2026 PREVIEW: Vance, Trump, Don Jr. Warn Indiana GOP Before and After Devastating Redistricting Vote

KIMBERLY STRASSEL: Rise of the Mamdani Clones. “After the 2024 humiliation, the left is back. It could hurt the party in 2026.”

The left’s zeal is also propelling candidates into open and battleground races—no matter the general-election risks. Maine Rep. Jared Golden clung to his rural Maine district by less than 1 point as Mr. Trump won it by 10 last year, and only via a pragmatic voting record. The primary to replace him features two avowed progressives, racing to the left. And progressives are stacking up cash and endorsements in primaries to take on the most vulnerable Republicans in battleground states from Pennsylvania to Arizona and Wisconsin. In the contest to challenge vulnerable Republican California Rep. David Valadao, school-board activist Randy Villegas is using a Sanders endorsement and dollars to outpower moderate state Rep. Jasmeet Bains.

The risks of the Sanders takeover were further highlighted in Texas this week, when former Rep. Colin Allred was pressured out of a Senate run, to clear the decks for uber-progressive Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Mr. Allred, a former NFL linebacker, lost to Sen. Ted Cruz last year by 8 points, significantly outperforming Kamala Harris. Democrats have their best shot at a statewide office in Texas in years, given the general electoral climate and a bloody GOP primary between Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Ms. Crockett still must beat state House member James Talarico, but backing for her is pouring in and Democrats face the real prospect that their “best” shot will be in the hands of a freshman Democrat who has clawed her way to notoriety through creative slanging matches.

Lost in all this maneuvering was the release of a recent report from a center-left group, Welcome, which Semafor reports “consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is ‘out of touch’ ” on issues ranging from transgenderism to climate—everything the reascendant progressive left stands for.

Well, they are. But that doesn’t mean the GOP can play dead and expect to win.

OPEN SOURCE:

An amazing article came out yesterday.
Seven German journalism students, as a continuation of their OSINT course project, tracked the movements of ships with Russian crews off the coasts of the Netherlands and Germany and linked them to swarms of drones appearing over European… pic.twitter.com/4B0CaVp2W5

— Pepel Klaasa (@pepel_klaasa) December 12, 2025

Full story here, complete with instructions on how to follow the ships yourself.

KRUISER: Dems Would Last Maybe 5 Minutes in the Civil War They Think They Want. “All of the posturing and potty-mouthing in front of friendly audiences has given the Democrats the mistaken impression that they actually are tough. It’s mostly amusing, especially given the fact that fey soy boy Gavin Newsom is their highest polling ‘fighter’ right now.”

BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET TO $108 BILLION BY KEEPING MONEY-LOSERS LIKE COLBERT ON FOREVER. NEXT QUESTION? Stephen Colbert Wonders Why ‘The Late Show’ Was Canceled if Paramount Has $108 Billion to Offer for Warner Bros.

THIS IS LOVELY: Aging Gracefully and the Songs That Grow With Us.

WEAKNESS BEGETS AGGRESSION: China Is Quietly Breaking America’s Pacific Defense Chain.

China is methodically chipping away at America’s Pacific defense architecture, and Yap’s Woleai airfield is the latest warning sign.

Despite the Federated States of Micronesia’s Compact of Free Association with Washington, Beijing has secured a deal to refurbish the airfield—just 450 miles from Guam.

That puts a potential dual-use Chinese facility inside the second island chain, complicating U.S. plans for agile air dispersal in a Taiwan war.

Naval expert Brent Sadler argues that Interior, regional commands, and legal advisers have all failed to enforce CoFA protections, risking billions in U.S. investments and eroding America’s positional advantage in Micronesia.

We paid for those islands with American blood. China is buying them with American dollars.

ROBERT SPENCER: ‘Minnesota Somalis Are as Minnesotan as Tater-Tot Hotdish,’ But There’s Just One Catch. “The Center for Immigration Studies revealed Wednesday that ‘nearly every Somali household with children (89 percent) receives some form of welfare.’ Even worse, ‘altogether, 81 percent of Somali households consume some form of welfare, compared to 21 percent of native households.’ Nor does this dependency lessen with time: ‘Somalis with 10 years of residency have welfare consumption rates that are only marginally lower than the Somali population as a whole.'”

JUST TRULY TERRIBLE PEOPLE: Newsom Press Account Had NO IDEA the Hell They Would Unleash Trolling Elon Musk With His Mentally Ill Son. “It takes someone really, really, really low to use one’s mentally ill child to hurt them. Still, then again, we are dealing with Governor Newsom and his broken, hateful, thin-skinned, troll press office account run by whack-job haters, so we’re not exactly surprised they’d go after Elon Musk by exploiting his son, who thinks he’s a girl.”

UPDATE (From Ed): Newsom would enjoy seeing many more families ripped apart:

It's going to be an ad. https://t.co/kVlI6D9TLK

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) December 11, 2025

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: OCC Fingers Big Banks That De-Banked ‘Controversial’ Business Like Gun Makers, Retailers. ““It is unfortunate that the nation’s largest banks thought these harmful debanking policies were an appropriate use of their government-granted charter and market power. While many of these policies were undertaken in plain sight and even announced publicly, certain banks have continued to insist that they did not engage in debanking… Going forward, the OCC will hold banks accountable for these actions and ensure unlawful debanking does not continue.”

WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD SELL?

‘Debacle of epic proportions’: Nuzzi book flops in first week https://t.co/bwMdVfjz9e

— POLITICO (@politico) December 11, 2025

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Quiet, Captivating Genius of Kamala Harris. “We all saw Harris for four years. Rare was the occasion when she could string together three coherent sentences. Typically, she would get stuck on a word or phrase and then repeat it. I called it the hamster wheel in her brain. Once she realized that she wasn’t getting off the wheel, she would begin gesticulating wildly, as if that made everything clearer.”

THIS IS THE CORRECT TAKE:

Christopher Caldwell gets the Trump NSS exactly right. Trump doesn't "hate Europe"; he hates the globalist technocratic class ruining it. Michael Anton, the chief drafter of the NSS, told me that he personally loves Europe — but not the EU & its mindset.https://t.co/IZuRUEOxrF

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) December 11, 2025

“Brussels saps the economic power and the morale of our European allies while purporting to unite and strengthen them.”

OH, CANADA:

When they tell you who they are, believe them. pic.twitter.com/0iqllNmZfQ

— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) December 11, 2025

You can look in vain for a Community Note, but there aren’t even any pending.

Yesterday, I wrote about the five steps of “postmodern reverse colonization,” and here they are again:

• Migration, often at the behest of the local population or their elites.
• Non-assimilation.
• Formation of ethno-religious political blocs.
• Street violence/mob tactics/mass rape as power tests.
• Demographic tipping points.

Parts of the UK are well into the fourth step, and it looks like Canada is doing its best to catch up.

ICYMI, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: One Cheer for Colonialism! “It is unseemly, untimely, unjustifiable, distasteful, and surely flat-out wrong to offer even one cheer for colonialism. So here I go.”

THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES DEFLATING: Fewer EVs need fewer batteries: Ford and SK On end their joint venture.

Cast your mind back to 2021. Electric vehicles were hot stuff, buoyed by Tesla’s increasingly stratospheric valuation and a general optimism fueled by what would turn out to be the most significant climate-focused spending package in US history. For some time, automakers had been promising an all-electric future, and they started laying the groundwork to make that happen, partnering with battery suppliers and the like.

Take Ford—that year, it announced a joint venture with SK to build a pair of battery factories, one in Kentucky, the other in Tennessee. BlueOvalSK represented an $11.4 billion investment that would create 11,000 jobs, we were told, and an annual output of 60 GWh from both plants.

Four years later, things look very different. EV subsidies are dead, as is any inclination by the current government to hold automakers accountable for selling too many gas guzzlers. EV-heavy product plans have been thrown out, and designs for new combustion-powered cars are being dusted off and spiffed up. Fewer EVs means a lower need for batteries, and today we saw that in evidence when it emerged that Ford and SK On are ending their battery factory joint venture.

Ending subsidies really meant finding out what the actual EV market could sustain.

2026 PREVIEW:

🚨 Within the past hour, Republicans:
– Gave Democrats 2 Congressional seats in the 2026 midterms via Indiana
– Passed a bill in the House repealing a Trump executive order that reins in the federal bureaucracy and federal unions

MANY Republicans JUST WANT TO LOSE 2026.

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 11, 2025

“SEIZE ANOTHER” HAS A NICE RING TO IT: The U.S. Seized an Oil Tanker Off the Coast of Venezuela. So, What’s Next?

“Y’ALL NEED TO GIVE THAT WOMAN SOME GRACE.”

I looked Mrs. Erika Kirk right in the eye last weekend and immediately understood her.

She’s trying to smile through the pain and lead with strength so that no one who hated Charlie can cheer at the Kirk family downfall. The radical Left WANTED to watch her crumble in misery and… https://t.co/9Mswu09R4p

— Xaviaer DuRousseau (@XAVIAERD) December 11, 2025

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: One Cheer for Colonialism! “It is unseemly, untimely, unjustifiable, distasteful, and surely flat-out wrong to offer even one cheer for colonialism. So here I go.”

As promised earlier this week, right here on Instapundit.

F-35 Talks With Turkey Could See ‘Breakthrough,’ U.S. Ambassador Says. “Barrack’s post is the first official signal from the U.S. side that talks about a return to the F-35 project could be underway. Turkish media had previously reported it would be discussed when Erdogan and Trump met in the White House in September. Asked by a reporter if he could revive Turkey’s cancelled F-35 deal shortly after the September meeting, Trump replied: ‘I could do so easily if I want. We may do that. Well, it depends. [Erdoğan’s] going to do something for us.'”

Is Erdoğan going to stop playing footsie with the Kremlin? Because that would be nice to see from an ally.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: AI Admits to LYING about Islam.

I always learn a lot from Ray’s video podcasts.

REMEMBER PACIFIC PALISADES? Newsom wouldn’t budge on his duplex ban for the Los Angeles wildfire rebuild. So, a YIMBY group is suing him.

The lawsuit, filed by YIMBY Law on Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges the governor unlawfully restricted homeowners’ ability to rebuild after the fires by allowing local governments to set aside Senate Bill 9, a 2021 state law that permits duplex construction and lot-splitting on single-family-home parcels.

Newsom issued his order in July in response to lobbying from property owners in the Pacific Palisades, the coastal L.A. community that was largely destroyed in the blazes. Palisades residents argued that allowing duplexes and spitting lots into two parcels would undermine the neighborhood’s character and worsen evacuation efforts in the event of future disasters. Following the governor’s order, all the jurisdictions affected — the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu and Pasadena and L.A. County — banned SB 9 rebuilds in high-risk fire areas. The suit includes each local government as a defendant as well.

YIMBY Law, which is based in San Francisco and sues public agencies to clear the way for more housing, had agreed in discussions with high-level Newsom staffers late last week not to file its suit if the governor allowed duplex construction again after a year, the group’s executive director Sonja Trauss told POLITICO.

When Newsom did not act, the group turned to the courts.

They f***** up — they trusted Newsom.

DOG BITES MAN: Judge Orders Criminal Kilmar Abrego Garcia Released AGAIN.

HISTORY:

The Ottomans retreated from Jerusalem on this day in 1917, after centuries of ruthless occupation. British General Allenby entered on foot, honoring the city’s holiness and promising protection for every sacred Jewish, Muslim and Christian place. pic.twitter.com/wI0mT89QhP

— Avi Kaner ابراهيم אבי (@AviKaner) December 11, 2025