RIDE THE MAMDANI RECURSION!

Flashback: Cuomo should thank Mamdani for making him look like the safe, stable choice for NYC mayor.

Speaking of the former LovGuv, “Cuomo is expected to announce this week that he is staying in the race as an independent for the mayor of New York City, sources told NewsNation.”

Otherwise: Mamdani is the mayor New York Democrats deserve. As Ed Koch was quoted as saying when he lost his primary against David Dinkins, “The people have spoken, and now they must be punished.” (And boy, were they.)

OUT ON A LIMB: How Live Aid ruined music forever.

Forty years ago this month, Bob Geldof unleashed his “global jukebox”. With the help of Midge Ure and promoter Harvey Goldsmith, he staged a concert across two venues on either side of the Atlantic, starting at midday on Saturday July 13 1985 in London and ending at the John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia 16 hours later.

Around the world, 1.7 billion people tuned in, and it is seen as one of the great charity success stories of all time, raising $140 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.*

Live Aid was so big that it has its own folklore: Status Quo’s backstage antics, Bono’s messiah impression, Phil Collins hopping on Concorde to play both venues, Geldof swearing on TV and, of course, Queen’s show-stealing performance.

Yet Live Aid’s impact on music itself is often overlooked – perhaps because no-one wants to sound uncharitable. But the truth is that it was a disaster. In Britain, up until this point, we had enjoyed a long tradition of innovation and reinvention, but this brace of charity concerts changed all that, although few people noticed at the time. It resuscitated artists on life support, invented the idea of a concert as a greatest hits parade, strangled the “second British invasion” of great pop acts in America, and provided the model for a new consumerism, encouraging us to purchase (or repurchase on compact disc) the back catalogue of musicians who had been slipping out of public consciousness for a decade

Ultimately, Live Aid heralded an era of musical regurgitation and nostalgia, an era from which we have never escaped.

* It didn’t do very well in that department, either: The Terrible Truth About ‘Live Aid.’

LARRY ELDER: Ex-Dem Rep: The N-Word Causes Cancer.

Remember former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) who got censured for pulling the fire alarm in the Capitol Building as lawmakers prepared to vote to prevent a government shutdown? He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a $1,000 fine and lost the next Democrat primary.

He’s back.

Bowman, appearing last week as a panelist on MSNBC, said, “The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the n-word directly or indirectly every day.”

* * * * * * * *

As for Bowman, where does one start? The stress of being called “the n-word directly or indirectly” makes heart disease, cancer and diabetes “bigger in the black community”?!

Other than in rap music or from black comedians, when was the last time a black person heard the n-word uttered directed at him or her? How is one subjected to the n-word “indirectly”? Is it like secondhand smoke? If someone says the n-word within a two-block radius, is it tantamount to being denied the front seat on a bus, prevented from voting or beaten by a racist cop? Where is the typical black person subjected to the n-word directly or indirectly? At work, at church, in a restaurant, on a bus or at Costco?

When does Bowman begin organizing the cleanup of rap music? If it saves just one life…

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND:

Rotherham Man who threatened Muslims with social ostracisation if they cooperated with South Yorkshire Police’s inquiries into the grooming gangs has been awarded an MBE for “services to integration” and “cohesion”. https://t.co/D2ODlBfzdC

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) July 13, 2025

A dying civilization refuses to defend itself https://t.co/VVreCWjdnr

— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) July 13, 2025

This is Britain.

1. A pervert exposed himself in front of children on the street.

2. A dad knocked out the pervert to the ground.

3. The dad was sentenced to 18 months custodial prison suspended for 2 years.

WHAT'S GOING ON???

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) July 13, 2025

Exit question:

TREEHOUSE OF HORROR:

$6,500 a month. https://t.co/KXJugzmP4A

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 12, 2025

But don’t try to build a treehouse on your own property in L.A., as Adam Carolla mentioned in a podcast interview a few months ago. (Full disclosure, this is a YouTube transcript of the interview that was cleaned up and reformatted by ChatGPT and lightly edited by me):

Carolla: The city’s in the process of tearing down a beautiful treehouse that was in the front of a home—the Simpsons guy—in Sherman Oaks. And they’re tearing that down. Meanwhile, you go two blocks over and people are building homes—homeless people—out of plywood and yield signs and Visqueen [plastic sheeting], under the freeway, on the sidewalk, so moms pushing strollers have to walk in the street.

The city has no interest in these guys building illegal homes on the sidewalk, but they have a grand interest in people building treehouses for the neighborhood kids on their [own] property.

Interviewer 1: Did you see this story?

Interviewer 2: No, the treehouse story?

Interviewer 1: It is insane. This guy—like 30, 40 years ago—was one of the guys from The Simpsons. He made this beautiful treehouse in a tree, and it’s been there, I think, since the 1980s? ’70s?

Carolla: No, I think it’s about 20 years.

Interviewer 1: So it’s been there, but the city now says he needs to comply with zoning regulations for the treehouse. He has to pull permits, he needs to do ground structural testing of the treehouse. He’s spent $50,000 defending this in court, and it’s about to go to a jury.

And he says, “You know what? I give up. I don’t want to spend another $50,000 defending myself in a jury trial just to have a chance at keeping the treehouse.”

Interviewer 2: That’s incredible.

Interviewer 1: It’s a treehouse. There it is, right there.

Interviewer 2: Yeah, I see it. That’s beautiful.

It’s known as a landmark in the area. In fact, we could drive by it.

I would love to see it.

Yeah, we could film some. My friend has a house in a really nice part of Los Angeles. Right next to his house is a two-story tent. He’s lived in that house now for a couple of years. Every single time I drive to his house, you have this massive, like, tent mansion—which, don’t hate me—but it looks really nice.

And the person there is very aggressive. Every time I drive by—well, not every time, but quite a few times—they’ll come out of their tent and start yelling things. I’ve seen them yelling at pedestrians on the sidewalk—obscenities. It’s not a good situation. But this person—no one stops them from living there.

And it’s, like I said, a full-on massive house.

Carolla: Well, so what we just did is sort of illustrate—with the treehouse, which the city is very vigorous about and says needs to come down—versus the shanty house, which they have no interest in, because that guy’s an empty bag. He has no money to give them.

Now, my feeling is: you have to pick a lane as a city. Here’s optimal, and then unacceptable.

Optimal is: places where you take down the shanty town that’s built under the freeway overpass or built on the freeway or in the LA River. Optimal is that the city would enforce that and take down those dangerous structures where people deal drugs and insane people live.

All right, take those down. And their policy toward a guy who built a treehouse on his own property would be: the guy’s paying taxes, people seem to like it, and it looks good from here. He’s an American. Leave him alone. It’s his property. Okay? That’s optimal.

Middle ground is: look, we’re going to let that guy in his Visqueen plywood house build on a sidewalk. But if you want to build a treehouse, I guess that’s your business. At least we’re consistent. He’ll build something, you’ll build something—we won’t get involved.

L.A. is the worst, which is: not going to do anything about the plywood house on the sidewalk; full weight of the law on the homeowner and taxpayer.

That’s why people leave. And they don’t get it. And they somehow think it’s progress or something. But the blue-est cities are the toughest on taxpayers and the easiest on criminals.

Interviewer 1: So, if you were governor, what would you change?

Carolla: The first thing would be the regulatory system. You can’t make it impossible to build or start a business or whatever because of the regulations. It’s so overregulated that people just physically leave. That would be number one.

In the meantime, gooder and harder, California. (Discussion above starts at about the nine minute mark.)

Related:

ANDREW FERGUSON: A Funny Thing About Dave Barry.

A long time ago, in a media environment far, far away, an editor walked into my office and dropped a pile of books by Dave Barry on my desk. “Here’s an idea,” he said. “Read these and figure out how he does it.”

At the time, Barry was a weekly humor columnist at the Miami Herald, which, at the time, was a newspaper. By tradition, humor columns in newspapers were pretty dreary. For one thing, labeling any piece of writing “humor” discourages discerning readers from finding it funny; discerning readers like to decide these things for themselves. Beyond this terrible handicap, newspaper humorists shared a problem with their employers: They had to satisfy, or at least not offend, a large enough audience to stay in business, which encouraged a timidity and blandness that made humor nearly impossible. Too much humor could get a humorist fired.

Dave Barry was different. Dave Barry was funny—and not just funny but consistently funny, line by line and paragraph to paragraph, week after week. Yet he was astonishingly popular. By the late 1980s, the Herald was syndicating his column to more than 500 newspapers. (Yes! The world once contained 500 newspapers!) A TV network created a situation comedy about him, Dave’s World, which ran for four seasons. Even more: He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A Pulitzer itself is nearly meaningless as a measure of quality—Thomas L. Friedman has won three of them—but anyone who can get a laugh out of the self-important, humor-impaired stiffs who sit on Pulitzer committees deserves a prize. You might as well try to jolly up a board of oncologists or the docents at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Read the whole thing.

FAFO: Cop Straight Up Bodies Lib Agitator at Turning Point USA’s SAS Summit in Florida (Watch!).

🚨: Unhinged leftist stops his car in the middle of the road to charge towards SAS attendees. He attacks a man, runs away from police, trips, and gets arrested. pic.twitter.com/Yn6ePzioxy

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) July 12, 2025

Yet another socialist just inadvertently channeled the old ad for the Libertarian Party:

SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER TERROR-FAMINE:

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST MAR-A-LAGO:

To be fair Kilgore, a former vice president for policy at the Democratic Leadership Council, didn’t buy into Joe Scarborough’s Soviet-level “Best Biden Ever” rant, but he did sound like Biden was probably fine for another four years. In February of last year, he wrote, “An Old Guy’s Defense of Our Old-Guy President:”

Like Joe Biden, I got my dream job at a stage of life when most folks are planning or entering retirement. After writing hundreds of thousands of words for politicians and organizations without getting much credit for it, I became a rather geriatric blogger and then a political writer for New York Magazine and blew right by the age at which I could have packed it all in. Best I can tell, I still produce more words — though perhaps not higher-quality words — than my whippersnapper colleagues. So I am naturally sympathetic to the president’s desire to stay in the saddle as long as he can, and naturally hostile to partisan efforts to depict Biden as senile or incompetent, particularly when the beneficiary of undermining confidence in his abilities is Donald Trump.

The day before the now infamous debate in June, he asked, “Could the Biden-Trump Debate Actually Be a Game Changer?” before tut-tutting, nahh, probably not:

Political scientists have long concluded that debates rarely have a big and enduring impact in the general election. They are much more significant during presidential primaries, particularly when there is no incumbent or clear front-runner. To the limited extent that general-election debates matter, they tend to be the initial debates between the two contenders, where viewership is high and familiarity with the candidates is relatively low.

Even though the June 27 debate is the initial encounter of this cycle, it’s not like a Biden-Trump debate is any sort of novelty; they met twice in 2020 and are the ultimate known quantities. Back in 2020, most observers thought Biden easily won the first debate over a blustery Trump, while the second debate was more of a standoff. But it’s hard to say either debate really mattered when voters voted. And barring some calamitous misstep by one of the candidates, it’s hard to envision this one mattering much either.

* * * * * * * * *

Unfortunately for both campaigns, the 2024 presidential election looks like a grim and remorseless battle between two large and immovable electoral blocs with murky turnout patterns ultimately mattering as much as the decisions of largely unhappy swing voters. That doesn’t mean the June 27 debate isn’t worth watching for those who are civic-minded enough to feel some obligation to tune in. But no one should count on knowing the country’s fate on June 28.

Which seems fair in retrospect — the (p)resident’s self-styled “Politburo” kept the nation in the dark for another three weeks before it determined his fate, a month after their news apparatuses issued any talk of Biden’s age and ailments as “cheap fakes.”

JONATHAN TURLEY: WaPo Editor to Staff: Get on Board or Get Out.

Bezos wants the Post to be a viable newspaper again and some of us who once wrote for the Post applauded his efforts. However, writers who have contributed to the free fall of the Post were apoplectic.

Amanda Katz, who resigned from the Post’s opinion team at the end of 2024, offered a vivid example of the culture that Bezos is trying to change at the Post. Katz said the change was “an absolute abandonment of the principles of accountability of the powerful, justice, democracy, human rights, and accurate information that previously animated the section in favor of a white male billionaire’s self-interested agenda.”

The most telling condemnation came from Post columnist Philip Bump, who wrote “what the actual f**k.” Not surprisingly, Bump wrote the condemnation on Bluesky, a site that promises a type of safe space for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views.

Bump previously had a meltdown in an interview when confronted about past false claims. After I wrote a column about the litany of such false claims, the Post surprised many of us by issuing a statement that it stood by all of Bump’s reporting, including false columns on the Lafayette Park protests, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other stories. That was long after other media debunked the claims, but the Post stood by the false reporting.

We have previously discussed the sharp change in culture at the Post, which became an outlet that pushed anti-free speech views and embraced advocacy journalism. The result was that many moderates and conservatives stopped reading the newspaper.

Lewis is still laboring to return the Post to objective journalism. He is even using the language of the left in encouraging them to “reinvent” or “reimagine” the Post. He discussed  the Post’s “reinvention journey” it has taken in recent months, including its “reimagining” of its opinion pages that “champion American values” among other company initiatives.

“The moment demands that we continue to rethink all aspects of our organization and business to maximize our impact. If we want to reconnect with our audience and continue to defend democracy, more changes at The Post will be necessary. And to succeed, we need to be united as a team with a strong belief and passion in where we are heading.

I understand and respect, however, that our chosen path is not for everyone,. That’s exactly why we introduced the voluntary separation program. As we continue in this new direction, I want to ask those who do not feel aligned with the company’s plan to reflect on that. The VSP is designed to support you in making this decision, give you the ability to weigh your options thoughtfully and with less concern about financial consequences. And if you think that it’s time to move on to a new chapter, the VSP helps you take that next step with more security.”

In other words, please leave now.

Especially after the banger the Post ran earlier this week:

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Sunny Hostin Says CBP, ICE Deserve Violent ‘Reckoning’ Coming for Them.

Disney and ABC News seem to be fine with their hosts promoting violence and attempts to kill federal law enforcement officers. During Friday’s episode of The View, staunchly racist Sunny Hostin responded to the recent attempt to kill Customs and Border Protection agents in McAllen, Texas by suggesting they had it coming because they wear masks. She also proclaimed that a “reckoning” was coming for them.

* * * * * * * *

Upon hearing the story, Hostin immediately launched into seemingly suggesting that the agents deserved it because they wear masks:

If they would do their jobs the way that I think they should be doing their jobs, which is unmasked without disappearing people from the streets, I don’t think that the public would feel as endangered. Because if someone approaches my loved one who is undocumented with a mask, how do I know that they’re actual law enforcement and how do I know they work for ICE? So, that’s one thing I’ll say.

The threat seemed to solidify further when she declared that “in my world, if you mask yourself because you don’t want to be seen…there will be a reckoning for some of the actions that law enforcement, actual law enforcement have done!”

Curiously, the ladies of The View were all for everyone masking up for a surprisingly long time: The View mocked after releasing audience from mask requirement three years into pandemic: ‘Finally.’

—Fox News, March 6th, 2023.

ALMOST ONE YEAR LATER, THE QUESTION REMAINS: Why Did Butler Shooter Try to Kill Trump?

MATT TAIBBI: Brennan, MSNBC Can’t Stop Lying About Trump and Russia. “Attention, believers in the Trump-Russia conspiracy: you are being lied to. Side by side, here’s what you’ve been told, next to the reality that’s being hidden from you.”

THE NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME CHATBOT: Grok’s Hitler hallucinations expose the stupidity of AI.

One is that large language models (LLMs) are not reliable enough to do much of the work that’s expected of them, because they make stuff up, or ‘hallucinate’. Social-media accounts such as AI Being Dumb collect the examples. One of the more prominent was Google’s recent insistence that former US president John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, had used Facebook. Google’s AI chatbot has also been derided for visualising the Nazi Wehrmacht as black, and refusing to draw a white Pope.

Businesses are also finding out that AI is not all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, it is hardly revolutionising the private sector to the degree many had hoped or feared. Consulting group Gartner found that AI has been a let-down, largely because ‘current models do not have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time’. In other words, those hoping AI could do the thinking for them, or replace their employees, have been sorely disappointed.

These revelations should hardly be groundbreaking. As the AI engineer and author Andriy Burkov wrote six years ago in his book, The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, chatbots are not independently intelligent. They are statistical word-completion engines, and have no internal world model against which they can check their output. This is not only a barrier to performing the kind of reasoning we would expect from something that purports to be ‘artificial intelligence’, it also means chatbots are highly suggestible. One of the most popular new classes of exploits in cybersecurity is seducing an AI into ‘believing’ it is in a trusted situation, and persuading it to relinquish any guardrails that may have been put into place. A recent illustration of this ‘narrative engineering’ comes from Cato Networks, whose researchers developed a way to bypass the security controls of DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot and then convinced the AIs to write malware for Google Chrome.

At the NRO Corner, Phillip Klein adds, “Why the Nazi Grok Fiasco Has Made Me Less Worried About AI.” “If, under Musk’s scenario, we contemplate a future in which AI becomes all-powerful, we don’t have to try very hard to imagine what a MechaHitler might cook up. Yet despite the possibility that either MechaHitler or WokeGemini will get me, the Grok episode struck me as actually a bit more reassuring for humanity. The reason for my optimism is that despite all the brainpower and resources available to Google and Musk, they both faceplanted so spectacularly, and that makes me think that a lot of analysts are getting way ahead of themselves in predicting the scale and speed at which AI will replace human beings.”

In the interim, it’s safe to say who Tucker’s next guest will be:

DEUTSCHLAND IST GEFALLEN: Vaginal Traps Instead of Migration Policy: Germany’s Latest Absurdity.

Germany is facing an alarming rise in rape cases. In just five years, the number of reported assaults has increased by 49.5%, surpassing 12,000 per year. And yet, the institutional and academic response does not point towards a serious analysis of the causes or reforms that would effectively protect women. Instead of addressing the factors driving this violence—such as massive and uncontrolled immigration—the reaction is a grotesque distraction: proposing “trap condoms” with internal spikes designed to injure the attacker’s penis.

The idea, recycled from an old South African invention called Rape-aXe, consists of a vaginal device that a woman can wear for self-defense. If she becomes a victim of rape, the device activates, inflicting pain and injuries on the attacker and also facilitating later medical identification. Sociologist Julia Wege of the Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences and physician Urs Schneider of the Fraunhofer Institute for Health Technology in Stuttgart have announced a study in which they intend to investigate technical aids against sexual violence, which includes this one.

What is presented as an innovative and empowering measure is a surrender of the state. It is the tacit admission that the streets are unsafe, that the judicial system offers no protection, that the borders are open, and that women must prepare to defend themselves alone—as if they lived in a war zone.

Are we meant to believe that turning the female body into a booby trap is the solution to the surge in rapes in Germany? Is this what Europe has come to: getting used to imported barbarism and finding creative ways to endure it?

Earlier: Why are plus-sized Teutonic frauleins assaulting innocent one-legged Somali pirates?

VDH: The Roots of Leftist Rage.

Across the political left, from orthodox Democrats to Antifa in the streets, the opposition to President Donald Trump has lost its collective mind.

The House minority leader and now self-styled tough guy, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, poses with a baseball bat to show how dangerous he is in opposing Trump’s budget bill.

Jeffries harangued Congress for eight hours; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker went on for 25 — both to no effect.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit the rally trail in private jets to rail about oligarchs, omitting that the ultra-rich are not only mostly leftists but also the funders of the Democratic Party.

Sometimes the Democrats in Congress make bizarre videos, featuring profanity like f**k or s**t. On other occasions, they scream and interrupt Congress.

Some representatives now confess that they’re being pressured by their constituents to take a bullet for the cause.

The racialist Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett — sometimes playing the prep-school prima donna, sometimes modulating her accent to pass as the authentic inner-city activist — gains headlines for monotonously ranting about old white men.

On left-wing social media, the assassin Luigi Mangione remains a heartthrob for murdering a health-care executive, replacing the Tsarnaev brothers as the hot new left-wing killer.

He, too, might soon end up with a cover photo on Rolling Stone.

The left-wing internet mob grotesquely claims that children lost to the recent flash flood in Texas deserved their fate.

They even advance three sick reasons for their ghoulishness. Texas Christians supported the MAGA agenda and thus met a just fate. Or, as red-state Texans, they were deservedly collateral damage to DOGE’s bureaucratic reductions. Or, as climate denialists would say, the flash flood took righteous revenge on children for their supposed ignorance.

Add it all up, and there is a sizable leftist “base” that is completely amoral.

QED:

When the left tells that if they ever return to power they plan to put you in reeducation camps you should believe them and act accordingly https://t.co/yZHOquvbAq

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) July 12, 2025

UPDATE:

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Superman — A Beautiful James Gunn Mess. “Not to worry dear viewer, because the Drinker is back to bring order out of chaos, restore balance to a world gone mad and pronounce the final verdict on James Gun’s Superman by James Gun. And damn, man, what a delightfully optimistic, frustratingly flawed, and thoroughly weird movie this turned out to be.”

ROGER SIMON: Mamdani and the Rise and Fall of Great Cities.

All great cities have their days in the sun–Rome, Athens and so forth–and the time for NY to go is gone. It will be hastened by many successful Jews leaving (largely to Miami or Tel Aviv) and New York will have to stew in its juices. The city will go into a rapid, and VERY DESERVED, decline. A lesson (hopefully) will be learned. Some of this is sad. I love the Metropolitan Museum and the Opera as much as most people (the theater is already a wasteland) but nothing is perfect. One can always visit.

But NYC was largely (not exclusively of course) built by Jews in almost every area of life. Jesse Jackson called it “hymie town” for a reason, obnoxious as that term was. We can, and have, built great things in other places and other times. . Socialism, meanwhile, as anyone with an IQ in the proverbial triple digits knows, has never worked and never will, The wretched Jewish pols of NY like Schumer can go stuff it in their slavish hypocrisy as they take a knee for Mamdani. They have been less than pond scum for years. Florida has better government anyway by far. Move there. Or head to Jerusalem, or anywhere in Eretz Israel. In January, every Jew reading this will thank me as New York turns into more of a hellhole than it already is. You will be doing something more revolutionary than marching against stupid progressives who won’t listen to you.. (When have they ever?). And if New York comes back to its senses because it goes broke, you can always return. But don’t hold your breath.

I can be wrong—it won’t be the first time; far from it—but I think I am right about the cataclysmic change to New York that will occur if Mamdani is elected and about the exodus of many Jews and gentiles from the city thereafter. I admit my evidence for this is extremely anecdotal. You only know who you know. But virtually everyone in the city I have talked with is either planning to leave, debating leaving or wishing they could leave but regretting that they can’t for personal reasons (family, work, etc.).

Read the whole thing.

Related: The Manchurian Candidate? ‘Jews for Zohran’ Mamdani group tied to niece of lefty China-based billionaire.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Summer Vacation Edition.

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

Hahaha this is a real ad being run on TVs in Los Angeles

Watch "We're Not the Crazy Ones" pic.twitter.com/g5JxRkinc1

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) July 11, 2025

NO. NEXT QUESTION?

Federal Reserve employees donated 92% of their $700k in political contributions to Democrats during the 2024 cycle. 

Does that sound "nonpartisan" to you? pic.twitter.com/XVCncqX1lk

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) July 11, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: The Biden Administration was Tacitly Obama’s Third Term as President.

The New Hotness? Mamdani Will Be de Blasio’s Third Term as Mayor: Bill de Blasio and his former aides are advising Zohran Mamdani — and clamoring to get back to City Hall.

RIP: David Gergen, trusted White House advisor to four US presidents across decades, dies at 83.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Namaste, fascists! The racist history of yoga.

[Stewart Home, the author of Fascist Yoga] pursues his promise of fascist yoga to the Free State of Fiume in 1920. After the First World War, Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) was seized by a one-eyed, cocaine-snorting sex-addict novelist and former soldier called Gabriele D’Annunzio. He established a regime with all the symbols and violence of fascism, if not the complete ideology. There were balcony addresses and Roman salutes and the troops guarding D’Annunzio used the bellicose slogan “I don’t give a damn”, which was later co-opted by Benito Mussolini. Those around D’Annunzio in Fiume formed a group called YOGA, Home says. They were mystics and nudists who danced and hugged trees and believed in a spiritual hierarchy based on the Hindu caste system. The group emblazoned its shortlived weekly paper with swastikas — they believed the swastika to be a symbol of their Aryan ancestors after it was discovered scrawled on ancient artefacts. The Nazis used it for the same reason.

Like YOGA, the Nazis also twisted Hinduism. They tried to use it to justify the Holocaust. Home shows how Heinrich Himmler, the chief planner of the Final Solution, was influenced by a German Indologist called Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who was enchanted by Hinduism. Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, which sought to promote a new religion, a fusion of paganism and Nazi ideas. When writing in 1934 about the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text, Hauer said it called on men to meet the hereditary or “innate duty” demanded of them by their caste and fate, even if that deed is steeped in guilt. Himmler believed that his caste — the SS — were called upon by fate to exterminate Jews.

The weakness of Home’s book is there is no clean link between yoga and fascism. There is no record of Mussolini or Hitler ever doing a downward dog. This mostly doesn’t matter because so much of the history is strange and interesting, but sometimes Home stretches his thesis too far. A few pages are wasted trying to prove that Ezra Pound’s fascism was “very much entwined” with yoga. As evidence, Home relies on a sign that Pound once put in the window of a bookshop he owned that said something or other about marijuana and communism — it’s thin and convoluted evidence.

Still though, considering yoga’s been practiced by Nazis, Italian Fascists, Aleister Crowley, and more recently, guys wearing man buns, why take chances?

BONDI OR BONGINO: Bongino Won’t Remain At FBI If Bondi Keeps Job, Source Says.