Spambot of the day
This bot has a way with words:
His answers circle the question like it’s on fire.
“Affordability”: Democrats and Republicans
“Affordability” is the word du jour, fastened on by the left and considered by them to be a winning approach in the wake of Mamdani’s victory. To the right, that’s puzzling, because it seems quite clear that the Biden administration made things worse in that regard, and it’s been getting at least somewhat better under Trump.
But “somewhat better” isn’t “all better,” even though to expect the latter would be unrealistic.
Here’s a good discussion of this issue, and why it is that people don’t seem to see that electing Democrats isn’t the solution. They discuss it for about 37 minutes, but there’s no need to watch for that long to get the gist of it (and these guys are always entertaining, too):
Then again, the solution to “affordability” means something different to left and right. To the right, it means getting inflation under control and getting wages up. To the left, it means “we give the virtuous among you subsidies,” and “virtue” is defined by the identity group to which you belong.
NOTE: David Foster of Chicago Boyz deals with the issue of “affordability” here.
Europe’s imagology
Europe’s current elites still live in what can be called a “narrated world,” a reality facilitated by institutions, consultants, and public relations machinery. Narration replaces analysis; virtue replaces vision. For three decades, European societies were told that history had ended and that globalization would dissolve geopolitics. The illusion produced intellectual disarmament. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine or China weaponized trade, the continent was shocked, not because these events were unforeseeable, but because they contradicted its preferred narratives. Strategic communication cannot substitute for strategic comprehension.
This reminds me of the triumph of imagology, as described by Milan Kundera decades ago. I’ve written about the concept many times here; this is Kundera’s 1990 quote:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
From that first link, a remedy of sorts is offered:
To recover agency, Europe must first articulate what it stands for beyond comfort and regulation. The starting point is intellectual: to acknowledge that the new Cold War is not a metaphor but a structural reality. The DragonBear will not dissolve through diplomacy, and America’s patience is not infinite.
Next, Europe must translate awareness into capacity by linking industrial and defense policy, incentivizing capital investment, and embedding innovation within security planning. Dual-use technologies, from AI-driven tools to quantum encryption, should define the next generation of European deterrence.
Finally, Europe must reform its leadership class. Institutions that cannot prioritize or exercise agency will never produce strategy. Renewal will come only with a generational shift, led by those who understand that freedom is not merely inherited, but must be safeguarded, defended, and sustained.
… Without a guiding vision, Europe oscillates between moralism and denial. It preaches multilateralism to a world of blocs, advocates dialogue to adversaries who weaponize it, and confuses consensus with strength. The outcome is strategic drift and irrelevance.
Because the US, like Europe, participated in both WWI and WWII, I think we tend to underestimate how different the US and European experiences were in both wars. Both originated in Europe and much of the damage done was accomplished even before the US entered. The number of deaths in Europe were on a different scale, the physical destruction phenomenal and widespread, the suffering far greater. Even the UK, which was never invaded and conquered, endured a great deal of destruction both physical and economic. In many ways, I don’t think Europe ever has recovered, and this even affects younger generations that experienced nothing of the war.
America only started to lose its confidence with the Vietnam War, and although the left has pushed the idea of shame onto Americans it hasn’t quite taken. Trump is hated by the left in part because he refuses to deal in American shame, but instead invokes American pride.
I don’t see Europe taking the advice offered in that article – at least, not western Europe. Eastern Europe, having experienced life under the Soviets, was forced into accepting reality over imagology to a greater extent.
Open thread 12/11/2025
As Trump said, they’re not sending their best
Here’s another poor illegal alien arrested by mean old ICE:
Gerson Emir Cuadra Soto, 33, also known as “Fantasma,” was detained on Monday on immigration-related charges. He is believed to have overseen an MS-13 kill squad called “El Combo,” which is designed to carry out assassinations on behalf of the gang. In his home country of Honduras, he has been charged with four homicides, for which he was imprisoned.
Authorities believe he was involved in the July 2022 assassination of Said Lobo Bonilla, the son of former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Bonilla and three others were gunned down after leaving a nightclub in Tegucigalpa.
However, Cuadra Soto and two of his co-defendants were able to bribe their way out of jail and flee, eventually entering the United States illegally under the Biden Administration. He first entered Texas from Mexico before making his way to California and obtaining a driver’s license under his true identity, the attorney’s office said.
Federal agents tracked Cuadra Soto to his home in Nebraska, where he was taken into custody without incident.
What the Biden administration did in failing to enforce immigration law was incredibly destructive. We knew it was happening, watched it in real time, and couldn’t stop it. Now we are reaping the effects; there are also rumors of impending terrorist attacks as a result. I can’t foretell the future, but what we’ve already seen is bad enough. And yet the Democrats and most of the MSM would have you think that ICE and Trump have declared war on sweet little old abuelas and innocent school kids.
And why is the NY Times just now suddenly discovering that there was a border problem under Biden? And even now, the Times frames it as Biden’s fault, at least from the headline: ““How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration”. Biden did it, not the Democrats running the show instead of him? But Biden, at least, would have the semi-excuse of cognitive decline. What’s the NY Times’ excuse? That they just now have woken up from a long Rip Van Winklerian sleep?
See this from the NY Post on the open borders, the motivation for it, and what the Democrats say turned the tide:
Texas is deep red, after all — and more poor migrants could only help turn the state blue over generations, potentially tipping the Electoral College permanently to the Democrats.
Abbott short-circuited that design by putting illegal immigrants on buses and sending them to blue cities throughout the country: Denver, Philadelphia, DC, New York.
Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants poured into Democratic cities that thought the border emergency was somebody else’s problem.
It was a winning move:
“Many Biden officials came to view Mr. Abbott’s campaign as the point Democrats lost the debate,” the Times notes — and quotes Biden’s former assistant director for policy at ICE, Deborah Fleischaker, saying, “I don’t think we ever recovered.”
The cynical Machiavellian viewpoint is phenomenal.
The Miami mayoral election
The fact that a Democrat won the post of mayor of Miami yesterday was both perplexing and somewhat alarming, as was the coverage. This was a contest I’d previously read next to nothing about, and I had no way to explain what was going on.
Commenter “physicsguy” has posted this link, which offers some reasonable explanations, particularly for the extremely low turnout:
The “nonpartisan” mayor of Miami holds a largely ceremonial role. Real executive authority rests with the city manager, who can only serve with the approval of the five-member city commission. That “nonpartisan” commission currently has a stable 3-2 Republican majority.
So this isn’t a conventional mayoral post.
The article goes on to add that the city remains slightly Democrat, and that despite his wins elsewhere in Florida Trump lost there in 2024 by a small margin.
Perhaps some of you can shed more light on what’s spin and what isn’t.
Fuentes the fake phenom
It was always clear that at least some of Nick Funetes’ traffic has been the result of bots. The only question is how much. Lately I have become more and more suspicious that the answer is “an enormous amount.” But it’s not as though I had any way to tell.
Now, this article on the subject has come out, and it seems pretty persuasive. The author, Colin Wright, cites this report from something called the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).
Wright states:
The report’s most shocking finding is just how wildly Fuentes’s engagement numbers differ from those of other political influencers. NCRI compared the first 30 minutes of engagement on 20 of his recent posts with those from four major online figures—Elon Musk, Hasan Piker, Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, and Ian Carroll. Incredibly, Fuentes outperformed all of them in early retweets, including Musk, whose follower count is over 200 times higher.
None of this makes sense if the engagement is organic. According to NCRI’s report, this is explained by the fact that 61 percent of Fuentes’s early retweets come from accounts that repeatedly retweeted several of his posts within the same 30-minute window. This is not what you’d expect if these were random users scrolling their feeds. Rather, these accounts appear to be waiting for Fuentes to post so they could amplify his content almost instantly.
When NCRI dug into who these accounts actually were, 92 percent were completely anonymous. … Many openly identified as “Groypers,” members of Fuentes’s online fan base, and their feeds consisted almost entirely of retweets or replies to him. Some even labeled themselves as Fuentes “signal boosters.” These accounts appear to be part of a coordinated network built to push his content as widely and quickly as possible.
NCRI uncovered another major red flag. When they examined Fuentes’s most viral posts—three from before the assassination of Charlie Kirk and three after—it found that nearly half of all retweets came from foreign accounts, heavily concentrated in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia. These regions are known hubs for low-cost engagement farms.
Crucially, Fuentes is not merely a passive beneficiary of this manipulation—he actively coordinates it. NCRI shows that he routinely gives his viewers direct instructions during live broadcasts to retweet his content, often just seconds after posting a link. This is meant to trigger the early spike in engagement that algorithms reward, a tactic that may violate X’s own rules against coordinated inauthentic activity.
And the effects of this manufactured engagement didn’t stay online. They spilled into mainstream news coverage. …
The media believed it was responding to a real political shift. It wasn’t. It was responding to a manipulated signal created by anonymous amplification networks and foreign engagement farms. Even TPUSA’s own social-media replies showed growing Groyper infiltration as Fuentes tried to capitalize on the vacuum left by Kirk’s death.
This is very much in line with recent revelations about the foreign origins of many social media accounts from supposed American patriots and America-firsters who are posting from places like Pakistan. That’s not to say that there are no real Fuentes supporters (“groypers”), but they are almost certainly far less numerous than one might originally have thought.
One result of all of this is to demoralize the right and also make it appear every bit as bigoted and moronic as the left says it is. As for Fuentes himself, aside from fame and money, what are his goals and who is backing him?
The are other related internet phenomena on the so-called “woke right” (often rabidly anti-Semitic and heavily conspiracy-theory oriented) such as Candace Owens. Are they the beneficiaries of a similar process as that which has made Fuentes famous? I think so, but probably to a lesser extent because prior to Owens’ going off into her current fringe/cringe content, she did seem to have a more conventional following on more conventional platforms.
The same is true of Tucker Carlson to an even greater extent; during his Fox News years he was a popular and at least somewhat mainstream figure on the right. A fair amount of his current traffic is almost certainly a carryover from that. But how much?
Almost since its beginning, the internet has been a place where deception is easier than in the non-virtual world. We’ve had trolling, bot farms, catfishing, phishing, sock puppets, and more recently the spread of AI, and now fake internet phenoms such as Fuentes. No wonder he’s smirking.
Open thread 12/10/2025
Trump on Europe’s immigration policies
Harsh, but correct.
Here’s what he had to say [emphasis mine]:
President Donald Trump denounced Europe as a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people in an interview with POLITICO, belittling the traditional U.S. allies for failing to control migration and end the Russia-Ukraine war, and signaling that he would endorse European political candidates aligned with his own vision for the continent. …
“I think they’re weak,” Trump said of Europe’s political leaders. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct.”
“I think they don’t know what to do,” he added. “Europe doesn’t know what to do.”
Many of Western Europe’s leaders have backed themselves into a corner. Their countries have already imported large numbers of mostly Muslim unassimilated newcomers, whose values are antithetical to European tolerance, who commit a disproportionate number of crimes against women, and who put a strain on generous welfare benefits. And yet the current leaders commitment to “tolerance” and fears of seeming racist or “nationalist” have them paralyzed in terms of doing much of anything about it.
Trump is determined not to let the US fall into the same trap. Under Obama and then Biden it came very close. Trump’s not-so-secret power is that he doesn’t care to tiptoe around the issues, and he’s unafraid of being called racist.
Without a change in border policy, Trump said, some European states “will not be viable countries any longer.”
Using highly incendiary language, Trump singled out London’s left-wing mayor, Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the city’s first Muslim mayor, as a “disaster” and blamed his election on immigration: “He gets elected because so many people have come in. They vote for him now.”
Squatters rights on steroids
Here’s an infuriarating story:
A local homeowner who said she’s in the fight of her life trying to get a squatter out of her house has spoken exclusively to 7News.
The alleged squatter, Shadija Romero, originally got into the house through Airbnb, claiming her home had been damaged in a fire and she needed somewhere to stay while it was being repaired, which was back in February.
Rochanne Douglas said she didn’t know she was opening her life up to a nightmare when she accepted Romero’s Airbnb reservation almost ten months ago.
That reservation ended on March 29th, after 32 days. After being a guest for 30 days, Romero started to claim residency at the home and is claiming forms of tenants’ rights and refuses to let Rochanne enter the property.
“I never gave her any tenancy,” said Douglas. “I never gave her a lease.”
The story is datelined 12/3/2025, so this has been going on for many many months. There will be a court hearing in a few days; let’s hope the squatter gets evicted. However, the venue is Washington DC, so I wouldn’t count on it.
The accused squatter allegedly tried to place utilities in her name and has tampered with security cameras.
She removed Douglas’s personal property from the fully-furnished unit and has blocked the owner from entering to conduct maintenance, repairs, inspections and preparations needed to sell the home, the filings stated.
Douglas also alleged Romero has verbally threatened her, engaged in repeated abuse of police and judicial processes, and attempted to have her work vehicle towed by falsely claiming ownership of the home.
That article also indicates this isn’t Romero’s first squatter go-round:
… Douglas has since learned that Romero was evicted from her previous address after accruing approximately $50,000 in unpaid rent for 13 months of residence.
The filing accused Romero of ‘attempting to use the same tactics again to avoid lawful removal’ from Douglas’s home.
‘Her unstable employment and documented eviction history further demonstrate her pattern of manipulating legal protections intended for legitimate tenants, not transient Airbnb guests,’ the document said.
Romero claims she’s been paying Douglas, but whether or not that is the case isn’t really the issue. If the owner wants her out, she needs to get out.
It would seem that Romero knows exactly what she’s doing.
There is an adverse possession law in DC, but Romero doesn’t qualify:
In Washington DC, people who occupy a home without permission can gain legal rights to the property through a process known as adverse possession, according to the House Buyers of America.
But in the district, squatters can only obtain legal ownership of the residence if they have occupied the property for 15 years or more and meet five criteria …
Mamdani’s dream team: Imagine there are no prisons
All is proceeding as foreseen. Mamdani has assembled a group that’s brimming with ideas. Some of those ideas may seem vaguely familiar to you, if you came of age in the late 1960s and spent some time on college campuses. Now these stale warmed-over Rousseauvian theories come out of the mouths of young people who are running the show in NYC rather than shooting the late-night breeze in the dorm while passing the bong around:
Late last month, the mayor-elect released the roster of his transition team’s Committee on Community Safety, a 26-person group that will advise him on criminal-justice and related issues. The list contains several activists who are not only openly hostile to law enforcement but also reject the very concept of carceral punishment.
What could possibly go wrong?:
Brooklyn College professor Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, has argued, for example, that policing is “fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation.” He has also described police as “violence workers,” who should be turned to only as a “last resort.”
And he seems like the conservative on the team, compared to several others:
Advocates like Vitale and Olderman often cast the criminal-justice system, and even America itself, as a villain. In doing so, they echo the worldview of transition-team member and former Women’s March leader Tamika Mallory, who said days after the death of George Floyd in 2020, “We are not responsible for the mental illness that has been inflicted upon our people by the American government institutions and those people who are in positions of power. Don’t talk to us about looting. We learn violence from you.”
There is a tiny kernel of something true in all the claptrap, and that “something” is that the causes of crime and related social ills are multifaceted, and that a lot of criminals really are mentally ill and/or addicted, something that’s also true of the homeless. It’s interesting that a great many of the solutions suggested by the Mamdani appointees involve intervention by social workers rather than police; good luck with that, is what I say having known a great many social workers, most of whom are not the least bit eager to be the first on the scene of a potentially – or actually – violent situation.
The idea of protecting the non-criminal public from criminals seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of Mamdani’s crew.
Perhaps my favorite part of the article is this. Kassandra reminds me most forcibly of the type of thinking that one would often hear back in the late 60s and early 70s. Let’s reminisce, readers:
Kassandra Frederique, head of the Drug Policy Alliance and another Mamdani committee member, has framed her advocacy in “abolitionist” and revolutionary terms. During a 2021 appearance on a web show, for example, she discussed the prospect of black revolutionaries “tak[ing] over the state.” She also seemed to endorse drug use as a way for some advocates to embrace more radical positions. “There are some people in our movement that need to be high so that they can imagine the world that we can’t see currently,” she said.
Imagine.