AUSTIN: Abbott Urges Adult Charges for Teens Who Committed 12 Shootings.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: AOC’s Poor Understanding of America.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has little, if any, awareness of where money comes from—no knowledge of finance, of savings and investment, of creating a product or conceiving an invention that adds value to the economy. She operates in a stark and static universe without consequences and trade-offs, without growth or mobility. There are only victims and victimizers. And according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, she’s in fourth place in the 2028 Democratic primary.

Socialists have been getting economics wrong since at least 1848. There are several reasons. The link between individual effort and reward isn’t always clear. State action is visible; the operations of the market are not. Government takes dramatic steps, while the invisible hand—division of labor, specialization, comparative advantage, accrued interest, mankind’s natural tendency to truck and barter and innovate—improves our condition gradually. The unintended consequences of a policy, no matter how well-meaning, can be worse than the problem the policy is meant to solve.

Economics is counterintuitive. Few secondary schools teach it (they might want to start here). Most Americans learn the value of work, thrift and initiative—as well as the costs of taxation, regulation and inflation—through experience. That’s why Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a celebrity since she was elected to Congress at age 29, can’t distinguish between minimum-wage increases and overpriced croissants.

To be fair, she’s never had to.

2028 PREVIEW:

After @PeteButtigieg lies about modernizing Air Traffic systems and reducing highway fatalities he explains what he did with the $2 Trillion congress gave him:

“Magnificent” Baggage claim areas for airports nobody cares about, Wildlife tunnels (that still aren’t finished) across… pic.twitter.com/lLZfeiAhBP

— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) May 18, 2026

OH MY: Multiple 2020 Election Fraud Investigations in Georgia and Arizona Are Underway.

IT ISN’T THE BIAS SO MUCH AS IT’S THE LACK OF LAUGHS: 91% of SNL’s political Weekend Update jokes this season targeted Trump, conservatives.

FOR A FEW YEARS IN THE ’90S, WILL SMITH DEFINED SUMMER BOX OFFICE:

Hollywood was full of enormous incandescent black Movie Stars right up until the moment activists decided the movie business was broken and racist and needed to be “fixed” and now we’re stuck hoping for Will Smith’s redemption because we aren’t making movie stars at all anymore https://t.co/zlMglBGPDR

— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) May 18, 2026

IT’S WHAT THEY DO: The AP Goes Manic Panic Over Muskets?

BIG MONEY: SpaceX heads into a record-shattering IPO with the ‘deepest moat that exists today’ as investors vow to ‘never bet against Elon.’

SpaceX could file publicly for the IPO as early as Wednesday, with a roadshow kicking off on June 4, the report said. The prior timeline put the IPO near the end of June.

The company had already filed confidentially and is seeking to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. That would surpass the current record holder for the biggest IPO ever: Saudi Aramco, which $29 billion raised at a $1.7 trillion valuation in 2019.

Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has taken over the market. It claimed more than 80% of global rocket launches last year and has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, providing space-based internet connections to businesses and militaries.

SpaceX is a top launch provider for NASA and the Pentagon, which is also looking to the company to help develop President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile-defense shield.

“It’s a truly unique business with the deepest moat that exists today,” an investor told the Financial Times. “This company launches over 90% of Western payload into space each year. It’s like if you own the only undersea cable from the U.S. to Europe, it’s the only way you can get internet.”

Nobody has yet to beat Falcon 9 on price, and that’s before Starship undercuts Falcon 9.

DON’T TRUST GOOGLE: Why Did Torched Ghost Homes of Palisades and Altadena Just Miraculously Reappear on Google Maps?

TAXES: Europe tried wealth taxes. Most gave up.

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate the Sanders proposal would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. Competing estimates from the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute project significantly lower totals of $3.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion, respectively.

Saez and Zucman’s estimate for Warren’s proposal has more than doubled since the legislation was first introduced in 2021, which the economists attribute largely to the rapid growth in billionaire wealth during that period.

Zucman has estimated that U.S. billionaires pay an effective tax rate of about 23%, though Magness disputed that figure, arguing broader accounting methods place the rate closer to 40%. A 2025 paper by IRS economist David Splinter estimated effective tax rates as high as 45% for top earners.

Wealth taxes have largely disappeared across Europe. Twelve European countries imposed wealth taxes in the 1990s, but only Spain, Norway and Switzerland still maintain them today.

“In practice, these measures have almost never delivered on their promised tax revenue,” Magness told The Center Square.

According to Magness, countries including Austria, France, Sweden, Finland and Denmark repealed their wealth taxes between 1994 and 2018 because of low revenue yields and concerns that high-net-worth residents would move assets or relocate abroad.

We’ll see if California voters figure this stuff out before or after they drive out even more wealthy taxpayers.

THE ENEMY WITHIN (ITALIAN EDITION):

Salim El Koudri, the terrorist who committed an atrocity in Modena had sent a job application in 2021 to the university he had graduated in Business Economics from:

"You have to hire me as an employee. Fucking Christian bastards.

You and your Jesus Christ on the cross, I'll… pic.twitter.com/BwEllEj8OQ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 18, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s Awesome to Have the Feds Focusing on Real Criminals Again. “In the Democrats’ morality-free, topsy-turvy world, you and I are the bad guys. When the drooling moron Joe Biden was doing his puppet thing in the Oval Office, his handlers tasked various federal law enforcement agencies with going after almost anyone except the actual bad guys. As I wrote on more than one occasion duing that dark time, I didn’t feel like a domestic terrorist, but the government kept insisting that I was one.”

NICE WORK, FELLAS: Hamas commander who helped plan Oct. 7 attacks has been killed, Israel says.

A long-serving Hamas commander who replaced Mohammed Sinwar and helped plan the October 7 attacks in Israel was killed on Friday, Israeli officials said Saturday.

Izz al-Din al-Haddad was the head of Hamas’ military wing, the Israel Defense Forces said in a news release. The IDF said he “was involved in the holding of many Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity” amid the war in Gaza and “surrounded himself with hostages to prevent his elimination.”

A coward and a war criminal, and now a corpse.

THEY’RE ALWAYS IMPORTANT, BUT YES:

I cannot stress enough how important local elections are going to become in the years ahead https://t.co/YioWkZixg9

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) May 16, 2026

The Left has played this game — particularly with Soros DAs — with impunity long enough.

HOW VERY FRENCH: California Bureaucrats Meet the Four-Day Office Week and Start Complaining.

GAS LINES IN AN OIL GIANT:

And there are still people saying the US Blockade of Iran is failing. 🤡 https://t.co/vzHQ7zbwOd

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2026

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Nicholas Kristof and the Collapse of Journalistic Standards.

Kristof himself offers a telling hedge in his column. He writes that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are” – which is an interesting disclaimer in a piece that also calls the assaults “systematic,” “widely practiced,” and “frequent.”

Adding to all of this, the timing of the piece is highly suspect: published the day before the release of a major Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence during the October 7 attack, which, unlike Kristof’s piece, is deeply sourced with documentary evidence. It’s difficult to view Kristof’s column as anything other than an attempt to shift focus and paint a false moral equivalency.

Ultimately, this is not just another case of Hamas propaganda being laundered for the Western masses. It is a striking example of the disintegration in journalistic standards that is eroding trust in the press. I know many who have published opinion pieces in the New York Times, usually representing moderate viewpoints, and they describe a strenuous fact checking process – but it appears to be selectively enforced.

The Times should have applied particular scrutiny to Kristof given his recent ambitions.

Scrutiny in pursuit of accuracy is no way to push the NYT’s preferred narrative, as Walter Duranty showed the paper almost a century ago.

Nothing has changed since.

A REMINDER THAT EUROPE’S ELITES ARE COMPLETELY DETACHED FROM EUROPEANS:

Croatia stormed into the Eurovision final with a song about Ottoman rule and the ancient Christian tradition of tattooing young girls to protect them from Muslim captors.

The song, performed in Croatian, has absolutely nothing to do with the usual “progressive” Eurovision… pic.twitter.com/PhYR9vqrYj

— Olena Rohoza (@OlenaRohoza) May 16, 2026

GET OFF MY LAWN: Here We Go Again: WHO Says Ebola Is Global Emergency as U.S. Virologist Smuggles in Pathogens.

AND THEN THEY WOULDN’T LET HIM — OR HARDLY ANYONE ELSE — REBUILD:

You live in a $2 million mansion.

He lives in a hotel because democrats burned his house down. https://t.co/mnZJHJsKz4

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) May 17, 2026

YES:

A thought on Cassidy’s defeat.  Donald Trump’s philosophy of practicing politics is simple: “If you hit me, I’ll hit you back 10 times harder.”  This is his way of imposing discipline so he can get things done.  Many Republicans mistake this for childish petulance.  The ironic…

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) May 17, 2026

This is the keeper: “The ironic thing is that when these oh-so-high-minded Republicans (Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Thom Tillis, etc.) get their comeuppance, they are the ones who react with truly childish petulance.”

DON’T MISS THE LATEST FROM SALENA ZITO:

Appalachia is not just a place on a map or a forgotten talking point for the elite; it is a vast, complex culture rooted in dirt, grit, and enduring faith. It is the beating heart of the American working class, where the love of God, country, and family still reigns supreme.

It…

— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) May 16, 2026

YES:

This real-time 1948 article from The Economist completely destroys the modern “Nakba” narrative that was invented decades later as political propaganda.

Straight from British eyewitnesses in Haifa, October 2, 1948:

“Jewish authorities urged all Arabs to remain in Haifa and… https://t.co/WIcnerXMmQ pic.twitter.com/pifBTXIzey

— Captain Allen (@CptAllenHistory) May 16, 2026

YOUR OCCASIONAL REMINDER THAT ANYTHING THE LEFT CAN’T CONTROL, IT WILL DESTROY, AND IF IT CAN’T BE DESTROYED, THEY’LL DISCREDIT IT:

You get the game here, right?

They file an absurd motion asking the Supreme Court to rule on a case where it clearly has no jurisdiction. Then when it obviously refuses (w 0 dissents), they accuse it of corruption to justify trying to stack the court.

Shameful. https://t.co/VwUlPiF41l

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 16, 2026

CORN, POPPED: Israel Knows a Defamation Case Won’t Fly. That’s Not the Play.

Which brings us to the real mechanism: 28 U.S.C. § 1782.

Once an Israeli proceeding is in reasonable contemplation, an interested person can apply in the Southern District of New York (where the New York Times is headquartered) to compel evidence production from a U.S. entity for use in foreign litigation. A properly framed § 1782 application does not ask the court to adjudicate the case; it simply asks the court to order the Times to produce the factual basis for one published allegation.

The subpoena categories write themselves: documents identifying the source and evidentiary basis for the dog allegation; fact-checking notes and editorial review records; communications with cited human rights organizations about this specific claim; internal discussions of reliability or corroboration. The Times will obviously raise reporter’s privilege. That is expected. But the answer here is a measured response: Nobody is asking for every source on every story. The request is for the factual foundation for one allegation the Times has publicly called corroborated and extensively fact-checked and “deeply reported.” Either show the corroboration or explain why you cannot. Both answers are informative.

None of this is a technical defamation case, but the critics declaring the claim dead on arrival are focusing on the colloquial use of the word “defamation” expressed in a spokesperson’s tweet and missing the tree for the forest. The real question is whether there exists a narrow, disciplined legal theory that forces the Times to produce the evidentiary basis for one of the most inflammatory factual allegations it has ever published. And there is.

Clever.