ANNOUNCEMENT: new comments system is now operating [scroll down for newer posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

[I’m planning to pin this post to the top of the page for at least a few days, so scroll down for newer posts.]

I’ve turned on the new comments system and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ve already tested it out in various ways and it appears to be operating pretty well, as far as I can tell. But if you have any problems with it, please let me know in an email. You can find my email address underneath the photo at the top of the blog (the apple, books, and pointe shoes on the table). Click where it says “Email.”

If you’ve been commenting here already you shouldn’t experience any changes when you try to comment. As long as you use the username you’ve been using right along, and the email address you’ve been using right along (even if it’s not a real one), your comments should post without any problems and you wouldn’t even notice anything new if I hadn’t posted this announcement.

However, new commenters – that is, people with new usernames and/or new email addresses – will find that their first comment goes into moderation. It will not appear until I approve it. When I see it – which would be the next time I check the moderated comments, so there might be a time lag of a few hours – I will either approve it or disapprove it. If I approve it, you become a regular commenter and your future comments should post smoothly without going into moderation again.

So, in summary: old commenters no problem. New commenters, the first comment is moderated and after that no problem.

At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

California as the next South Africa

The New Neo Posted on by

When people think of South Africa – at least, people over fifty – they tend to think of its apartheid history. But in the decades since apartheid ended, South Africa’s efforts to undo those wrongs have caused extremely serious problems of their own [emphasis mine]:

It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. …

After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.

South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.

Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. …

Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.

I don’t pretend it’s not a dilemma to figure out how to proceed when one portion of a country has been severely discriminated against for that long and some sort of corrective is necessary. But I’m convinced that reverse racial preferences are not the answer.

The authors of that piece, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe, claim that California is in danger of following in South Africa’s footsteps (without South Africa’s apartheid history):

[California’s] leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.

For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. …

This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.

During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.

The rest of the article goes into the particulars.

Fascism explained

The New Neo Posted on by

The term “fascist” is thrown around so much – and so inaccurately – these days that it’s come to mean “anyone with whom I disagree and think is doing bad things.” Most people haven’t a clue what it means except for that. I’m one of those people who has bothered to research it and understands the basics. But the following video taught me a lot that I hadn’t known, and I think it’s a valuable listen.

James Lindsay is the interviewee:

Vance reveals himself, and it’s not pretty

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been clear for quite some time that Vance has been flirting with the Tucker Carlson wing of the anti-Israel right. He’s refused to separate himself from Carlson by criticizing him, no matter how egregiously anti-Israel Tucker becomes; how many lies he tells or liars he platforms; or how friendly he is towards Putin, Qatar, and towards Islam as a religion of supposed tolerance of Christianity. This has been worrisome and caused people to wonder just how far Vance’s alliance with Carlson goes. Has he just been trying to keep the Carlson wing under the shelter of the big tent, or is he in agreement with Tucker?

Yesterday Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some things that indicate agreement with Carlson. Here’s a report:

JD Vance has claimed he is the target of an Israeli-funded propaganda campaign over his Iran peace push, and that Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the ‘highest levels’ of Mossad.

The vice president made the explosive allegations during a nearly three-hour sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan.

Vance pointed to a Time magazine report he said proved American influencers were being paid to attack the Iran deal. The report notes that money has flowed through a former Trump campaign operative and is bankrolled by elements of the Israeli government.

‘My response to that is, well, go to hell,’ Vance said of those taking the cash to smear him. The vice president, who complained he has been branded an anti-Semite, declared that Israel is losing the public opinion battle in America.

He also said that ‘figures’ inside the Israeli government are manipulating American public opinion to keep the war going ‘indefinitely.’

Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’

These are claims that have been aired by the Tucker wing for quite some time, and the evidence for them is extremely poor and mostly rumor and innuendo. The following is about Vance’s allegation about Israel sabotaging the peace negotiations, which he says he based on an article in Time:

… [T]here is apparently a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to derail negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, according to Vice President JD Vance on Joe Rogan’s show last night. Why is the Vice President perpetuating this dubious claim? The reason is simple: it benefits him too.

Much like other theories that find a home on Rogan’s podcast, this one is thinly sourced and vastly misinterpreted. The article Vance cites for this conspiracy does indeed point to an Israeli-funded influence operation—a FARA-registered, Israeli-government-funded campaign, run through political consultant Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X, pushing pro-Israel content into the MAGA ecosystem, including through paid influencers who reportedly received suggested language via private group chats and compensation tied to engagement.

Where the article cuts against him is on the one point his whole story depends on: that this was a deliberate campaign built “to derail the negotiations” and keep the war going indefinitely. The Time magazine reporting establishes no such intent. Per the article, the contracted goal was preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel—a reputation campaign, not an anti-ceasefire operation. The sabotage motive is Vance’s attribution, not the reporting’s finding.

And the two people best positioned to know deny his version.

So, whatever you think of Vance’s using a Time story as support for his allegations, he’s not even citing it properly.

Vance was heavily involved in the negotiations with Iran. Now he’s indicating that he didn’t fail; Israel stabbed him in the back. I wonder if this sort of statement on Vance’s part represents a rift between Vance and Trump on this or whether Vance is doing this with Trump’s permission, to keep the Tuckeresque right in the GOP camp for the midterms.

Another statement of Vance’s is somewhat in the same vein:

Vance then shifted to the administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal, revealing that the disgraced financier ‘clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence’ and ‘Israeli intelligence.’

When Rogan noted that most people believe Epstein was working for Mossad, the vice president did not dispute it. Vance noted that it was Mossad ‘or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country or both.’

Vance, who described himself as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on Epstein, said that anything tying the pedophile to spy agencies was likely destroyed after 2006 – when the financier was first arrested.

Get it? Epstein was a Mossad agent but he conveniently destroyed the evidence, so we can never know.

Actually, Epstein had “connections” to a lot of people who had nothing to do with his pedophilia; he was a famous guy with a lot of money and influence. I would have hoped this sort of insinuation would be beneath Vance, but apparently not:

On Epstein, the vice president agreed with Rogan that the financier was running an operation to pressure or compromise powerful people.

‘I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there,’ Vance said, though he admitted he cannot prove it.

‘And I promise you there’s not some document, at least that I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.’

There, Vance sounds like Candace Owens, who likes to say she doesn’t know-know but she knows.

More here:

Asked by Rogan how he was being attacked, Vance pointed to social media posts and leaks to reporters.

“They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely,” he said.

Vance said critics had accused him of being influenced by Qatar and other foreign governments and of taking “marching orders from Tucker Carlson.” …

“When I open up the pages of Time Magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and, oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, well, go to hell,” Vance said.

Boo hoo, those Israeli-funded meanies were attacking him and that’s why Iran didn’t just give in to his brilliant negotiations.

It’s also of relevance that Vance chose the Joe Rogan podcast to air these grievances against Israel and these excuses for himself. Rogan is not Israel-friendly, nor is his main audience. I doubt Vance would go on Tucker’s show – Vance is smart, and he knows better than that. But Rogan’s show is the next best thing without being especially controversial.

For quite some time I’ve hoped that Rubio is the GOP presidential candidate in 2028. I’m certainly open to other possibilities, but so far Vance is not one of them.

[NOTE: When Carlson decided to split from the Republican Party, I wondered who he’d be supporting for the presidency in 2028. For a while I considered that Tucker himself might want to run. But now it occurs to me that it’s possible that he’d be supporting Vance for the head of a third party. This would be disastrous, IMHO, and could easily cause a Democrat to win if enough people ended up supporting Vance.

I’m not saying this will happen. I still think Vance wants to be the GOP nominee. But if he doesn’t get the nomination, I can easily imagine a situation in which he goes third-party to ally with Tucker and Tucker’s followers.]

Rumors about Trump’s talk tomorrow night

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of rumors are swirling around about the talk Trump is scheduled to give to the nation tomorrow night at 9 PM Eastern Time. They all seem to involve some sort of statement about fraud – or at least “rigging” in terms of foreign influence – in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

In a way it’s old news, but Trump promises something new. You can see some of the rumors at Ace’s (see this), but what Trump has actually said so far is this:

Speaking in the Oval Office two days ahead of the planned address, Trump affirmed the speech would focus on elections and a “couple of other things.” …

… Trump framed the elections portion of his Thursday speech as the centerpiece. Two sources said he is expected to focus on voting machine security and alleged efforts by foreign nations to influence elections.

“It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up,” Trump said during a meeting with Iraq’s prime minister.

“It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” the president added. “We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”

It could be about the SAVE Act. It could be about nearly anything related to elections. But I am convinced that, whatever he says – for example, if he produced what ordinarily would be considered ironclad evidence of fraud in previous elections – at least half the nation would not believe it. They don’t believe anything he says or anything his confederates say. They believe that everything and anything that comes from the GOP is fabricated, fake, false.

NOTE: Speaking of which, Chuck Grassley writes on X that he has evidence about prosecutor Jack Smith:

I received records frm DOJ confirming Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Im 1 of the 44

Im alerting my colleagues who were impacted and will release the records w Sen Johnson so American ppl can see the evidence.

Most of the responses on X are from angry people saying they’re tired of this sort of thing without any prosecutions of high-up perpetrators such as Smith.

Permanent Daylight Savings Time?

The New Neo Posted on by

Congress may be about to make Daylight Savings Time the permanent time in the US, rather than shifting back and forth seasonally between Standard and DST. The seasonal shifting is annoying to many people, but the change would pit the Morning People against the Night People.

Summer isn’t the problem; it’s winter that creates the issue. Do you want you or your children to get up in the dark to go to work or school – something you may be doing already anyway if your start time is early? Or do you want the depressing experience of night falling long before the afternoon is finished? Your answer matters not only on whether you favor Night or Morning, plus how early work or school starts, but on your latitude and your east-west location in your time zone. The more north you live and the more to the east in your zone, the more extreme your winter/summer sunrise and sunset times.

I live in the north, and I live in the east of a time zone, and let’s just say I’ve never been a Morning Person. Even as a little child – and I mean aged 2 or 3 – I would balk at going to bed for the evening in what I considered the daytime. Luckily, though, because I lived in NYC, school began at 9 AM and I never had to get up for school in the dark until I started junior high.

I’d like to see school begin at 9 AM for everyone. There’s evidence that children, especially teenagers, have trouble with the early start times because they need a lot of sleep. My junior high and high school were overcrowded and we had split sessions at times, and I still remember what it felt like when school began at 7:30 AM. And no one cared that we were going to school in the dark, either.

I’m not at all sure this bill will pass the Senate, so it could all be moot.

I will now quote Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem which I loved as a child, for obvious reasons:

BED IN SUMMER

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

And now I’ve updated it for the present dilemma. I only took about ten minutes to do it, so it’s not one of my better efforts. But I couldn’t resist:

Would you prefer the winter dark
In morning to delay the lark?
Or have it be in afternoon
That you can spy the rising moon?

Because there’s no way to evade
The shortened days that winter made.
You have to choose your times, and then
In summer find long days again.

The Morning People rise with joy
In all seasons, but they annoy
We Night Folk, who would like to sleep
While birds are silent, not a peep.

But summer is the season all
Are happy with the late nightfall.
The further north that you reside
The more the daylight does abide.

I’m baaaack

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned in the Open Thread that today is the Ides of July.

When I was about to start writing, the blog went down. Nor was it the usual “too many requests” problem. This time the glitch was at the level of the host’s server, and it affected quite a few sites. I don’t know how many, but when I phoned the server the agent told me that a whole tranche of their hosted sites were down, and that it would probably take “a few hours” to fix the issue. It seems to have taken close to three hours.

This sort of thing is frustrating. But it happens now and then with all hosts, as far as I can tell. A while back I looked into changing hosts, and there seemed to be many problems reported for all of them. So I’ve stuck with mine, for better or for worse.

Apologies to everyone who was trying to access the site this afternoon. But at least it wasn’t that something was wrong with this particular blog.

Meanwhile, I used part of the down time to work on a document in Word, and discovered that a recent update there had generated a bunch of automatic things that I don’t want. For instance, there were constant AI prompts trying to guess what I wanted to write next. I do not want that sort of “help.” But to figure out how to turn it off was not the easiest thing, although I finally accomplished it.

Technical stuff; gotta love it.

Back to the future: Ayers and other 60s leftist radicals

The New Neo Posted on by

See this for a stroll down memory lane, and not an especially pleasant one:

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases. …

But what [Obama] actually stood for was sitting in the third row and wearing the Communist star. The media didn’t even believe that Obama’s mentor getting a front row seat to the opening of his presidential center while wearing the symbol of a movement responsible for the mass murder of millions mattered.

Bill Ayers was pretty clear about what Obama represented. “The people who tried to say that Obama palled around with terrorists, that he had Palestinian friends, that he had a black nationalist minister, none of that s___ worked,” Ayers told the one reporter who stopped him to chat.

Some of us – actually, many of us – were quite aware of what Obama stood for even back in 2008. The media and the left (but I repeat myself) were devoted to covering it up. But apparently there’s no need to cover it up any more.

Those of us of a certain age can remember the 60s quite well:

The Weathermen were a murderous Marxist terrorist organization dedicated to bringing down the United States. After they realized that planting bombs wouldn’t work, they turned to politics.

And the radicals accomplished with politics what they never managed to do with explosives.

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men,” Prairie Fire, a book co-authored by Ayers, Dohrn and other radicals declared. “Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.”

Barack Obama may have seated his two terrorist mentors in the front rows, but he made no direct reference to them, except for having “found my community here, friendships that would last a lifetime.”

Ah, but remember that Obama claimed back during his first campaign that Ayers was someone he hardly knew, just “a guy” who lived “in the neighborhood.” I wrote this post about the Obama-Ayers connection in 2008 prior to Obama’s first election, and I was hardly alone. But the media was engaged in covering it up, and they succeeded.

So here we are. Ayers is 81 years old now, and retired. But he has managed to have an outsized influence on politics by going into academia and focusing on the field of teaching teachers to teach. That’s how he has shaped the beliefs of several generations of students. He must be very very proud:

Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues. …

Ayers was elected vice president for curriculum studies by the American Educational Research Association in 2008.[48] William H. Schubert, a fellow professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote that his election was “a testimony of [Ayers’s] stature and [the] high esteem he holds in the field of education locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally”. Writer Sol Stern, a conservative opponent of progressive education policies, has criticized Ayers as having a virulent “hatred of America”, and said, “Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer.” …

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs]

Funny stuff.

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) It’s official; the 60-day clock has resumed on the Iran War:

President Donald Trump formally notified lawmakers this weekend that the nation is once again at war with Iran, giving his administration another 60-day clock to use the military in the region without congressional approval.

In a letter to Congress dated July 10, obtained by POLITICO, Trump stated that the strikes that began on July 7 represent “military action consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States’ interests both at home and abroad.”

The ceasefire is over – but we already knew that.

(2) Iranian oil shipments are being blockaded again by the US. And this time, Trump wants reimbursement from ships that pass through – or at least, that’s what he’s saying at the moment:

“The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’” he claimed. “But as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World.”

As this NY Post article says:

Trump announced the concept on Monday — after months of rejecting Iran’s plan for post-war tolls — in what could amount to a negotiating tactic. …

The US government has announced no concrete steps toward imposing the levy.

Trump’s abrupt announcement is a break from his longstanding position that the strait should be toll-free after the conflict ends with Tehran — so much so that administration insiders believe he’s establishing space to negotiate with the Islamic Republic, which wants to impose its own fees.

(3) A prominent British politician named Ann Widdecomb has been murdered, and there is a suspect who has been arrested:

The killing of former British politician Ann Widdecombe is now being considered an act of terror, police said Monday.

A 28-year-old man in custody on suspicion of murder was rearrested on suspicion of commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, Counter Terrorism Policing South East said.

Devon and Cornwall Police originally said the killing was not believed to be a terror-related crime and there was nothing to suggest it was politically motivated.

“We now have new information and evidence that means Counter Terrorism Policing is now leading the investigation,” said the head of National Counter Terrorism Policing, Laurence Taylor.

Widdecomb was a conservative and had recently supported Reform. The man arrested has not been named, nor do we know what flavor of terrorism they’re talking about.

(4) Some rich people are fleeing New York, leading to a tax decline:

The analysis shows New York’s share of millionaires fell from 12.7% in 2010 to just 8.7% in 2022 — the steepest decline of any state in the country.

As a direct result, personal income tax collections in 2022 alone were roughly $10.7 billion lower than they otherwise would have been if they had maintained their share of the wealthy folks. The study makes clear that the people leaving pay a disproportionately large share of state taxes,

(5) 82-year-old woman falls into tub, is injured, and survives nine days there before rescue. An impressive will to live.

Non-citizens are voting

The New Neo Posted on by

We do know it’s happening, but the real question is “in what numbers?”:

A small town Kansas mayor born in Mexico. A Filipino senior citizen living in Hawaii. Two Pakistani men residing in New Jersey. An Aussie in Louisiana. And a Chinese student studying at the University of Michigan. They all have one thing in common.

Each has been charged in the last year with illegally voting in U.S. federal elections as foreigners, part of a sudden wave of prosecutions led by the Trump Justice Department for a crime that used to be among the rarest in the federal court system.

The Trump Justice Department has secured about two dozen non-citizens voting arrests, prosecutions or convictions in the last few months alone, with about another 90 more cases under investigation, officials told Just the News. And all 50 states were sent notices this month that election officials can and will be prosecuted too if they allow non-citizens to vote.

Until now, prosecutors haven’t been especially interested in pursuing the possibility. And so it’s been easy to say it just doesn’t happen. But the DOJ has started to focus on the phenomenon, and these cases are the result. How many more are there?:

Trump administration officials like Dhillon believe the total number of foreigners who made it onto voter rolls will grow into the hundreds of thousands when all the reviews of state voter rolls are completed.

Many blue and even some red states are fighting in court to block the DOJ from examining their voter rolls. The dozen or so states that have cooperated in some form have identified 20,000 to 30,000 non-citizens on their rolls, officials said. A much larger bloc of non-citizens is expected to be found in non-cooperating states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, the officials said.

Being on the rolls isn’t the same thing as actually voting, of course. But the two can certainly be connected, especially in states that send out ballots by mail without voters having requested them.

This is part of the reason Americans feel increased distrust of the validity of US elections. Here’s a poll:

In a national survey from the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections (CTTE) at the University of California San Diego, produced in collaboration with the university’s Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research, 60% of respondents said they are confident votes will be counted accurately nationwide in the 2026 midterms. Just after the 2024 presidential election, that figure stood at 77%, a 17-point drop.

The survey of 11,406 eligible voters, conducted Dec. 19, 2025 through Jan. 12, 2026, shows trust declining by 17 percentage points among Republicans, 13 points among Democrats and 16 points among independents. The decline spans party lines, though the sources of skepticism vary.

Of course they vary, and they vary in the way you might expect:

Only 27% of Democrats, 21% of independents and 35% of Republicans say they trust that district lines are drawn in a way that fairly reflects what voters want. …

Republicans expressed higher levels of distrust about mail ballots and whether noncitizens will be prevented from casting ballots, while Democrats’ distrust focused on redistricting efforts.

Not good.