It’s been five years since J6
Time flies; things change.
There’s still plenty that we don’t know about J6. One thing we do know is that the Democrats made sure their narrative of the day got cemented in people’s minds very early.
Here’s Victor Davis Hanson with a few remarks on J6, in a video I think was made fairly recently but before his surgery (hat tip: commenter “huxley”):
Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff theatricals
Mamdani is staging a series of struggle sessions in which people complain about bad kulaks landlords. These events have been given the alliterative title of “Rental Ripoff” hearings:
New Yorkers will be able to lament about their rental woes – from hidden fees, retaliation, discrimination, illegal eviction and deplorable building conditions – during Mamdani’s first 100 days in office, according to an executive order signed by the mayor on Sunday. …
“In a city filled with older buildings that could use some tender loving care, some landlords are taking advantage of the housing market to gouge tenants with outrageous fees, all while leaving them trying to survive in homes with collapsing ceilings and sinking floors,” Mamdani said in an Instagram video. …
“He’s one-sided right now. Everything is about destroying the landlords,” said Humberto Lopes, CEO of H.L. Dynasty and the Gotham Housing Alliance.
“You think all the landlords are slumlords?” Lopes added.
If you help the landlords, you can help the tenants. Landlords can make the repairs if you help them.”
Instead, Lopes argued that Mamdani was going in the other direction by squeezing property owners.
This approach is highly likely to involve a succession of theatrical ventings without much attention paid to economic realities. That omission would be a hallmark of socialism/Communism.
One of the commenters at the article writes this:
Is Zoron also planning on holding hearings on tenants abusing the landlords? The deadbeats, the squatters, the tenants that tear up the property, or the rent controlled apartments that are money losers for the landlords.
I think we know the answer.
I wonder if Mamdani plans a similarly creative and theatrical approach to this problem:
In New York City, making a profit on real estate has become increasingly difficult. Rent-stabilization laws built on the mantra that “housing is a human right,” a dysfunctional housing court, and myriad other interventions have driven thousands of units off the market, giving rise to the phenomenon of New York’s “ghost apartments.”
The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations. Recently, I visited four of these ghost apartments. Together, they reveal the city’s fundamentally broken housing market and what needs to be done to fix it.
In New York, rent stabilization laws often mean that the cost of making repairs and improvements in apartments – especially older ones – cannot be recouped. So the apartments remain vacant and in disrepair.
There are possible solutions, but I would be extremely surprised if Mamdani and his team would ever consider them:
“New York is unique in its rent-control system,” Kenny Burgos, who heads the New York Apartment Association, said. “Even Los Angeles [gives landlords] an ability to reset rents after [apartments] become vacant.”
Burgos’s suggestion is to amend the law to restore landlords’ ability to raise rents after vacancy. Under this proposal, rents would continue to be subjected to the Rent Guidelines Board’s maximum increases while a lease is active. But landlords would be allowed to raise rents once the units come off the market, reestablishing the economic incentive to renovate. This would mitigate the effects of the below-inflation rent increases that the RGB has permitted over the previous decade.
Burgos didn’t endorse it, but there’s an even more effective option: eliminate rent stabilization entirely. This would let rents rise to meet demand while also making renovations profitable again. New Yorkers whose incomes are below a certain level could get a housing voucher, thereby restoring the investment required to maintain, construct, and operate buildings. New Yorkers would gain a sustainable solution to rent burdens while also keeping the existing housing stock in good shape.
Democrats on the capture of Maduro
I was wondering whether any prominent Democrats had broken ranks and praised the Venezuela operation that netted Maduro.
And so of course I thought of John Fetterman, and he didn’t disappoint:
“I don’t know why we can’t just acknowledge it’s been a good thing what’s happened. I’ve seen the speeches from, whether it’s Leader Schumer or kinds of past tweets from President Biden,” he said, referring to recent criticism of the military operation by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and former President Biden’s tough talk about Maduro in the past.
“We all wanted this man gone, and now he is gone. I think we should really appreciate exactly what happened here,” Fetterman said. …
“I salute our military, what they’ve done,” he said on Fox News. “That was really surgical and precise and very efficient — so why we can’t celebrate these kinds of things?
The Pennsylvania senator said Maduro’s ouster opens up the possibility of a more prosperous future for Venezuelans.
Decades ago such comments might have been standard from the opposition. No more.
Fetterman was not entirely alone among Democrats, however. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of all people (who represents a district in Florida, however, which probably has plenty of voters in favor of Maduro’s capture), has spoken similarly, although her comments were mixed with some criticism:
“The capture of the brutal, illegitimate ruler of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who oppressed Venezuela’s people is welcome news for my friends and neighbors who fled his violent, lawless, and disastrous rule. However, cutting off the head of a snake is fruitless if it just regrows,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., wrote on X.
“Venezuelans deserve the promise of democracy and the rule of law, not a state of endless violence and spiraling disorder. My hope is it offers a passage to true democracy and liberation. This action offers beleaguered Venezuelans a chance to seat their true, democratically elected president, Edmundo González.”
She criticized the GOP administration for apparently failing to notify Congress beforehand, however.
Most – or perhaps all? – of the rest of the Democrats followed party orders, although not always happily:
Some Democrats are grumbling at their party’s largely oppositional stance to President Trump’s raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, saying privately that their colleagues should be celebrating.
Why it matters: These lawmakers argue it could be a major political miscalculation if the party fails to applaud the downfall of a brutal dictator with sufficient volume, even given grave concerns about the operation’s legality and longer-term ramifications.
Such independent thinkers.
And of course the Democrats say it’s an impeachable offense – but then again, that’s true of everything Trump does. They’ve managed to strip impeachment of all meaning, but if they win the House in 2026 (perish the thought) they’ll go for the hat trick of at least three impeachments for Trump.
ADDENDUM:
Once upon a time, Democrats demanded Maduro’s ouster.
Open thread 1/6/2026
Who will be the next long-term head of Venezuela?
Late last night I wrote a draft for this post, and in it I said the following:
Was Maduro’s VP Delcy Rodriguez the mole? Did she cooperate to bring him down? It’s a weird thought and I doubt it’s the case, but it nevertheless occurs to me as a possibility. After all, she knew the US wanted Maduro, and she knew she was next in line, and she knew she’d get points for helping the US bring him down, and she almost certainly had access to information about his movements. Is her reward that they’ll give her a chance to run the country, if she plays ball with the US?
Now I see this:
Delcy Rodriguez has been formally sworn in as new president of Venezuela, amid strong rumors that she cooperated with the CIA to oust Maduro. …
She’s quickly expressed her willingness to cooperate with the United States on the future of Venezuela, in a significant shift in tone following Maduro’s Friday into Saturday morning ‘shock’ abduction by US special forces.
“We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the US and Venezuela,” Rodriguez wrote on Telegram Sunday.
And more than that, her following words convey willingness of Caracas to bend the knee: “We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperation agenda, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and to strengthen lasting community coexistence,” she stated.
I’m not even going to opine on what I think will happen, because I think it’s way too early.
Here’s Rubio on the subject of what comes next:
And from commenter “TJ,” this seems pretty important, if true:
Apparently, the Venezuelan Constitution has a proviso in the event of unforeseen interruption of top leadership. First, the Vice President now controls their government. Second, he or she must declare an election within 45 days.
When I checked, I found the following, which somewhat resembles it:
Venezuela’s Supreme Court late Saturday ordered Vice President Delcy Rodriguez to become the country’s interim leader, after the United States seized President Nicolas Maduro and whisked him out of the country. …
The judges stopped short of declaring Maduro permanently absent from office, a ruling that requires holding elections within 30 days.
And back in NY, Maduro says he’s innocent, the head of Venezuela, and a prisoner of war. The judge in the case is 92-year-old Alvin Hellerstein, who is an Orthodox Jew and was appointed by Bill Clinton.
The report of MAGA’s fracture may be greatly exaggerated …
… and although the cracks are not imaginary, we don’t know if they’re deep fissures or only surface flaws.
In this Tablet article, Michael Doran seems to think they’re deep and probably fatal to MAGA. The piece is very long and I confess I gave up reading it long before the end. I already know a great deal about the Fuentes/Carlson wing that takes up a large portion of its analysis, but the piece seemed to be short on figures that would tell us how much influence these groups really have.
As I said, the article is very long, but all I could find on that topic was a throwaway couple of lines:
Since the October 27 Carlson–Fuentes interview exploded across Rumble and flooded onto X, posts branding Trump a “Zionist puppet” or recasting Ukraine aid as “globalist war funding” have racked up millions of impressions, often outpacing sober defenses of Trump’s big-tent project. Holocaust-denying memes outrun statements by government officials. Musk’s new location-tagging features have already exposed a swath of “America First” accounts as foreign operators—Pakistanis, Indians, Nigerians—posing as domestic populists. It was a brief reminder that a trend line on X is not the voice of the American electorate.
And yet it seems the assumption of Doran’s article is that X is the voice of the American electorate.
I’ve written several times on the subject, and I certainly don’t know the answer as to how big the MAGA splinter group is. But I see no indication that Doran is making a serious effort to tackle the question.
In no surprise at all, Tim Walz withdraws from Minnesota governor’s race
Even Walz could read the writing on the wall, although he wasn’t happy about it:
On Monday morning, we learned that Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) is dropping his reelection bid.
Walz released a statement Monday morning confirming reports that he was dropping out of the race and later held a press conference.
During the press conference, he apparently just read his previous statement, and took no questions:
He again accused Republicans and President Donald Trump of exploiting the crisis politically. He again accused the White House of demonizing Somali communities and withholding child care funds.
He again insisted his administration had aggressively tackled fraud, fired bad actors, locked down programs, and put the right people in charge. And he again cast himself as the adult in the room, reluctantly abandoning politics so he could focus on governing.
This clears the way for Amy Klobuchar to run for the office; my guess is that she’ll run and she’ll win:
Klobuchar didn’t comment on her future political plans in a statement Monday. But the senator, commenting on the governor’s move to combat the fraud scandal full time rather than to seek another term in office, said, “Walz made the difficult decision to focus on his job and the challenges facing our state rather than campaigning and running for re-election.”
The senator has won all four of her Senate elections by wide margins, including a nearly 16-point re-election in 2024.
Selfless Tim Walz.
As soon as I saw that the NY Times was focusing on the Minnesota fraud cases, I realized that the Democrats wanted Walz out of the race. On December 1 I wrote:
But still, the [Times’] highlighting of Walz’s role surprised me. My guess is that the Times would like him to refrain from any more participation in national politics, he was such a disaster in 2024. I have no evidence for this; it’s just a hunch.
And of course, because the Times is basically the Democrats’ propaganda organ, that meant that the Democrats wanted Tim out. They got what they wanted.
It is astounding to me that Walz came fairly close to becoming VP.
Late start today
Spent a ridiculous amount of time dealing with “customer service” type issues. But here I am.
Open thread 1/5/2026
Plisetskaya:
More on Venezuela
It seems this was the culmination of months – or more? – of planning, with signals and warnings for Maduro to go into exile or else. Now we see the “or else.”
There are also rumors that it’s all staged and Maduro cooperated. I definitely don’t think that’s the case.He almost certainly could have absconded to one of his sponsor states instead. They may not be paradises, but they’re better than US prison.
Trump is now saying that we’ll be running Venezuela till the new government takes over:
We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition, and it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about.
We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela who are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country as their homeland.
We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela, that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind for decades. We’re not going to let that happen. …
We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so.
I figured they had a plan at the outset. But what is that plan, how long will it take, and will it be successful? Trump’s not a big one for lengthy neoconnish nation-building endeavors, but does this threaten to become that? There’s a president and/or VP waiting in the wings in exile, Machado and Gonzalez who actually were elected in the previous election in Venezuela, as was widely acknowledged at the time. So if anyone is the legitimate leader of Venezuela, it would be one or both of them. But how can their installation be facilitated? The regime itself, minus Maduro, will almost certainly want to hang onto power, or at least some of the cast of characters will (I listed them in my previous post on the subject).
We’re learning a bit more about the action itself, from Chairman John Daniel Caine:
“This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discreet, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2, and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake.”
Chairman Caine continued.
“This particular mission required every component of our joint force with soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians, working in unison with our intelligence agency partners and law enforcement teammates in an unprecedented operation, we leveraged our unmatched intelligence capabilities and our years of experience in hunting terrorists, and we could not have done this mission without the incredible work by various intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA and NGA.”
There’s a very interesting post at Althouse covering the different takes of the WaPo and NY Times on this:
I’m [Althouse, that is] reading “Trump’s bold capture of Maduro was a victory for America. What’s next?” by The Editorial Board of The Washington Post. That’s the front page headline. Inside it’s “Justice in Venezuela/The next challenge is setting the country up for long-term success.”
The editorial ends: “For years, Maduro was a symbol of the false warmth of Latin American collectivism. Now he should spend the rest of his life in a humane American prison. His downfall is good news.”
That’s astounding on two levels. The first is that it seems to contain elements of praise for Trump, and the second is the rather obvious reference to the inaugural speech of the odious Mamdani (I covered that in this post, where Mamdani is quoted as having said: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”).
The Times is not as pleased as the WaPo:
Anyway, the WaPo editors seem rather positive about Trump’s action in Venezuela. The mood at The New York Times is different: “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise.” It ends:
“We will hold out hope that the current crisis will end less badly than we expect. We fear that the result of Mr. Trump’s adventurism is increased suffering for Venezuelans, rising regional instability and lasting damage for America’s interests around the world. We know that Mr. Trump’s warmongering violates the law.”
It doesn’t violate the precedent I discussed in my earlier post, the Noriega case. Jonathan Turley also doesn’t think it violates the law; I hadn’t seen his comment when I wrote my earlier piece, but here it is:
The administration is acting within the navigational beacons of the Noriega case. And by the way, for all these Democrats objecting, the authority that Trump could cite is Barack Obama. Barack Obama vaporized a US citizen without a criminal charge. One would think that if a president could do that, and I don’t remember Democrats objecting en masse that you could arrest someone for trial with an existing indictment.
You can see some photos of Venezuelans around the world celebrating.
And it’s been announced that Maduro has landed in NY:
The aircraft believed to be carrying Nicolas Maduro has touched down at Stewart Airport in Orange County, New York, Saturday afternoon, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Maduro is now expected to take a helicopter to New York City, accompanied by the DEA. He will then head by motorcade to a location in New York City for processing before he’s held in jail, sources said.
Mamdani’s rogues gallery of appointments
Mamdani’s appointees so far are about as expected. A sampler:
On Friday, the new mayor named Ali Najmi to chair his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which picks judges for family and civil courts and interim appointees for criminal courts; Najmi is big on making the bench more “diverse.”
Mamdani outright ordered the committee to find more diversity picks and to get public defenders and other anti-prosecution types more involved in judicial selections: Expect the city’s courts to become even more eager to put criminals back on the streets.
But what sounds even worse is this character:
The day before, [Mamdani] picked Cea Weaver to run his Office to Protect Tenants: She’s a proud radical who has called for the city to force private landlords out of business so it can seize their buildings; that’s partly why she praises his rent-freeze plans as likely to “deepen the crises” in the housing marketplace.
She’s spent years advocating unabashed Marxism: “Elect more Communists,” ran a tweet from December 2017; “Seize private property,” another in June 2018.
Plus this one:
Ramzi Kassem will serve as City Hall’s chief counsel; he recently defended Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and before that an al Qaeda terrorist who pleaded guilty to planning a major terrorist attack on a French ship.
As a student at Columbia in 1998, Kassem wrote an article blaming “European Jews” for all the problems in the Middle East; he was a top Biden adviser on immigration, when the main policy was to let everyone in, no questions asked.
Perhaps Tucker Carlson could become press secretary. He’s already auditioned for the job:
“Is the incoming mayor a fan of Israel? Does he want America to fight its wars? Not particularly. But a Jew hater? That’s a different conversation. We’ve never seen anything to suggest he falls into that ugly camp. Because he doesn’t,” Carlson wrote.
He noted that Mamdani rejected that he was antisemitic during the campaign, but said it didn’t keep people from “slandering him as some sort of dark force plotting to install the Fourth Reich in America’s largest city.”
NOTE: Speaking of Mamdani, I was wondering what he’s said about Maduro, and I found this weaselly answer from his campaigning days: