January 8, 2026

IF THEY AREN’T NEITHER ARE WE, AND THE ENTIRE SYSTEM OF INDIVIDUAL GOVERNANCE FALLS APART:  Are the Unborn People?  The pivotal point upon which the abortion debate turns is not whether abortion itself is right or wrong, but whether the unborn are “persons.”

A humanist system rests on humans and you can’t have humanity be dependent on “because mommy wants me.” That is what we have now and it’s ontologically indefensible and philosophically infantile. Sorry. Truth must be told.

Posted at 1:30 am by Sarah Hoyt

AND ANOTHER WORTHY ADDITION TO THE PROMETHEUS NOMINEES SLATE:  ‘A Kiss for Damocles’ Snags 2026 Prometheus Award Nomination!

This year is lit! I just hope that Kiss for Damocles and Storm Dragon, and Planting Life: shut the kingdom, and of course my own No Man’s Land all make it to finalists. I’d be very proud to stand in that slate.  All amazing books. (I’m sure the other nominees are too, I just haven’t heard who they are yet.  And pardon me, I prefer the books I’ve read and like.)  And remember, if you want to have a say join the Libertarian Futurist Society.

Posted at 12:46 am by Sarah Hoyt

January 7, 2026

SALENA ZITO:

Posted at 10:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHECKING IN WITH THE THEATER KIDS: Mamdani’s Commie Housing Official Is a Lunatic.

Venture aloud that the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, might just have a touch of the communist about him, and you will run immediately into a wall of indignant pedantry. “He’s not a communist,” his apologists will insist. He’s a “communitarian.” Other preferred substitutions include “collectivist,” “Fabian,” “democratic socialist,” and, in the less intellectually inclined depths of the well, “just, like, someone who cares about other people.”

Whatever. A commie by any other name still smells as foul. Besides, far more important than whether Mamdani wishes to be more closely associated with the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea is what he is actually doing with his power — and, alas, what Mamdani is actually doing with his power is appointing lunatics such as Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Given that New York City has more people living in rented housing than any other American city has residents, this is a position from which a great deal of mischief can be made.

If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States.

That may be close to what happened to Weaver. According to the Daily Mail, in their article yesterday headlined, “Breathtaking hypocrisy of woke NYC mayoral aide who says whites owning homes is racist… as her $1.4m secret is revealed:”

New York City’s new renters’ tsar wasted no time in outraging locals by vowing to make life harder for whites in the Big Apple over their role in ‘racist gentrification.’

But Cea Weaver has kept strangely quiet about her own mother – a white professor who owns a gorgeous $1.4 million home in America’s fastest gentrifying city, where longtime black residents are quickly being priced out.

The hardline leftist’s mother Celia Applegate, a professor [of] German Studies at prestigious Vanderbilt University, resides at a pretty, roomy 1930s Craftsman home in one of Nashville’s leafiest neighborhoods.

Here’s the Webpage for Celia Applegate, Professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt:

The history of Germany in the 20th century is one of massive state-sanctioned property theft in both err, post-Weimar Germany, and the Soviet satellite state that succeeded it in East Germany. How much does Cea Weaver root for the Stasi when she pops The Lives of Others into the Blu-Ray player?

So what about dad? In a post headlined “Crybully: Mamdani’s Tenant Advocate Breaks Down When Confronted About Hypocrisy,” Ed Morrissey adds:

Sohrab Ahmari asks the right question:

Is Weaver mentally unstable? She certainly seems unprepared for the job, which is public-facing and substantial enough to deal with the media. Weaver was adept enough to scrub her social media after the election, but it turned out to be too late. Michelle Tandler kept a lot of receipts, which she posted in a lengthy thread on Monday. However, the first tweet has the right context for today’s events, given the “gentrifier” declaration she made in 2018:

Ed asks, “Was that aimed at her parents? Or was it just empty sloganeering from someone who never imagined that she would be held accountable for her public statements?”

It could be the former: Newsweek notes that “Weaver’s father, Stewart Weaver, was reported in 2023 to own a home in Rochester, according to real estate publication The Real Deal. At the time, a spokesperson for Housing Justice for All, an organization Cea Weaver worked for at the time, told the publication that Stewart Weaver ‘manages an additional rental property with a family member.’”

More on Weaver and her astonishing vocal fryyyyyyy from Megyn Kelly and Mark Helprin:

UPDATE:

To be fair, that’s a slightly less extreme aviation position than AOC, 2019’s New Socialist It Girl, who wanted to ban commercial flight entirely that year: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal. “Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out ‘highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.’ Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains that run on fossil fuels will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?”

Posted at 9:16 pm by Ed Driscoll

IGNORANCE, THY NAME IS TUCKER: In a segment of his interview with Ted Cruz last summer since deleted from his platforms, Tucker Carlson expresses incredulity when Cruz notes that Iran was trying to assassinate Trump (X link).
Well, it’s not like Biden-appointed prosecutors indicted an Iranian agent, who is still at large for trying to murder Trump, and Biden AG Merrick Garland announced this with great fanfare. Oh, wait, it’s exactly like that. Somehow, this very public (and important) story either eluded Tucker’s attention, or he purposely chose to mock it, knowing that it’s true. Neither speaks well of Tucker.

Posted at 9:00 pm by David Bernstein

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW:

Indeed:

Come spring however, and as Jon Gabriel wrote in 2024: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THE DAVIDIANS WERE MORE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE THAN PERPETRATORS:

Posted at 8:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IRAN:

(That’s the old Monarchy’s flag, not the Islamic Republic version.)

Posted at 8:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PAYBACK IS A BITCH:

Posted at 7:59 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NEWS FROM THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF MINNESOTASTAN: Minneapolis Protester Shot Dead; UPDATE: Car Apparently Hit Agent; Riots Soon? I dunno, but it’s not 2020 and riots won’t play out like they did then.

UPDATE: Walz Threatens Civil War.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Walz: Minnesota Is at ‘War’ With the Federal Government, Calls Out National Guard; More Violence? “From everything I can see, Walz and Frey have been egging on the confrontations to distract from the disastrous fraud investigations and have been cooperating with the very people who have been assaulting officers and impeding operations. Mayor Frey, just the other day, threatened violence, and here we have it.”

Insurrection Act time?

Related question: I suppose there’s no chance we could trade Minnesota for Greenland …

Posted at 6:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds