IT’S MERELY RESTING: Chris Cuomo says Democratic Party ‘dead,’ after brother loses NY mayor primary to democrat-socialist.

The funny part is Cuomo’s desperate attempt at equating NYC’s slow-motion suicide-by-politics to MAGA “extremism.”

WHEN THE NEWS ISN’T: Oh, Noes! That ‘Economic Blackout’ Guy Is Bankrupting McDonald’s.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: As Christians Are Slaughtered, the World Looks Away.

Father Ukuma Jonathan, the local parish priest, was in the presbytery with displaced Christians when they heard yells of “Allahu Akbar,” gunfire, and screams. Everyone immediately dropped to the floor, fearing for their lives, according to John Pontifex, head of press and public affairs at Aid to the Church in Need UK, who spoke to Father Jonathan the day after the attack.

The jihadists broke into homes and shelters, murdering people with machetes. They were “cutting them like they were cutting a cow or an animal to be eaten,” said Kefas, who visited Yelwata and interviewed around 30 survivors the week after the massacre. The terrorists then doused their victims’ bodies and homes in petrol and set them ablaze.

“It’s psychological,” said Kefas. “They could just shoot people and move on. So I feel going the extra length of butchering these people is to send a message to the survivors that: ‘Hey, look what we’ve done to these people. That’s what we’re going to do to you if you don’t vacate your land.’ ”

At this writing, the death toll is 218, but it could keep climbing as survivors continue to die from their injuries.

And the Christian West — or largely post-Christian West — remains silent and deeply uninterested.

PROGRESS: AI Is Quietly Rebuilding Manufacturing From the Inside Out. “Artificial intelligence isn’t coming for manufacturing. It’s already there, installed, integrated, and making corrections before anyone upstairs has time to schedule a meeting. The shift hasn’t been loud or flashy. That’s part of the reason so many people still don’t believe it’s real. But those working closest to the machines know the difference. The line runs cleaner. Errors happen less often. Waste is down. And in most cases, no one on the floor was told why. It just started working better.”

MORE AND MORE ASTROTURF:

BREAKING: Dozens of “Scottish independence” X accounts suddenly went silent on June 12—the same day Israel began its strike on Iran, including a major cyber attack.

They’d been tweeting nonstop for months. Then, nothing.

Turns out, they may have been Iranian bots all along. pic.twitter.com/uNFKLlWF17

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) June 26, 2025

Musk could eliminate a lot of foreign agitprop with more transparency.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: Inside the campaign to find a new Republican to run against Mamdani — and why it could be Mayor Adams.

Prominent donors are gunning to get Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa a job in the Trump Administration in hopes of pushing him out of New York City’s mayoral race, sources told me. The aim is to open up the GOP nomination — and the nearly 30% of the vote someone running in that lane is expected to get — for current mayor Eric Adams.

At present, the mayor is running for re-election as an independent — sandwiched in between Sliwa on the right and Zohran Mamdani on the (ultra-far) left. My sources said Adams, who recently struck a deal with the Trump Administration to clear himself of charges leveled by the DOJ, is open to running as a Republican, but it hinges on a rather complicated chain of events.

Sliwa would have to leave the state to open up the slot, and then Republican borough leaders — city council members and the only Republican borough president, Staten Island’s Vito Fossella — would need to anoint Adams.

Welcome to “Hot Commie Summer.“

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Need a New Bingo Card Now That Racism Causes Diabetes. “I know that the rules say that a white guy isn’t supposed to weigh in on anything having to do with race but, hey, once some moron tries to link racism to diabetes, all bets are off. I find the perma-victims to be exceedingly tedious. Jamaal Bowman is a former member of Congress who now runs a super PAC. The fat crybaby is practically a Rockefeller compared to me.”

UNDERREPORTED STORIES: Illegal But ‘Honest, Hardworking Individuals’ at NE Meat Packing Plant Also Using Stolen IDs, SSNs.

When I initially heard about this raid, I thought it was a repeat of that classic dance from the late 90s and early 2000s, but was kind of surprised that a factory owner would be so sanguine about employing illegals in numbers approaching that in this day and age. It didn’t seem especially prudent.

I also gave a passing moment to wondering why the feds would be bothering with a plant in the middle of nowhere when surely there were plenty of the first-to-go criminals to be found by the gross in any city they were already working in.

And that was that, until I read a Judicial Watch newsletter this morning, which began to explain exactly HOW an obscure plant out of thousands in the country wound up raided.

It also answered my question about the plant owner’s apparent lack of concern. It turns out, as far as he knew, all his employees were kosher by virtue of passing their E-Verify screenings. The plant was 100% compliant with federal regulations for hiring. The workers did so by using stolen identities and Social Security numbers.

Full details at the link.

DOG BITES MAN: Jamaal Bowman Just Went Bat Poop Crazy on CNN.

JONATHAN TURLEY: The Icarian Gene: The Rise and Fall of the Expert Class.

In his concurrence in United States v. Skrmetti, a case upholding Tennessee’s ban on adolescent transgender treatments, Thomas called for his colleagues to stand against an “expert class” that has dictated both policy and legal conclusions in the United States.

The reference to “experts” is often used to insulate an opinion as self-evidently true on a given question when they speak as a group. It distinguishes the informed from the casual; the certifiably authoritative from the merely interested. Yet, what constitutes an “expert” can be little more than an advanced degree, and the “overwhelming opinion of experts” can be little more than groupthink.

Thomas warned his colleagues that “[t]here are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.”

Indeed, those “good reasons” have become increasingly obvious to those outside of the Beltway. The public saw experts line up during the pandemic to support mandatory uses of surgical masks, shutting down schools, and requiring the ruinous six-foot rule of separation. Many of these rules were later found lacking in scientific support. At the same time, dissenting experts, including the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, were blacklisted, censored, or fired for challenging these views.

We have seen the same orthodoxy on issues ranging from gender dysphoria to COVID measures.

And the results are rarely — never? — as beneficial as you’d expect to get from experts. Unless, of course, their real expertise is in leftwing orthodoxy.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Suicide of Expertise.

AN IMPORTANT REMINDER: Hey, GOP: Senate Parliamentarian Isn’t Binding.

RESHORING:

🚨 BREAKING: General Electric Appliances invests $500 MILLION to move production from China to KENTUCKY, USA.

Manufacturing continues to return home. pic.twitter.com/YyMdXx2fLv

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 26, 2025

THAT GUY, YES:

this guy? https://t.co/RrcE8SZjiw pic.twitter.com/BrI3vSbsB1

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) June 26, 2025

The White House needs to revoke a bunch more clearances.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A knowledgeable friend writes:

Somebody got to Panetta. After he spoken the unspeakable, that Trump bombing Iran was the right thing to do. Which suggests his boss, Obama, did everything wrong. Someone called up the 86-year-old former SecDef and CIA director, said he needed to make things right. He was making the boss, and the party, look bad.

And that is not permissible.

Never.

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Sunday’s ‘Midnight Hammer’ Operation Launched in 1941.

“On Sunday, when those jets returned to Whiteman, their families were there — flags flying and tears flowing.” —U.S. Air Force Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, on the B-2 Spirit bomber crews who conducted their part of Operation Midnight Hammer.

The dead-sexy B-2 Spirit bombers and their highly trained crews got all the attention in the days following Operation Midnight Hammer, but there was so much more to the mission than a half-dozen or so stealth jets carrying massive bunker-buster bombs.

How much more? The story begins 15 years ago, when the Pentagon first looked at how to bomb facilities like Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, buried deep under a mountain. Actually, it began in the 1980s with the development of our first stealth bomber — or no, wait, that’s not quite right either. To tell the full story of Midnight Hammer, I need to take you back to 1941 and a U.S. Army effort to maximize its ability to “reach out and touch someone” with maximum lethality.

Much more at the link.

HMM: Netanyahu agreed to end Gaza war within two weeks after US strike on Iran. “According to the outlet, Trump and Netanyahu agreed in a phone call that the war in Gaza would end within two weeks. Four Arab states, including the UAE and Egypt, would jointly govern the Gaza Strip in place of Hamas. The terror group’s leadership would be exiled, and all hostages would be released.”

That’s nice. Did Hamas agree to exile? Or will the IDF have to keep rooting them out for as long as it takes?

PROBLEM: COMMIES AREN’T HOT. Wall Street Girds Its Loins For a ‘Hot Commie Summer.’

SANDY FROM THE BLOCK: AOC’s tough girl from the Bronx image is destroyed by yearbook photo from well-to-do high school. “The truth is AOC is Sandy Cortez who went to Yorktown High School and lived at the corner of Friends Road and Longvue Street.”

CATHERINE SALGADO: Another Reason to Reinstate FBI Whistleblowers.

SEND THIS TO YOUR GOP SENATOR:

Please repeat after me, three times:

Cutting fraud, waste and abuse from a federal program is not the same thing as cutting benefits under that program.

Cutting fraud, waste and abuse from a federal program is not the same thing as cutting benefits under that program.

CUTTING…

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) June 26, 2025

“WHERE’S WALDO?” ISLAMIC THEOCRACY EDITION: In Iran, Mass Arrests, Executions, and Everyone Is Wondering: Where Is Supreme Leader Khamenei?

CHANGE: Eric Adams suddenly finds ‘overwhelming support’ from NYC’s desperate business elites.

Some of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s biggest backers hinted in fluid, panicked conversations Wednesday that they’ll put their money behind Adams, who was elected in 2021 as a tough-but-fair ex-cop, and now, after a federal corruption indictment and the removal of his inner circle, is running on his policy successes and frankly fun personality.

Adams’ popularity stood at an all-time low of 20% in a poll last month. The business community was largely neutral on Adams, who they saw as a welcome if occasionally tiring return to moderation after the left-leaning, rich-baiting de Blasio era; they remain nostalgic for Mike Bloomberg’s three terms.

“There is going to be overwhelming support in the business community to rally around Adams,” said Richard Farley, a partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP who said he’s organizing a fundraiser for the mayor and has been speaking with some of Cuomo’s biggest donors. “This will be a street fight all the way to November.”

Adams’ path is “narrow,” acknowledged one adviser.

“There’s always a choice!,” the wise man wrote. “This one is a choice between ‘bad’ and ‘worse,’ which is a difference much more poignant than that between ‘good’ and ‘better.’”

BREAKING: SCOTUS Allows States to Remove Medicaid Funding to Planned Parenthood.

WELL, THEY SHOULD: Wall Street Panics Over Prospect of a Socialist Running New York City.

“I can’t believe I even need to say this, but socialism doesn’t work,” said Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, a bitcoin-focused financial services company. “It has failed in every American city it was tried.”

There were renewed questions about whether Wall Street executives would stay in New York or if Mamdani’s plans for the city would send more financiers to states such as Florida and Texas. Some executives cited concerns about taxes and crime under a potential Mamdani administration as well as fears of rising antisemitism.

Sander Gerber, chief executive of investment firm Hudson Bay Capital, said he fielded texts from some of his 170 employees who said they were “thinking of leaving.”

Some developers and landlords said they are already making plans to exit New York and focus on more business-friendly markets like Miami, Dallas or Nashville.

“I’m depressed and sad,” said Ricky Sandler, who runs Eminence Capital, a Midtown Manhattan hedge fund, which employs 55 people. “If Mamdani becomes mayor, I will likely move my business and family out of New York.”

If Mamdani wins, how long before NYSE becomes FLASE?

GOOD LORD:

8 West Virginians lost their lives in this horrific flash flood in Appalachia including a three-year-old girl—a 9th person Sandra Parsons, 83, of Triadelphia is still is unaccounted for— my reporting & interview with ⁦@wvgovernor⁩ https://t.co/K5af23bdeZ

— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) June 26, 2025

Good stuff as always from Salena Zito.

SARAH ANDERSON: Jasmine Crockett Went After Melania, And I’m Not Gonna Let That Slide.