January 6, 2026

6 YEARS IN COURT FOR QUOTING THE BIBLE: Twice acquitted Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen is still fighting charges for citing Romans 1 in criticism of her church’s LGBTQ support because prosecutors won’t give up.

Posted at 9:38 pm by Greg Lukianoff

OPEN THREAD: Have a groovy Tuesday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY: Marxism In The Metropolis: NYC’s New ‘Tenant Czar’ Has Targeted White Homeowners, Private Property.

“The reality is that for centuries, we have really treated property as an individualized good and not as a collective good,” Weaver stated, echoing the core tenets of Karl Marx. She went on to warn that the transition to “shared equity” would specifically target “white families” and “some POC (people of color) families who are homeowners,” forcing them into a “different relationship to property” than the one protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 250 years.

In a previous social media post, Weaver said, “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

Matt Taibbi responds, “Ideas matter and some very crazy ones are coming:” 

Crazy ideas are coming? Bane’s motley crew are just getting warmed up — this is only Mamdani’s sixth day in office.

UPDATE:

She’s going to take things away from on behalf of the common good, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE: Unexpectedly! Mom of Zohran Mamdani aide who said owning a home fuels ‘white supremacy’ has $1.6M house in Tennessee.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE $20 TRILLION QUESTION: How to Spend It and How Not To.

$20 trillion is a lot of money.

One would expect a big bang to follow the spending of twenty-thousand billion dollars. It’s a lot of money! It’s pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.

This is the sum that was globally spent — largely by Europe and the United States — in a coordinated effort by the developed world to decarbonize the global economy. China, in contrast, sold the world windmills and solar panels while it opened a new coal-fired power plant per month.

What was the net effect of this “Green” Marshall Plan? Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.

We also saw the de-industrialization of the European and American economies — not just with higher prices at the gas pump and on electric bills, but a stealth green tax that was passed on to consumers on everything. This is the culprit of our American and global affordability crisis. So much treasure and pain for a 2 percent reduction in the share of hydrocarbons.

Ironically, a byproduct of this Green Hunger Games was political populism.

What a tilting-at-windmills waste. The worst bang for the public and private buck ever. Yet, the Chicken Little believers of the Church of Settled Science and the grifters who profited from it will still sing in unison that it failed because they did not go far enough. If only the global community spent and regulated more!

As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

  • Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
  • Blocking oil and gas pipelines
  • Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
  • Cutting U.S. military spending
  • Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE NEED TO PREPARE FOR THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE U.S. USES MILITARY COERCION AGAINST CANADA:

Donald Trump promised that under his leadership the U.S. would eschew “nation building,” “forever wars,” “regime change,” and violent foreign engagements more generally.

Yet since his second inauguration, he’s ordered military action in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq; bombed Iran’s nuclear weapons complexes; and blown up more than a score of boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean. In just the past two weeks, he has launched missiles against Islamic terrorists in northern Nigeria, declared that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” for another attack on Iran, and now decapitated Venezuela’s government.

In this context, Canadians must acknowledge the real risk that Mr. Trump will use military coercion against our country.

We would be greeted as liberators:

UPDATE: Why would we need to use military coercion and bombs? Trump knows a thing or two about real estate deals, right?

Posted at 6:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Trump targets Venezuela’s oil, US firms stay wary.

The New Hotness? “We seized Nicolas Maduro in order to bring gay marriage to Venezuela, in Tucker’s eyes the most ‘conservative’ country in the New World. You can’t make this stuff up:”

Ride the rainbow-colored Mobius loop! Last year began with “Gay and transgender liberals around the country…arming themselves over perceived concerns they’ll be rounded up and placed in ‘concentration camps’ under a second Trump administration, according to a report,” and this year begins with Tucker claiming that Trump wants to bring gay marriage to Venezuela.

Trump’s been an advocate of domestic partnerships for gay people as early as 2000, and “days after being elected in 2016 in a ‘60 Minutes’ interview, he said he was ‘fine’ with same-sex marriage,” but I’m pretty sure that expanding gay rights in South America isn’t a major component of the Donroe Doctrine.

Related: Ben Shapiro Calls Out Tucker Carlson’s Claim ‘Globo Homo’ People Wanted Venezuela’s Maduro Ousted.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Seriously, WTF is wrong with Tucker?

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEVER FORGET:

The late Norm Macdonald tried to warn us of the violence of the radical right wing protestors:

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BON APPÉTIT ANOINTS THE DEMOCRATS’ LATEST ‘NEXT BIG THING:’

There are few positions in life greater than being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party; you start getting ludicrously generous coverage, even from publications that are only marginally connected to politics. Back in 2007, Men’s Vogue suddenly put former North Carolina senator John Edwards on the cover. (An actual sentence from the profile: “The hair, up close, is peppered with tiny strands of blond. Chestnut brown and so finely trimmed, mellifluous, smooth, and feathery, it could almost be a weave, the Platonic ideal as imagined by the Hair Club for Men.”)

Back in 2008, Men’s Health declared longtime smoker Barack Obama was one of the 25 fittest men in America. And who could forget Beto O’Rourke on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2019, declaring he was “was born” to be in the presidential race, with his glum-looking dog seeming to know how his presidential bid was going to go? Or the French fashion magazine Marie Claire putting failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on the cover in 2021?

This isn’t just garden-variety liberal media bias; these are once-apolitical publications suddenly giving laudatory soft-focus coverage of a figure, portraying him as the coolest guy ever. In these profiles, the not-so-political audience of the magazine usually doesn’t get told a lot about the figure’s policy positions; often those positions are airbrushed beyond recognition. (In 2017, Vogue insisted that New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand was an economic centrist, an iconoclast, and a campaigning powerhouse with cross-party appeal. She was and is none of those things.)

Bon Appetit has announced that the year is Springtime for Graham Platner, but there are a few problems here.  As Jim Geraghty writes, “Hey, just out of curiosity… if a Republican Senate candidate said he had accidentally gotten a logo of the Nazi SS tattooed to his chest, would they be getting soft-focus glowing profiles in major culinary magazines? Nah, I didn’t think so.”

Tweet continues:

In a deep, gravely voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in a truck commercial, he talks about his decade of military service, and “farming oysters to feed my community.” Interspliced are shots of him hauling up oyster cages, sliding a knife into an oyster to shuck it, handing a fresh oyster to a little girl. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he growls. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”*

I’m picturing some readers asking, “what the f— is this Pyongyang-level propaganda doing in my food and recipes magazine?”

You could see last year when the DNC-MSM hype machine was getting waaaay over its skis trying to promote the candidate du jour:

With brats and coconuts failing to catch on, the following month, the DNC-MSM tried to achieve strength through joy (a slogan which Platner might appreciate as well):

In the last full month of the campaign, things were getting eye-poppingly bad for the left:

“Like a magic spell from Dungeons and Dragons, being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party also grants the bearer of that title temporary immunity to all potential criticisms and attacks,” Geraghty writes. “But as Walz demonstrated, once you lose that title, you also lose that immunity, and past scandals can catch up with you.”

* Isn’t it always?

UPDATE: Via Joseph Campbell, New York magazine’s Dewey Defeats Truman moment in 2016:

As the magazine’s editors admitted a couple of weeks later, “even as we stubbornly maintain that the image is more complex than a certain notorious, erroneous headline from 1948, it is true that seeing the cover on the newsstand after Election Day makes us cringe — and that the vote turned an image meant to be provocative into one that perhaps feels hubristic instead.”

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll