Author Archive: Stephen Green

THE LEFT’S NAZI PROBLEM IS MUCH BIGGER THAN PLATNER: The New Brownshirts? “Antisemitic rhetoric on the far left increasingly echoes the propaganda of Nazi Germany.”

OOF:

MAKE AMERICA FLORIDA FOR ONCE, AND PASS THE SAVE ACT:

“The vote fraud was stopped, DeSantis cleaned up our elections, and he won by almost 20% in 2022.”

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: OPEC is in a struggle for its survival. It could mean $40 oil.

OPEC countries with major operations in the Persian Gulf mostly struggled to get their crude out to their customers. Iran’s closure and America’s subsequent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz locked in a fifth of the world’s oil supply.

Several OPEC members – namely Iran, Iraq and Kuwait – had no choice but to shut in their crude production and wait.

Now that traffic in the strait has started to ramp up again, the jockeying for production quotas has begun. Iraq, the bloc’s second-largest oil producer, is reportedly the next shoe to drop – the country’s oil minister told Bloomberg that Iraq would have to decide whether or not to remain with OPEC if production targets don’t dramatically increase.

Iraq’s production was the hardest hit by the war, dropping by 75% to just over 1 million barrels a day in April and May – down from more than 4.5 million a day in January and February. Iraq wants permission to produce a record 5 million barrels a day coming out of the war, with a long-term aim of getting production up to 7 million barrels a day, Bloomberg reported.

At first I thought the OPEC nations were looking to take market share from Iran while they could. If they’re jockeying against one another, even better.

THEY’LL EVEN GASLIGHT YOU ON THE DAILY TEMPS:

SALENA ZITO: Young Washington: History’s ultimate gritty origin story.

The crushed stone along the quiet pathways here at the “Great Meadow” where Fort Necessity sits has always held wonder to me. Here is where 22-year-old George Washington, a brash, sometimes headstrong, but always ambitious young man trying to figure out his fate, suffered the first and only military surrender of his lifetime.

On the big screen, I’ve always imagined that the series of events that led to this moment, beginning with his run-in with the French Captain Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre in present day Erie, to being shot point blank in Butler, to accidentally starting the French and Indian War in Jumonville Glen, would look vivid and stark — that they would show a man on his way to greatness despite failures along the way.

But after seeing the new film, Young Washington, and standing on the hollowed grounds of a meadow tucked away in the dense, green ridges of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, it is difficult to comprehend why it took so long for this story to be told.

It’s Salena, so of course, read the whole thing.

HISTORY: The Pentagon Paid Moldova $40 Million for 21 MiG-29s So Iran Couldn’t Have Them. The Minister Who Signed the Deal Went to Prison for It. “In 1997, the United States quietly paid a former Soviet republic tens of millions of dollars to buy an entire fighter regiment — not to fly it, but to keep it away from Iran, and to take it apart. The Moldova deal is remembered as one of the Pentagon’s cleanest nonproliferation coups, and in one sense it was: the intelligence haul shaped American weapons for a decade. But the full story runs stranger than the legend, taking in a rationale Moscow disputed the same week, a defense minister who went to prison for signing it, and six fighter jets that no one on Earth would ever buy.”

DENY HIM REENTRY:

More:

Jackson Hinkle, one of the most openly antisemitic figures on X, traveled from Russia to Tehran to pay tribute to the regime that has spent decades exporting terror, murdering its own people, and calling for the destruction of America and Israel.

At Khamenei’s funeral, he proudly chanted:

“Down with America. Down with the Zionists. Down with Israel.” (Al Bawaba)

Born and raised in California, he now cheers America’s enemies while standing shoulder to shoulder with a regime whose hands are stained with the blood of tens of thousands of Iranians.

This isn’t “anti-Zionism.” It isn’t “activism.” It’s open allegiance to a murderous dictatorship.

Indeed.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: A Tale of Two Air Wars. “A pair of overnight airstrikes didn’t just light up the skies over Russia and Ukraine on Sunday night; they illuminated the very different realities of a war now well into its fifth year.”

ONCE YOU SEE IT…:

…oh, wait — you saw it decades ago, didn’t you?

THANKS, FELLAS: OPEC+ companies slightly boosting production as oil prices slide.

Seven OPEC+ nations have said they will increase their production goals by 188,000 barrels per day. The participating countries are Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman.

Multiple nations in the Middle East have had their oil production throttled by the war in Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil shipping lane in the region.

A temporary agreement between Iran and the Trump administration reopened the strait, meaning more oil should be able to flow and reach the market, sending prices downward.

Stay tuned…

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN…:

“They are also letting you know that they don’t care about evidence. They will accuse their enemies without any documented evidence. They will protect their own even with mountains of evidence.”

…and into the fire:

This is not your father’s quietly Republican Maine.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Der Platnerfürher Might Finally Be Too Creepy for the Dems. “Things should never have gotten this far with Platner and the Democrats. Let’s face it, the Nazi tattoo should have been the only disqualifier that they needed. The Democrats may be united in their frothing hatred of President Trump, but that has made them adrift in everything else. I’ve got decades of dealing with their tortured rationalizations under my belt but everything since November 2024 has really been out of control.”

BRING IT ON HOME: Toyota to invest $3.6 billion to move Tacoma pickup truck production from Mexico to Texas.

The investment is expected to create 2,000 U.S. jobs at the facility, add a second vehicle assembly line and roughly double the size of the 2.7-million-square-foot plant by 2030, the automaker said. It will expand the plant’s annual capacity from roughly 200,000 to 350,000 units, Toyota said.

The announcement is part of Toyota’s stated plans to invest up to $10 billion more than previously expected domestically in the U.S. through 2030. It comes less than a week after the Trump administration confirmed it would not extend its trilateral trade pact with Canada and Mexico, instead opting to conduct annual reviews.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but building things here is good.

YES:

“You have to step back and ask yourself who are these people and what are they trying to do to both our society and the people in it?”

HMM: Hamas dismantles government to allow Board of Peace-approved panel to take over. “Anonymous officials from the Gaza-based terrorist group announced the dissolution to AFP on Monday after preliminary reports swirled late Sunday evening. The officials confirmed that the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, created by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, would fill the power vacuum in the Gaza Strip.”

It isn’t so much who serves on the Board of Peace now, but who gets slipped in once our attention is elsewhere.

YES:

Related:

Bookmark this for next time because there will be a next time.

UPDATE: Sorry, had a duplicate tweet posted originally. All fixed now.