feature (I’m looking at you, AMC), and how few trailers leave me thinking, “Yeah, I want to see that on the big screen!” (The vast majority of trailers leave me with no desire to see the movies they’re plugging at all, even at home.) The combination of streaming fatigue, no new stars, and the inability to move past the superhero/sci-fi/sequel mobius loop that Hollywood has been trapped in for at least 15 years now has left the industry as moribund as it was when the Easy Riders/Raging Bulls-era of Young Turks got their start in the late 1960s. Actually, it’s worse, since films in the 1960s and pre-Star Wars 1970s typically had far lower budgets (even adjusted for inflation) than today’s cinematic bloatware, and could thus take far more chances.
And as a result, as the L.A. Times reported last year: Hollywood crews in ‘crisis:’ ‘Everyone’s just in panic mode’ as jobs decline.
2025 has been the dumping ground for product shot last year, when at least until the debate in June, Hollywood collectively believed that of course Biden’s got this one in the bag, and then afterwards, spent the summer and fall believing that of course, Kamala has this one in the bag. They can’t use that excuse for the material they shot this year, so 2026’s product will be fun to observe, at least Kremlinologist style, to see if it’s worth venturing back to the multiplex:
IF I WERE GOING TO BUY ANOTHER SPORTS CAR, THIS WOULD BE ON MY LIST: Mercedes-AMG SL63 S E Performance Tested: Long Name, Short 0-60. Probably too pricey, though.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX launches private space station pathfinder ‘Haven Demo.’ “Among the 18 payloads on board the Falcon 9 is Haven Demo, a pathfinder for Haven-1, the private space station that California company Vast Space plans to launch to Earth orbit next year.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Tragic: Man Runs Out Of Conversation Topics 45 Seconds Into Haircut https://t.co/rki0IzLx1p pic.twitter.com/ifKxPo9k7W
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 3, 2025
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: I can’t believe all these pop-culture icons come out of copyright in 2026.
Betty Boop. Nancy Drew. The Maltese Falcon. Pluto. The Three Stooges. Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple novel. These aren’t forgotten relics. These are proper cultural icons.
On 1 January 2026, they’re walking free from their current owners. And as someone who makes things for a living, I’m both thrilled and absolutely terrified.
What could go wrong?
BE SAFE: Super Bright Headlamp Rechargeable 4000 High Lumen. #CommissionEarned
“NO, I HAVEN’T.” “PERFECT!” Have You Seen the Latest Advances in Camouflage?
I’m reminded of the scene, years ago, where a base commander roped off an empty section of runway during an air show and put up a sign that said “B-2 Stealth Bomber.”
EXCLUSIVE: ‘Arctic Frost’ Prosecutor Could Use Cushy Big Tech Job To Target Conservatives, Watchdog Warns. “The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) is demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) review its contracts with Microsoft after the tech giant hired former Biden Justice Department official Lisa Monaco, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The letter warns that Monaco’s senior position poses a national security risk, as she is privy to sensitive information between Microsoft and the federal government.”
There’s that fascism the Democrats keep looking for.
DON’T TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOE:
🇮🇱 The Israeli army has started taking away Chinese-made service cars from officers — espionage risks officially confirmed
The military has strong reasons to believe that built-in cameras, sensors and communication systems in these vehicles could collect data and transmit it to… pic.twitter.com/fXEFqmOHHg
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) November 3, 2025
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL: The Most Important Elections Are the Ones Nobody’s Talking About. “Two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission are up for grabs. Before you yawn and dismiss this vote as no big deal, keep in mind that the Democrats in these races are massive Green New Deal supporters, while Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson are focused on keeping utility costs low for customers across the Peach State.”
READER FAVORITE: Toniiq Ultra High Purity Quercetin Capsules. #CommissionEarned