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.

The viral video of an ocean rescue

The New Neo Posted on by

You may already have seen this; it’s really quite impressive:

And here’s the father of the 10-year-old who was saved:

When you think about it, the difference between 10 years old and 16 years old isn’t really so great – not in years, anyway. But it can make all the difference in the world.

The lifeguard was very very determined:

A 16-year-old rookie lifeguard hailed by President Trump after a dramatic California beach rescue says he made one decision as towering waves crashed around him: “I wasn’t going to let go of that kid.”

“He was going to drown, and I wasn’t going to let that happen,” Ryder Williams later told his father, retired firefighter Shane Williams, after rescuing 10-year-old Nathaniel Rai from violent surf at Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz on Saturday. …

“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to return the child to his family safely,” Williams said. “This is my job and I love what I do.”

This is my job and I love what I do. As I said, impressive.

Fauci and the Fifth

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of Fauci’s taking the Fifth right now, although I plan to write more about Fauci. In the legal sense, however, I think that his taking the Fifth can be justified in terms of protecting himself from self-incrimination for any future state prosecution. After all, his pardon – if it holds up despite its autopen aspects – only applies to federal prosecutions.

I also defer to Alan Dershowitz on the subject of Fauci’s taking the Fifth even regarding possible federal crimes, as described in this comment (the actual article by Dershowitz is behind a paywall). I’m not sure about this part, though:

Fauci almost certainly has useful information that would help in this process. The best thing for our nation and for the world, would be to give Fauci total immunity and question him about everything he knows without giving him the right to refuse to answer questions on the ground that his answers might tend to incriminate him.

Can Congress give immunity against state prosecution? I wouldn’t think so. Perhaps, however, it can give immunity for anything said during a Congressional investigation, even if a state decides to prosecute?

The DSA plan for NYC schools

The New Neo Posted on by

As bad as the public school system in New York City already is, there are plans to make it worse. And I’ll reiterate that, although you may not care about NYC, as these ascendant leftists get more power it will be the plan elsewhere.

The article describes a meeting of radical DSA educators in New York City, mostly connected with CUNY (The City University of New York):

“We need to overhaul the curriculum in a class consciousness frame. . . . The curriculum as a whole needs to be relooked at, revisioned and reframed,” the CUNY Kingsborough Community College professor [Maureen Fadem] said.

The meeting, titled “Planning for Socialist School Governance,” was led by NYC DSA Labor Working Group co-chair Nina Bruckenthal, a math teacher at NEST+m, a public science-oriented K-12 school on the Lower East Side, and Amanda Vender, an ESL teacher at the International High School of Sciences in Elmhurst, Queens. …

The DSA educators vowed to use their connections to fellow socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get their agenda through, and also conspired to use upcoming contract negotiations to realize their far-left goals. …

The UFT contract for Gotham teachers is set to expire Nov. 28, 2027 and the DSA has progressively been strengthening its grip on the union.

An especially chilling portion of the article quotes one of the teachers acknowledging that the idea of indoctrinating children in this way isn’t popular with the public. The solution? To further oppose school choice and charter schools and make such schools even more difficult to access. The New York City public school system is already shunned by parents who can afford to do so and to send their children to private or parochial schools. But for those less affluent, there is at least the possibility of securing a place for their children in charter schools. The rest – about 75% of the children in NYC – are in the public school system, and the statistics look like this:

In 2024-25, there were 906,248 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:

16.8 percent of students were English Language Learners
22.4 percent were students with disabilities
75.3 percent were economically disadvantaged
Race or ethnicity:
42.3 percent Hispanic
19.3 percent Black
18.7 percent Asian and Pacific Islander
16.1 percent White
2.0 percent Multi-Racial
1.2 percent Native American

Note the large number of students whose native language is not English and who need extra help with English (“English Language Learners”), the large number who are coded with disabilities, and the absolutely enormous number who are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The latter designation means the child is getting some sort of welfare and/or is in foster care. Note also that white students are among the smallest ethnic groups in the system.

Therefore it’s quite clear that, if these DSA teachers get their way, they’ll be ramming this far-left propaganda down the throats of the children who are very much in need of basic instruction in traditional school subjects, and who have little access to alternatives to the regular public schools. These children will be used as guinea pigs by teachers who could not care less what the children or their families actually need or actually want.

Transgender dolls for children: what could possibly go wrong?

The New Neo Posted on by

I consider this child abuse:

“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old.

The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head.

The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups.

Prototypes of the dolls were shown in a 2024 conference where one named “Sam” can be seen in what appears to be some phase of a gender transition, with a detachable penis off to the side, and a dress and girls’ underwear within reach.

The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers …

This is terrible on so many levels. From the article, it seems they will be used with children who already “identify” as trans. But any child young enough to be playing with dolls is too young to be on such a track, and certainly it’s not the school that should be dealing with fostering this.

These dolls are wrong wrong wrong; attempting to become trans is not a game. So-called “bottom” surgery is so far from being a game that it is an obscenity to promote it or even visualize it in this way – for children, with dolls. It is a profoundly serious and disfiguring surgery with lifelong effects and dangers, and it is irreversible. It should never be marketed to children in any way or made into a game using a paper doll with easily detachable genitalia. There is no analogy to bottom surgery or to what human beings who undergo it experience.

And there’s also the problem of mission creep. Do we really think these dolls will be limited to children already saying they are trans? I very much doubt it; that’s not the way such things tend to work. These dolls should absolutely never be shown to children in general. Talk about fostering a little old-fashioned castration anxiety – not to mention just plain old anxiety and confusion of all kinds.

But sowing that sort of confusion is the point, isn’t it?

The jihadi attack on the German gay pride festival

The New Neo Posted on by

The man who plowed his vehicle into a crowd at a gay pride festival in Berlin (and also went at the crowd with a machete) wasn’t just a known wolf – he was a very well-known wolf and there had been plenty of opportunities to prevent this. But the government seemed intent on releasing him in an act of suicidal empathy. Well, he’s dead now, killed by police after having killed one person and injuring many many others.

From Matt Taibbi, as quoted at PJ Media:

In sum, a Berlin-born man of Lebanese descent [the attacker] left Germany last year to join the ISIS militia, failed to reach Mauritania, failed to reach Syria, got arrested and sentenced in his family’s home country of Lebanon for ‘incitement to religious and sectarian conflict,’ then successfully returned to Germany to be arrested again,” Taibbi writes.

“He was convicted for planning a serious act of terrorist violence, but released despite a Prosecutor’s request for a ‘longer, non-probationary sentence for the juvenile’ — the 21-year-old juvenile — and put into ‘deradicalization counseling,’ which was about to report him for being ‘inscrutable,’ evasive, and a threat,” Taibbi continued. …

“Instead of examining border control policies that welcome back terrorist offenders so they can immediately be put into a criminal justice system that bars long sentences for 21-year-old ‘juveniles,’ or a probation policy that thinks it can counsel people out of religious fanaticism, the [New York] Times points the finger at a chancellor who refused to fly a Pride flag over parliament,” writes Taibbi.

So apparently it’s the right’s fault, of course.

Germany is in big trouble if it continues down this path. But Germany is hardly alone.

How was the suspect killed? Here’s the story:

“According to current findings, he is said to have rushed toward our emergency forces with a stabbing weapon, after which police firearms were used,” the Berlin Police said in a post on X, confirming that the confrontation occurred at approximately 6 p.m. local time Sunday. It went on to say that resuscitation efforts at the scene proved unsuccessful.

Is “a stabbing weapon” some sort of circumlocution to avoid naming the forbidden thing?

German authorities seem to think that their locating the suspect in such a timely fashion is something to brag about. But I would think that preventing him from being able to do this in the first place would have been much better. And in this case, this man already had fully demonstrated his dangerousness and should and could have been either deported or imprisoned. But it didn’t happen.

The DSA lets us know its plans

The New Neo Posted on by

At least some DSA members have pulled the mask off. One of those people is DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer, whom we can assume speaks for the group and not just for herself. They must have decided that it’s time.

Watch for yourself – it’s only about seven minutes long:

She’s such a chipper, happy warrior. She’s got the answers, too: the reason people come here from other countries that are awful is that we have “destabilized” those countries. Once the DSA candidates are elected, we won’t be a destabilizing force in the world, and people won’t be motivated to flee their home countries and come here. She’s positing a kind of “end of history,” in which the DSA’s taking power would function as a sort of Second Coming, ushering an age in which the lion will lie down with the lamb and we won’t have to enforce our immigration laws because all places on earth will be fine – or at least, stable, their natural state before we intervened.

Oh, and as for criminals, it’s pretty much the same thing. With the DSA in charge and income inequality and all those other awful things corrected and all the various sorts of social justice achieved, the number of violent criminals will be almost nonexistent and we won’t need prisons as we know them anymore.

The cult aspects of leftism are very much in evidence here, including her calm and smiling demeanor.

NOTE: I was curious to learn how old Romer is, and a bit of her background. This site says she is supposedly forty-three years old, and that her background prior to her DSA involvement (which began in 2018) was as “a freelance writer covering music, arts, and travel, and … editor in chief and publisher at Arioso Press, a small independent publishing operation.” That seems about right.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Fauci takes the Fifth. The gist of his statement prior to questioning is that he’s great and Rand Paul is a vindictive meanie forcing him to do this. From Fauci:

However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, “behind bars.” Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.

Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution …

Interesting approach. It’s Paul who’s the sick one, strangely obsessed with this self-aggrandizing public servant who lied to us and made countless people suffer.

(2) Fetterman continues to say sensible things that have the advantage of also being true:

Fetterman openly admitted that early in the pandemic he had dismissed the lab-leak theory largely because it had been labeled a “right-wing” idea. Just like his colleagues. Just like the media. And he confessed that partisanship may have blinded him to evidence that deserved serious consideration.

He identified it as one of his “regrets” during the pandemic.

(3) In no surprise – a phrase I sometimes tire of writing – we learn that China has been paying reporters for good press:

A years-long Chinese influence operation quietly targeted the people responsible for deciding how Americans understood Communist China.

An investigation by this publication identified at least 26 prominent American journalists, editors and broadcasters brought to China through a delegation program run by the Committee of 100, an organization repeatedly linked to figures and institutions inside the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front. The United Front is China’s military-grade influence network described by U.S. officials as working to “co-opt and neutralize sources of opposition” to the CCP with various tactics including pay-for-play trips.

The targets included managing editors, editorial-page chiefs, bureau leaders, nationally syndicated columnists and influential broadcasters from: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR, PBS, WNYC, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Affairs, USA Today, Financial Times.

The records reveal a deliberate propaganda model: identify the Americans controlling China coverage, bring them through a carefully managed experience inside the country, provide privileged access to Beijing-approved interlocutors and send them back into their newsrooms with friendlier views of China.

They probably get a lot of bang for their buck, by choosing already-sympathetic people and then feeding them information that amplifies their favorable coverage.

(4) Netanyahu says he’s coming to NYC despite Mamdani’s bluster:

“I’m going to New York,” Netanyahu said during an interview with “Hannity” following his White House meeting with President Donald Trump Tuesday.

“I’m going to speak the truth in front of this hate-spewing elected official who’s pitting one group of New Yorkers against the others. He’s turning them against New York Jews.” …

“What are we in the 1930s? What is this? So much hate, so many lies,” Netanyahu told host Sean Hannity.

I assume that Netanyahu has among the best security details in the world. But still, he doesn’t control security in the streets of NYC. Mamdani is grandstanding and trying to foment vicious demonstrations, at the very least.

(5) Another case of alleged plagiarism in the work of a high-up black professor, this time in England:

The University of Cambridge is facing calls to commission an independent inquiry into plagiarism claims surrounding one of its most high-profile professors.

An earlier analysis of Prof Arday’s PhD thesis for The Telegraph had identified more than 100 passages that were identical or nearly identical to another student.

I see that quite a few of the first responses to the tweet on X right now defend Arday and minimize or ignore the plagiarism:

The racists are absolutely tumescent with delight that they have yet another excuse to knock a high achieving minority.

In other words, racists on the right pounce.

Also:

Another attempt from a right wing paper to destroy the life of an aspiring successful black person! Shame on them!

And:

Perish the thought students helped each other with their thesis. “more than 100 passages” – what length are these passages? Are they just sentences or paragraphs? Passages tells us nothing except the Telegraph is trying to be sensational

Also:

Can’t wait to find out who the telegraph is lining up for me to hate tomorrow, after completely falling for this thinly veiled race hate stoking bollocks, I used to have to go out and buy national front propaganda for stuff like this but Elon now puts it straight into my phone!

Blah blah blah.

Why attacks on Jews lead to more Jew-hatred

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got something like twenty drafts of posts dealing with different aspects of Jew-hatred. The topic is so multi-faceted and so overwhelming that most of them have remained in draft form and never been finished and published.

But it’s a topic so important that I need to deal with it more often. Why is it so important, and not just to Jews? It’s an old saying but it’s true that the Jews are the canaries in the coalmine. Jew-hatred is the mark of a society that’s sick. It’s also a sign of evil, if you want to get metaphysical about it. And it’s one of the longest hatreds in the world, perhaps the longest hatred, and so flexible that it can shape-shift endlessly from old reason to new reason and back again.

There’s the envy part and the contempt part, the “Jews secretly rule the world and are trying to destroy the rest of us” part, the “Jews kill little children and use their blood to make matzoh” part and its current manifestation about Jews purposely killing Palestinian children in a genocidal war, there’s the ancient Islamic hatred of Jews and the ancient Christian “they killed Christ” part that sparked murderous pogroms against Jews, there’s the “Jews poisoned the wells” part and the “Jews want to destroy the white race” part and the “Jews are whites and colonist agents of oppression” part. I’m sure I’ve left some parts out, as well, but you get the idea[s]. Israel-hatred and its double standards are often a screen for Jew-hatred, which gives it a special oomph to which no other country is subjected.

But for the purposes of this post I’ll stick to one idea which I’ve seen expressed more and more often online by Jew-haters. It is, in my opinion, the main reason why Holocaust education not only doesn’t work these days to counter Jew-hatred but often actually works to amplify it. There is also the general tendency of today’s young people to say that the history they’re taught is a lie, but I think another very important part goes like this [my emphasis]:

One lesson … is not to indulge the “fantasy … that imparting information about the murder of the Jews of Europe will ensure its never happening again.” Showcasing one’s own weakness does nothing to placate illiberal enemies. To the contrary, what to the West looks like “innocence” appears more like an admission of guilt to those for whom violence is routine. “Something must be wrong with the Jews if they were selected as a target.”

Paul Berman would elaborate upon this point a decade later, analyzing the seemingly paradoxical success of grotesque Palestinian suicide bombings in turning world opinion against Israel. “Each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis,” because the liberal mind could not could not otherwise make sense of such depravity. “Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt.” Politics against the Jews—indeed against the West that abhors depravity—has only become more explicit over the last three years. If Hamas and the Gazans that followed them to rape and pillage could commit such unspeakable acts, Israel’s sins must be even graver than previously thought. American support for the iniquitous regime, moreover, could not be because it sees Israel as a decent nation and democratic ally, but because the United States is controlled by Zionists.

It seems a paradox, but it has its own logic. Among other things, it makes sense of evil – defining Hamas’ acts on 10/7 as not so much evil as motivated and in some sense justified. It makes order out of the chaos of human life. I’m speaking not of those who spread the lies and hatred with full knowledge that they are spreading lies and hatred, but those who accept the lies as truth and believe themselves to be virtuous in doing so. The argument is that if Jews are attacked far and wide, and have been for centuries, they must have deserved it and continue to deserve it.

Even some Jews succumb to the reasoning. It’s something like what happens with certain abused children: rather than believe the world can be so unjust, they believe that they themselves must have done something very very wrong to be treated that way.

Fascinating discussion of voter fraud, the SAVE Act, and the filibuster

The New Neo Posted on by

This isn’t long – only a little over five minutes (faster if speeded up), and it’s well worth hearing. It’s an interview with Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. He explains why voting fraud is nearly impossible to prove in the court system after the fact (something I’ve been saying for a long time), why the SAVE Act is so important, and he makes a suggestion about how to deal with the filibuster problem.

Mamdani’s tax hit list

The New Neo Posted on by

At first Mamdani’s new property tax was only going to affect people whose primary residence was elsewhere than in New York, and who owned second or third properties in the city worth over five million dollars. That was considered to be a rarified group, nothing much to worry about for ordinary people. That’s the way it was sold to the public.

But funny thing, now it’s come to this:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened a new front in his ongoing battle with New York City’s wealthy after his administration published a searchable database identifying affluent property owners who could be subject to the city’s proposed pied-à-terre tax, a move critics say could expose them to harassment and public safety risks.

The database, released by the city’s Department of Finance, allows users to search properties and view the names and addresses of owners whose non-primary residences could be subject to the proposed tax. …

… A person familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the city has publicly released similar property tax rolls every year for many years in accordance with New York state law. …

However, critics argue the database goes well beyond traditional public records by compiling the names and addresses of affluent property owners into a single, easily searchable location, potentially creating new privacy and security risks. The debate carries added weight in America’s largest city, where public safety remains a persistent political issue and affluent residents have long cited crime as a top concern.

While property ownership records have long been public, opponents say the city’s decision to aggregate them into a dedicated database could make wealthy homeowners more vulnerable to harassment and potential violence.

Of course it makes them more vulnerable. Isn’t that the point? Mamdani got elected by appealing to the Luigi-worshipping crowd, and this will please them no end. It will also give important information to the bolder among them.

But that’s not all. Remember the five million dollar threshold?:

Meanwhile, the Real Estate Board of New York President James Whelan argued that the database also illustrates how broadly the proposed tax could reach beyond the ultra-wealthy residents its supporters have emphasized. Although Mamdani initially promoted the proposal as a tax on secondary homes worth more than $5 million and owned by the “ultra-wealthy and global elites,” the final rules use different Department of Finance valuation thresholds depending on the type of property. According to the New York Post, over 960,000 residences could be listed in the database, which makes it possible to search and download property owners’ information, including their names and addresses.

“What this database really demonstrates is that the second-home tax is far broader and more complicated than its supporters have suggested,” he continued. “Policymakers should take a hard look at the many homeowners who could be swept in despite not fitting the profile of the ultra-wealthy residents this tax was supposedly designed to target.”

For condos, the threshold is now one million dollars. That doesn’t get you all that much in NYC, especially in some parts of it. And although these are second homes, who thinks that’s where Mamdani and the DSA will choose to stop?

More:

“What this database really demonstrates is that the second-home tax is far broader and more complicated than its supporters have suggested,” he continued. “Policymakers should take a hard look at the many homeowners who could be swept in despite not fitting the profile of the ultra-wealthy residents this tax was supposedly designed to target.”

Kulaks never were especially rich, either. They were the topic of envy and resentment nonetheless. And that’s what Mamdani and the DSA trade on – envy and resentment.

More:

At the center of the debate is whether the city can ask more of its wealthiest residents without weakening the tax base that helps fund municipal government.

Ya think?? Thing is, New York City is – or used to be – a special place in which to live, and people were willing to pay a premium to do so. Mamdani and company are assuming it will continue to be attractive to enough rich people (and rich 2nd property owners) to continue to live there or own property there, despite the increased taxes.

The following is no surprise:

Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office asking why the administration chose to publish the searchable database rather than notify affected property owners privately and whether it conducted a legal or privacy review before making the information available online. The office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Here’s Mamdani again:

“If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you’ve got mail,” he crooned last week before promising the initiative would yield “the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world.”

Sure thing. And the best government-run grocery stores.

The tax was originally estimated to affect between 11,200 and 31,000 properties. But guess what? It presently is due to affect 960,000.

Mamdani is malevolent, but he’s not alone. He is part of a movement, one that is growing, one that uses the ignorance and resentment of a large proportion of young people in order to seize power and make society over anew in the image they think best – or at least, the image that will give them the most power.

[NOTE: Speaking of city grocery stores, there’s a lawsuit brewing:

An immigrant-led business group is gearing up to sue New York City over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial plan to open five taxpayer-funded supermarkets — claiming the $70 million project will create unfair competition for nearby stores, The Post has learned.

As the far-left mayor announced new details of his plan this week — including a 30% discount on basic items like produce, meat, milk, cheese and bread – the Multicultural Business Coalition’s board voted to file a lawsuit in the coming weeks to block the pricey initiative, the group’s chairman Frank Garcia told The Post.

“The mayor doesn’t seem to want to sit down with us,” Garcia said, adding that Mamdani “won’t be able to bully these lawyers we are going to bring in.” …

MBC — formed earlier this year to create a unified front against Mamdani’s grocery policy — includes 50 chambers of commerce representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Jewish-owned businesses in New York.

Good luck.

I repeat – whether or not you care about New York City, this is a movement that has no plans to limit itself to NYC.]