Archive for 2025

September 7, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 7th, 2025

THAT THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS GOT SWEPT UNDER THE RUG AGAIN:

Posted at 5:42 pm by Stephen Green on Sep 7th, 2025

JOURNALISTS STILL THINK THEY REFLECT PUBLIC OPINION:

Posted at 5:15 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Sep 7th, 2025

JOSH HAMMER: Trump’s National Guard Deployment and the Art of the 80-20 Issue.

Trump knows that when he floats these proposals, Democrats and their corporate media allies won’t respond with nuance. They’ll respond with knee-jerk outrage — just as they did in 2020, when Trump sent federal agents to Portland to stop violent anarchists from torching courthouses. The media framed it as martial law; sane Oregonians saw it as basic governance.

This dynamic plays out again and again. When Trump highlights the border crisis and the need to deport unsavory figures like Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Democrats defend open borders. When Trump attacks gender ideology indoctrination in schools, Democrats double down on letting teachers hide children’s “transitions” from their parents. When Trump condemns pro-Hamas rioters in American cities, Democrats can’t bring themselves to say a word of support for Israel’s war against a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization. When Trump signs an executive order seeking to partially recriminalize flag burning, Democrats defend flag burning.

On and on it goes. By now, it’s a well-established pattern. And it’s politically devastating for the Left. Moreover, the relevant history is on Trump’s side. This sort of federal corrective goes back all the way to the republic’s origins; those now freaking out might want to read up on George Washington’s efforts to quash the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.

Call it the art of the 80-20 issue. Along with his sheer sense of humor, Trump’s instinctual knack for picking such winning battles is one of his greatest political assets. And this time, the winner won’t just be Trump himself — it will be Chicagoans and Baltimoreans as well.

Related:

Baltimore’s last Republican mayor left office almost 60 years ago. Why do Charm City’s mayors in the decades since want to keep maintaining plenty of “space to destroy,” despite such anarchy leading to collapsing real estate values and a fleeing tax base?

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 7th, 2025

STARTING FROM ZERO: Take the nuclear option: Let Mamdani win the mayoral race so NYC can start over from scratch.

As alarm bells ring over the New York City mayoral race, an odd sentiment is starting to gain traction across the business community: Just give up.

Just sit tight and let the ill-equipped Maoist Zohran Mamdani win in November.

Let him unleash his creepy, dogmatic socialist policies on the masses to teach them valuable lessons — both economic and cultural — about wokeness and progressivism, and more broadly its stranglehold on the Democratic Party.

I’m starting to agree.

A fleeing middle class

Let the city sink into the abyss.

Let Mamdani’s policies force out business and prod more upper- and middle-class residents to flee.

Let the city declare bankruptcy — which will happen if Mamdani gets his way.

We can then start from scratch.

Detroit did it and the last time I was there, its downtown was pristine.

Plus, we’re headed there anyway, right?

“Downtown Detroit has rebounded since the city’s 2013 bankruptcy, but acres of vacant land, blighted properties and a lack of private capital have kept the city’s other neighborhoods from enjoying a similar renaissance,” Real estate Website CoStar noted last year.  New York similarly collapsed in the late ’60s thanks to John Lindsay:

The crisis of 1965 was comparative. Liberal politicians like Lindsay believed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had worked out scientific answers to our great social problems, so that the city should be judged not by its own past but by what it could be if men of vision were given the power to remake it.

In the series, which cleared Lindsay’s path to City Hall, he vowed to get New York “going again.” Instead, he oversaw as mayor (and with the editor of “New York City in Crisis” soon joining his administration as a top aide) the city’s decent into the very catastrophe the Trib had imagined.

In the midst of an economic boom, crime exploded. Instead of reforming what had, in fact, been the best big city school system in America, he left it in tatters. He promised to better incorporate African Americans but left the city polarized.

It wasn’t until Rudy Giuliani was elected in 1993 that the city began to claw its way back, until Bill de Blasio took office in 2014. Are New Yorkers prepared for another decades-long collapse?

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 7th, 2025

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT: So, That Protest Of Old White Lefties in D.C. Pushing for MORE Crime? Insurrection Barbie Just Busted ‘Em.

As the late P.J. O’Rourke wrote in his 1991 magnum opus, Parliament of Whores:

Not long after Andy [Ferguson] and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration. “How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?” “We have jobs,” said Andy.

And so do the protestors:

“So, once again, taxpayers are funding protests they do not necessarily agree with. Yay.”

Related:

Earlier: Stephen Miller’s Rant on ‘White, Crazy Communist Hippie’ Rent-a-Mobs in D.C. Is Standing-O Worthy.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 7th, 2025
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