The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
California’s political machine has left Republicans with a simple challenge: convince voters that change is worth crossing the aisle for.
A very successful businessman—and a major contributor to Democratic Party candidates and causes—once explained to me why he talked, acted, and thought like a Republican but never considered supporting any Republican candidate, ever. “We’ve already got the Republicans,” he told me.
This is the transactional essence behind corporate support for Democrats in California, the one-party state. Republicans have no political power, and whenever the Democrats in the state legislature are surprisingly split on a matter of concern to business interests, the handful of Republican politicians will invariably cast pro-business votes.
This has been going on for a long time. Democrats have controlled both houses of the state legislature since 1997 and the governorship since 2011. A signature moment came in 2010 when Jerry Brown defeated the hapless billionaire Republican Meg Whitman to begin his second two-term stint as governor. That’s when the California Chamber of Commerce made an internal decision to start supporting “pro-business” Democrats.
So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the California Chamber of Commerce has endorsed Xavier Becerra for governor, the Democrat who will face Republican Steve Hilton this November.
In a guest op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal on June 17, candidate Hilton reiterated the case for change. Per-capita state government spending has nearly tripled over the last two decades, without a single quality-of-life metric improving. More than two million Californians moved out of the state during Newsom’s years as governor. Major businesses have relocated, with more on the way out. California has the highest taxes, the highest levels of unemployment, the highest poverty rate, and the highest cost of living in America.
It’s a familiar refrain, and yet Californians keep electing Democrats. Hilton faces an uphill battle. Republicans are only 25 percent of registered voters; Democrats are 45 percent, with No Party Preference voters at 23 percent, nearly outnumbering Republicans. In the last four gubernatorial elections in the state, Republicans barely captured 40 percent of the vote. Brian Dahle got 40.8 percent in 2022; John Cox got 38.1 percent in 2018; Neel Kashkari got 40.0 percent in 2014; and Meg Whitman squandered $170 million in her 2010 gubernatorial quest in exchange for only 40.9 percent of the vote.
These are remarkably consistent numbers. Can Hilton overcome them? In California’s preposterous jungle primary, where, in this most recent iteration, there were 63 candidates, Hilton captured 24.7 percent to come in second to Xavier Becerra, who got 28.1 percent. Hilton had to contend with Tom Steyer, a bona fide fascist billionaire who masquerades as a social democrat and who, unlike Meg Whitman, hired a campaign team that knew what it was doing and wasn’t just going through the motions. Steyer’s hard-left campaign attracted 22.9 percent and almost edged out Hilton for a spot on the ballot.
Also complicating Hilton’s ascension to the runoff was another Republican, Chad Bianco, who pulled in 10.2 percent of the primary vote. Which brings us to one of Hilton’s major challenges if he hopes to defy history and beat the odds. He will have to pull in Bianco’s voters, who are, generally speaking, further right of center than Hilton voters.
This won’t be easy. The battle between these two Republicans turned bitter. In a perfect post-primary world, Hilton and Bianco would meet, put aside their differences, and make some joint campaign appearances. The formula whereby Hilton picks up 50-plus percent in November is hard enough. He needs Bianco’s 10 percent, or as much of it as possible.
If voters were practical, Hilton could take for granted 10.2 percent from Bianco voters in the general election, along with another 1.2 percent from voters who supported one of the other 10 Republican candidates on the crowded primary ballot. But these voters not only made an initial choice for a Republican other than Hilton. More than any other voting cohort in the state, they are disgusted with the whole system—the jungle primary, the rigged election laws, and the perception that Republicans will never win and even if they did, they wouldn’t fix anything.
But even if we suppose Hilton can muster the traditional 40 percent support that Republicans have typically earned, he still has to find another 10 percent elsewhere. And if, like his predecessors, he garners 40 percent when only 25 percent of voters are Republicans, he will have already pulled significant votes from the 23 percent No Party Preference voters along with a handful of Democrats.
Simply by virtue of the overwhelming advantage in registration that Democrats have in California, the main chance for Steve Hilton—the only chance—is for him to convince them that a vote for him is preferable to a vote for Becerra. That ought to be obvious. The state has blown through literally trillions of dollars over the past few Democratic administrations, and nothing has improved. But three things win elections: the party affiliation, the policy agenda, and the candidate’s personality. Hilton can’t win the first of these, but he can attract defecting Democrats if he wins the other two.
Ordinarily, the Democrats win on policy because their rhetoric goes down easy. Inclusion. Compassion. Environmentalism. And “affordability,” their latest mantra. But increasing percentages of Californians realize the results have delivered the opposite of what the rhetoric promised. Hilton, on the other hand, has developed detailed policy solutions that offer a new approach to every challenge where Democrats have failed. Can he sell them?
This is where personality will be decisive. Everybody wants change, but by successfully stereotyping Republicans as mean-spirited, Democrats have positioned themselves as the only option despite their failing policies. This is the context in which Hilton emerges from a bruising primary campaign where his tactics and persona were necessarily abrasive. Now he needs to return to his genial, upbeat roots. His winning strategy is to focus overwhelmingly on the solutions he offers and the dreams they can fulfill for all Californians. If Hilton comes across as someone who will govern as a bridge builder, voters will trust him. If he comes across as someone who is upbeat and optimistic about the future, voters will like him.
Meanwhile, California’s business community has a choice to make. They can stick with Democrats, accepting an essentially fascist political economy where only the largest corporations will survive the escalating regulatory onslaught and increasing taxes, and only then if they always play ball with the one-party regime. Or they can return to their roots, accepting competition instead of cronyism, and supporting candidates who are trying to roll back a government that has lost its way.
Steve Hilton is the best candidate for governor that California has had in years. Regardless of their party affiliation, Californians who vote for him have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Attached is Alan Greenspan’s famous essay lamenting the demise of the gold standard and warning that fiat money would enable the endless growth of the Welfare State and Big Government. He was absolutely correct, of course, and to give testimony to this worldview, even as late as 1974 when he became Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, he brought Ayn Rand to his White House swearing in ceremony.
Once ensconced on the banks of the Potomac, however, Alan Greenspan lost his way. Clearly.
At length, he had shimmied his way up the slippery slope—the next stop being duty as Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor in the 1980 campaign. In that capacity, he focused on the more agreeable business of cutting taxes rather than returning to the real source of capitalist prosperity—-sound money and free markets working together.
Next, he chaired the Greenspan Commission to bailout Social Security in 1983, which was then on the cusp of insolvency. Again, however, he choose to tiptoe around the Welfare State rather than challenge the fundamental error of providing unearned retirement benefits to millions of citizens. This was done via some film-flam on spending cuts ( a puny one-time three-month delay in the COLA) but mainly a huge 75-year increase in taxes. The largest in history, in fact.
If the truth be told, your editor was also in on the flim-flam at the time because the 1981 Reagan tax cut had been way, way too big at nearly 5% of GDP. Accordingly, by 1983 it was evident to us that net spending cuts after Reagan’s giant, misbegotten defense buildup would not even amount to 1% of GDP.
So the public finances were now in permanent, massive and compounding imbalance. It was a ticket to financial disaster by any rational reckoning.
At that point, therefore, we parted way with the Lafferite advocates of magical growth and reverted to the Eisenhower Doctrine: Namely, tax cuts had to be earned via corresponding spending cuts and entitlement reforms—lest Washington borrow and spend its way to the very disaster than now looms menacingly in the nation’s future.
As it happened, we had been loath to brag about our role in the Greenspan plan (we drafted and negotiated most of the details) because we knew exactly what it was: A giant tax increase posing as a “bipartisan Social Security rescue plan”.
But we knew it had to be done, and history has proved that to be true. There was no way the Republican Party then or today was going to embrace even a fraction of the Welfare State/Warfare State shrinkage that would be needed to match a government tax take of less than 17% of GDP after the 1981 tax cuts.
We are not sure that Alan Greenspan was as cynical or devious about the so-called Bipartisan Package as we were. But he was heralded by the mainstream opinion-makers and bipartisan political leaders leaders in Washington for his leadership of the Commission, and he was off to the races from there.
That is to say, in much earlier days Ayn Rand had already dismissed Greenspan as an inveterate “social climber” and on that she was correct. In the years after the Social Security rescue he became a fixture at the White House (with our help) and among GOP leaders on Capitol Hill.
So when the Jim Baker faction at the White House and Treasury Department decided that Volcker had to go when his term expired in 1987, Alan Greenspan was hanging around the basket and readily got the nod.
Needless to say, he did not storm into the Fed looking to shutdown its printing presses and restore a sound money gold standard that would have made the Fed chairman largely irrelevant. To the contrary, an activist Fed balancing the entire US economy on its shoulders was the route to fame, glory and adoration by the mainstream politicians, press and comentariat.
Greenspan didn’t disappoint. In becoming the Toast of the Town he also became the money-printer who monetized massive amounts of public debt over the next 20 years, restored Keynesian/statist economics to the center of Washington policy-making and so doing eventually buried the nation in debt and speculation, as we will amplify in Part 2.
But in the interim, here’s the original gospel from his 1966 essay. It hearkens back to a sound money “Greenspan” you never knew.
Published in Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” newsletter in 1966, and reprinted in her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in 1967.
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense — perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire — that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.
In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.
Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.
The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.
What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable. In a primitive society of meager wealth, wheat might be sufficiently durable to serve as a medium, since all exchanges would occur only during and immediately after the harvest, leaving no value-surplus to store. But where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity. Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible. More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable. Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society. Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term “luxury good” implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.
In the early stages of a developing money economy, several media of exchange might be used, since a wide variety of commodities would fulfill the foregoing conditions. However, one of the commodities will gradually displace all others, by being more widely acceptable. Preferences on what to hold as a store of value will shift to the most widely acceptable commodity, which, in turn, will make it still more acceptable. The shift is progressive until that commodity becomes the sole medium of exchange. The use of a single medium is highly advantageous for the same reasons that a money economy is superior to a barter economy: it makes exchanges possible on an incalculably wider scale.
Whether the single medium is gold, silver, seashells, cattle, or tobacco is optional, depending on the context and development of a given economy. In fact, all have been employed, at various times, as media of exchange. Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce, has significant advantages over all other media of exchange. Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange. If all goods and services were to be paid for in gold, large payments would be difficult to execute and this would tend to limit the extent of a society’s divisions of labor and specialization. Thus a logical extension of the creation of a medium of exchange is the development of a banking system and credit instruments (bank notes and deposits) which act as a substitute for, but are convertible into, gold.
A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus to create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security of his deposits). But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.
When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy’s stability and balanced growth. When gold is accepted as the medium of exchange by most or all nations, an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade. Even though the units of exchange (the dollar, the pound, the franc, etc.) differ from country to country, when all are defined in terms of gold the economies of the different countries act as one — so long as there are no restraints on trade or on the movement of capital. Credit, interest rates, and prices tend to follow similar patterns in all countries. For example, if banks in one country extend credit too liberally, interest rates in that country will tend to fall, inducing depositors to shift their gold to higher-interest paying banks in other countries. This will immediately cause a shortage of bank reserves in the “easy money” country, inducing tighter credit standards and a return to competitively higher interest rates again.
A fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not as yet been achieved. But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled. Periodically, as a result of overly rapid credit expansion, banks became loaned up to the limit of their gold reserves, interest rates rose sharply, new credit was cut off, and the economy went into a sharp, but short-lived recession. (Compared with the depressions of 1920 and 1932, the pre-World War I business declines were mild indeed.) It was limited gold reserves that stopped the unbalanced expansions of business activity, before they could develop into the post-World War I type of disaster. The readjustment periods were short and the economies quickly reestablished a sound basis to resume expansion.
But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a business decline — argued economic interventionists — why not find a way of supplying increased reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely — it was claimed — there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913. It consisted of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks nominally owned by private bankers, but in fact government sponsored, controlled, and supported. Credit extended by these banks is in practice (though not legally) backed by the taxing power of the federal government. Technically, we remained on the gold standard; individuals were still free to own gold, and gold continued to be used as bank reserves. But now, in addition to gold, credit extended by the Federal Reserve banks (“paper reserves”) could serve as legal tender to pay depositors.
When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve’s attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain’s gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates. The “Fed” succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market, triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain’s abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed “a mixed gold standard”; yet it is gold that took the blame.) But the opposition to the gold standard in any form — from a growing number of welfare-state advocates — was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.
Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government’s promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which — through a complex series of steps — the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy’s books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.
On March 21, 2026, the Danish Free Press Society awarded Raymond Ibrahim with the Sappho Prize. This video contains the official award ceremony, including Mr. Ibrahim’s talk, which took place in Copenhagen.
“For more than two decades, Raymond Ibrahim has been one of the most rigorous and intellectually consistent voices in the international debate on Christian persecution, Islamism, and the historical conflicts between Islam and the West.
His work is grounded in extensive study of primary sources — including classical Arabic texts, medieval chronicles, and modern jihadist documents. Combining scholarly depth with rare communicative clarity, he has made complex historical realities accessible to a broad audience.
Ibrahim insists on something fundamental: that religion matters. That sacred texts matter. That history matters. And that violence committed in the name of God does not become less real simply because it is uncomfortable.
He has systematically documented the ongoing and structural persecution of Christians in large parts of the Muslim world, and has placed contemporary conflicts within a broader historical framework in books such as Crucified Again, Sword and Scimitar, Defenders of the West, and most recently The Two Swords of Christ.
It is precisely this insistence on taking religious sources seriously that has made him controversial. On several occasions, attempts have been made to cancel his lectures under accusations of “Islamophobia” — including at the U.S. Army War College in 2019.
The Danish Free Press Society awards the 2026 Sappho Prize to Raymond Ibrahim for his fearless, source-based scholarship exposing the persecution of Christians and the historical realities of Islamist violence — pursued with intellectual integrity despite sustained efforts to silence and discredit him.”
Oh no, they’re threatening us with a good time again.
California government workers, like a lot of federal, state and other workers, haven’t actually been working since the pandemic. Or rather they’ve been ‘working from home’ which is to say working even less than usual.
Now, California is considering asking them to go back to the office four days a week. And SEIU, a radical union that represents government workers, among other useless people, is pulling out all the stops and warning of a ‘mass exodus’.
“Since COVID we have been working and doing the jobs and being efficient and doing the jobs to keep California running,” said Anica Walls, the president of SEIU Local 1000, which represents state workers in Sacramento.
We have been working and doing the jobs and being efficient at working and doing the jobs which we are doing to keep running California… into the ground.
“I feel like there will be a mass exodus. I feel like the state needs to be ready for a mass exodus. We have individuals who have been teetering retirement, who look at this 4-days a week when they have been doing their job efficiently in a hybrid schedule will probably send them into a retirement,” Walls said.
A mass exodus? An exodus is when the slaves escape their masters. This would be the equivalent of the Egyptian taskmasters announcing that they don’t want to be slave masters anymore if they have to go into the fields to whip their slaves four times a week.
I’m not sure it really counts as an exodus when the people leaving are already a plague.
Anyway if these incredibly efficient government workers are forced to come into the office to pretend to work for four days a week, they’ll retire, at which point they can stop pretending, but will still gobble up taxpayer money.
Democratic Assemblyman Alex Lee, who authored the bill AB 1729, said the issue is critical for many state employees.
“I have heard from so many state workers from even the Bay Area all up and down the state who said this is the thing that matters the most to them,” Lee said. “They don’t want to move. They love their job, but they don’t, they aren’t willing to move after working 4-5 years in state service.”
They aren’t willing to move… because they’ve never ever shown up to work. They love their jobs… because they don’t do them.
Lee’s proposal also requires the state to establish an online dashboard to show how much taxpayer money is saved with telework. Lee and SEIU have estimated remote work saves the state up to $225 million a year.
A “mass exodus” of government workers however would save billions.
A billboard off a Sacramento highway warns of future traffic jams caused by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order. State workers argue they have been working efficiently under hybrid schedules since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Will those traffic jams be from the “mass exodus”?
The Democratic Socialists of America Just Adopted a Radical New Platform
Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
As more and more members seek election to local and national positions, the platform represents a clear statement of the DSA’s views. Its radicalism, therefore, gives a glimpse into how the equivalent of the DSA’s board of directors—some of whom have appeared to moderate—actually think about politics.
“Workers Deserve More!” emerged from another DSA committee that spent two months grappling with and debating its language. When the NPC took up the document, its presenter urged the DSA to pass it unamended after it cleared the committee unanimously.
Instead, DSA leadership added four amendments: one on “real democracy”—calling for the replacement of “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress”—another on police and prison abolition, a provision explicitly naming Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, and a ranked-choice voting section. The NPC passed two of these four amendments unanimously, while the “real democracy” provision prevailed by a razor-thin margin.
“Workers Deserve More!” has revolutionary aspirations. It aims to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The document makes clear that achieving this vision would require “building a new society from the ground up,” accompanied by sweeping structural changes.
To accomplish that goal, the DSA calls for sweeping political and economic changes, including full public financing for campaigns and the abolition of the Electoral College, alongside the establishment of public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability, and strict regulations on investment properties.
It would also defund the Department of War, close overseas bases, and end all economic sanctions—which would include those in states like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. The platform further endorses universal amnesty for illegal immigrants, and ending “restrictions on . . . marriage,” which would presumably entail the legalization of polygamy.
Mike LaChance
Mike LaChance has been covering higher education and politics for Legal Insurrection since 2012. He has also written for American Lookout, Townhall, and Twitchy.
Since 2008 he has contributed work to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Center for Security Policy, the Washington Free Beacon, and Ricochet.
Mike is a Generation X, New England lifer who describes his political views as conservative and libertarian.
The famous quote from Winston Churchill about Socialism is as apt today as when first uttered in 1948: “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” Forty-three years later in 1991, Churchill stood fully vindicated, as the Soviet Union fell, following decades of not just stagnation and decline, but immense human suffering and death. At the time I thought, no one could ever possibly again take this ideology seriously.
Well, here we are in the United States of 2026, and you could easily get the impression that Socialism is on the march. Politicians proudly claiming the Socialist (or even Communist) brand hold the mayoralties of all the largest cities, and their movement is the source of all the energy in today’s Democratic Party.
New York’s primary elections are set for June 23, with “early voting” already well underway. Two days ago (June 18), proud Socialists Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders came together for a rally in Brooklyn to promote a collection of their ideological comrades seeking to knock out “moderate” Democrats in three races for Congress in New York City. The Socialist candidates are Brad Lander in NY-10 (Lower Manhattan/Brooklyn — my district!), Claire Valdez in NY-7 (Brooklyn/Queens), and Darializa Chevalier in NY-13 (Northern Manhattan/Bronx). Valdez and Chevalier are endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Lander was also a member of the DSA for 30 years going back to college, but quit the group in October 2023 after it held a rally in support of the Hamas massacres of October 7 that year. But don’t worry, Lander is fully aligned with the DSA on economic issues, and also regularly accuses Israel of “genocide” for its actions in Gaza. Although these primaries are by no means certainties, all of Lander, Valdez and Chevalier have led in at least some polls.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, far-left Mayor Karen Bass faces a serious challenge from even-farther-left DSA member Nithya Raman; in DC, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary (and thus presumptive next Mayor) Janeese Lewis George, is a member of the DSA; and the new Mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, proclaims herself a “democratic socialist” (although apparently not actually a member of the DSA).
You could certainly be forgiven for getting the impression that the radical explicitly Socialist left is quickly becoming ascendant. Is there any hope of stopping its rise?
For some perspective, I suggest looking at recent developments in Latin America. In Latin America, a dramatic transformation of electoral politics has been occurring over the past several years. If you haven’t been following it closely, you may be amazed at how far the transformation has progressed. I’ll take it country by country:
– Argentina. Javier Milei was elected in November 2023 to a four-year term as President. He has substantially cut the size of government and re-invigorated the economy.
– Bolivia. In Bolivia, a Socialist party, MAS (“Movement Toward Socialism”) and charismatic leader Evo Morales took power in 2006. Morales was re-elected twice, and then, facing term limits, got a subservient Supreme Court to give him permission to run again in 2019. He claimed to win in an extremely dubious election. (See details here in a Manhattan Contrarian post.). Meanwhile, Morales and his redistributionist policies gradually ran the economy into the ground. By the 2025 election, the Bolivians had had enough. In the October that year, the MAS party was voted out by a huge margin. Its presidential candidate got about 4% of the vote, and it lost all but two seats in the legislature. New President Paz took office in November 2025.
– Chile. Left-wing President Gabriel Boric (he called himself a “libertarian socialist”) got voted out in December 2025 in favor of José Kast.
– Honduras. New President Nasry Asfura was elected in November 2025, and sworn in in January 2026. He promises to cut the size of government and incentivize the private sector.
– Peru. A run-off in the recent presidential election was held June 7, and the final results have still not been reported. However, according to this Wall Street Journal report from June 11, it looks like the centrist candidate, Keiko Fujimori, is likely to win an extremely narrow victory against left-wing opponent Roberto Sanchez.
– Colombia. The second round of the presidential election is tomorrow, June 21, between the right-wing Espriella and left-wing Cepeda. Current left-wing President Petro is barred from running for re-election. In the polling, Espriella leads by about 4-8% — not a huge amount, but generally beyond the margin of error.
It’s almost as if the Latin Americans have finally looked at the ruin that the left and Socialism have wreaked on places like Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba, and decided that it is time to try something different.
Here in the U.S., suppose that all of Lander, Valdez, and Chevalier win their primaries. Is this the path to victory for Democrats in November and thereafter? If those candidates win, they will then join the likes of Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Graham Platner, Brandon Johnson, Katie Wilson, Nithya Raman, and plenty of other such as the face of today’s Democratic Party. I don’t know when this will become electorally toxic, but the recent results in Latin America show that eventually the electorate will recognize snake oil for what it is.
The Obama Presidential Center is finally open, on South Stony Island in Chicago.
June 19 marked a gala opening day with four former residents of the Oval Office in attendance, along with their respective wives, enabling a happy photo of the eight of them to dominate the news stories instead of actual photos of the building they were supposed to be celebrating.
The Obama Presidential Center is a brutalist structure of pre-fab concrete, topped with a massive string of unreadable block lettering – which we are given to believe is an excerpt from one of the bestselling Obama memoirs that libraries and schools bought by the case but presumably, nobody actually read.
Architectural criticism is largely subjective, as is most criticism, but we take our architecture more seriously here in Chicago than they do in many places, so it’s a meaningful issue here, well worth pondering.
Despite the city’s general degradation in recent decades, Chicago has long been known as the city of skyscrapers.
Its beautiful skyline on Lake Michigan boasts the works of many of the world’s greatest architects – William LeBaron Jenney, Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Helmut Jahn, Daniel Burnham, and Graham and Khan. Chicago may be the only city where you can overhear regular folks argue the relative merits of architects, with the same fervor that they use when discussing the best pizzerias, Italian beef or gyros shops.
When Chicago gets a new building, the architect’s renderings are shared with delight. We may have crippling taxes, crushing traffic congestion, lethal neighborhoods and a shrinking tax base, but darn it, we can still be proud of our architecture, our theatre, and our cuisine.
To say that the Obama center was a let-down for any proud Chicagoan’s spirit is putting it mildly.
You might not know it to look at us, but Chicagoans tend to be more open-minded, more patient, than you might expect. We saw the renderings and couldn’t quite believe it at first. We saw the photos while it was going up, and we told ourselves to give it a chance.
It’s a Chicago building, after all; surely it will look better when it’s painted, or when it’s clad in marble – that must be what they plan, right? Or maybe the landscaping will make all the difference. Imagine a frustrated bride trying on a hideous bridal gown, and desperately hoping that the veil, train, or gloves will somehow transform the thing from pumpkin to chariot.
But the center finally opened – way over budget and way behind schedule – and if anything, it turned out to be even more hideous than we expected. The comparisons online and in the press ran the gamut from “a giant dumpster” to “a concentration camp guard tower.” Virtually nothing positive was written about it because there truly is nothing good to say about it. One can hardly imagine such failure; perhaps the only explanation is that it was intentional, a final, vulgar insult to the city that foolishly handed this socialist carpetbagger a political career.
But to the surprise of many, neither the hideousness of the building nor the celebrity status of the honored guests was to capture the headlines after this opening. The news story that shocked unsuspecting readers was the number of lawsuits from contractors who have allegedly been stiffed by the center’s building committee.
Like far too many public programs, the little 8-story Obama Presidential Center was saddled with a budget that grew much bigger than its original promise. The final number reported in June was about $850 million, an amazing price for a relatively small and incredibly ugly structure.
For comparison, the magnificent Trump International Tower, 100 gleaming stories of steel and glass, built just 15 years earlier in Chicago’s much pricier Magnificent Mile (right where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River, alongside two true Chicago landmarks, the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building) also cost $850 million.
Yes, that’s right – both structures have the same price tag.
The printing, advertising, hotel, and catering bills unpaid. When called on it, the pols have been known to sneer “well, just think of it as a contribution.” That’s just how too many DNC bosses tend to think.
If the mainstream press did their job and reported such stories with the fervor that they shower on Republican shortcomings, it’s unlikely that any contractor would ever accept business from a Democrat project on anything but a 100% cash-in-advance basis.
But we still haven’t come to the biggest question: the Obama Presidential Center is on nineteen acres of land, which they didn’t even have to purchase; Chicago politicians engineered a 99-year lease for a nominal cost – a single ten dollar bill – so that they’d have the use of the land for free, for a century. Yes, you read that right: Nineteen acres in Chicago for free.
Usually, the price of the land and its property taxes are a big part of any large construction project. A business doesn’t start collecting rents or sales or ticket purchases until after it opens, and must spend the years of construction paying for the costs of building and the cost of the real estate.
But in this case, thanks to generous local connections at City Hall, the Obama Foundation didn’t have to worry about those normally immense real estate costs, freeing up their capital to properly do a “pay as you go” process with the construction contractors.
Of all the questions that plague us about this Obama Foundation project, the biggest has to be this one: If they raised $850 million, and they got the land for free, and yet, they still aren’t paying their contractors, Where the heck did all that money go?
LONDON — In a stunning fall from power, one of the world’s foremost Muslim leaders was forced to resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Keir Starmer, a preeminent voice for Islam on the world stage over the past several years, announced his resignation this morning after losing the support of several powerful mosques.
“It is time for someone else to lead the intifada,” said Starmer, standing outside the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. “I have had the great privilege these past few years of heading up the Muslim takeover of England, glory to Allah. You know, 10 years ago, you couldn’t stab a native citizen and have the police arrest him while he’s dying. I’m extremely proud of the progress we’ve made, but it’s time to hand over the proverbial scimitar to the next leader. Thank you, and Allahu Akbar.”
According to sources within the Labour Party, the search had already begun for a devout Muslim leader to take Starmer’s place. “We have some great potential options identified,” said Labour leader Stanley Higgins. “There’s Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed, and also Sir William Chestershire of Brighton. I think we’re going to go with Mohammed.”
At publishing time, Starmer had reportedly accepted a new position as an aide to the “probably gay” Ayatollah of Iran.
A newly surfaced video shows Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico welcoming a climate activist organization to Texas and praising its work, a position that appears at odds with his campaign’s efforts to portray him as a supporter of the state’s energy industry.
In a June 2024 video promoting the expansion of Third Act into Texas, Talarico thanked the group for coming to the Lone Star State and said he looked forward to working “alongside” the organization.
“I’ve been fighting climate change my entire career,” Talarico said. Calling Texas “the front line in the fight to save democracy and our planet,” he described Third Act’s efforts as “critical” and “historic” because “the stakes could not be higher.”
Third Act is a climate activist organization founded by environmentalist Bill McKibben that advocates moving away from oil and gas and has campaigned to pressure major financial institutions to stop financing new fossil fuel projects.
The description for the June 2024 event stated that participants were part of a movement to “increase the use of renewable energy” and “move away from fossil fuels.”
Third Act has also called for stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals. Two weeks after Talarico’s appearance, Third Act Texas called for a transition to “100% renewable resources as soon as possible.”
The organization has drawn attention for staging “die-in” protests outside banks as part of campaigns targeting financing for fossil fuel projects. During one series of demonstrations in New York, Third Act boasted that more than 200 individuals affiliated with the organization were arrested.
The video offers a reminder of Talarico’s long record of climate activism as he campaigns statewide in Texas, where oil and natural gas remain major drivers of the economy.
As a member of the Texas House, Talarico authored legislation in 2021 that would have required Texas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. He also filed legislation that would require climate change education in public schools.
Talarico’s climate advocacy has extended beyond legislation. During his 2022 re-election campaign, he announced that his campaign would temporarily adopt a vegan diet, describing the move as a response to what he called an “existential climate crisis.”
The resurfaced comments come as Talarico has sought to reassure voters that he supports Texas’ oil and gas industry.
Texas leads the nation in oil and gas employment, with more than 476,000 workers directly employed by the industry and millions of additional jobs supported by oil and natural gas activity. Industry estimates place the sector’s economic impact at hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Talarico campaign spokesman JT Ennis disputed suggestions that the candidate opposes Texas energy production.
“James went to public schools funded by the oil and gas industry and knows how essential oil and gas is to Texas’ economy — it’s why he supports LNG production and backed legislation to strengthen it in the Texas legislature,” Ennis told Texas Scorecard. “James will always put the economic interests of Texans first — creating good jobs and lowering energy costs.”
Republicans, however, argue the video highlights a disconnect between Talarico’s current campaign messaging and his history of climate activism.
“James Talarico wants to force Texans to ride tandem bikes and go vegan, so he doesn’t feel like the only low T soy boy in the state,” RNC spokesman Zach Kraft told Texas Scorecard.
“The good news is that after his Green New Deal agenda is rejected by voters in November, Talarico will have plenty of free time to attend as many ‘die-ins’ and Greta Thunberg protests as his heart desires.”
Recently the head of German domestic intelligence, Sinan Selen, held a meeting in the Bundestag building where he laid out for a select audience the threat of Islamist infiltration into the country’s political institutions. More on his warning can be found here: “Germany’s Intelligence Chief Warns of Islamist Infiltration of Political Institutions,” by Jules Gomes, Middle East Forum, June 14, 2026:
Sinan Selen, Cybersec22, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
At a closed-door meeting for select guests in the German Parliament building, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service, warned of high-level Islamist infiltration into German political institutions.
Sinan Selen, 54, who has served as president of the BfV since 2025, explicitly raised the alarm about the Muslim Brotherhood before a select audience at the German Bundestag during a breakfast meeting, BILD said in an exclusive report in early June, noting that the information leaked to the newspaper was “extremely worrying.”
Islamist groups in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular were exerting targeted influence on state and political structures in Germany with a view to transforming the state and society, Selen told the secret meeting. The ultimate goal of these infiltration attempts was the establishment of an Islamic society.
The Muslim Brotherhood does not act violently, but it is no less dangerous, because it pursues its objectives in an extremely strategic manner with long-term goals, the intelligence head noted. The Islamists respect German laws—but only insofar as these laws are compatible with Sharia.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy involves establishing contacts with political figures and inviting them to events through a complex network of organizations. The goal is to build long-term relationships and influence public officials in line with the movement’s agenda. For example, officials should oppose criticism of political Islam or turn a blind eye to Islamism, Selen said.
Parties on the left-wing political spectrum are more open and susceptible to contact and infiltration from Islamists, the intelligence chief warned. This is partly due to a lack of understanding of Islamist structures and partly due to a poorly understood concept of tolerance.
Several participants at the closed-door meeting, organized under the patronage of State Secretary for the Interior Christoph de Vries, told BILD that they were surprised by the urgency of Selen’s remarks but also satisfied with the clarity of his message.
In a follow-up interview with BILD published on June 4, Güner Balci, the Integration Commissioner for Berlin-Neukölln, confirmed that Islamist infiltration was so widespread in Germany that there are “still police projects nationwide in which Islamists participate.”
“Women and girls are forced to enter marriage as virgins or at least to pretend to be,” Balci warned. Because many people in Muslim communities “despise, abhor, and even want to punish” homosexuality, “we have a very high number of homophobic attacks and crimes in Neukölln, but also in other districts of Berlin.”
“Islamists have indeed gained a foothold in many areas, and not just in Neukölln,” Balci said. “They aren’t just active in mosque communities; they’re doing educational work, community outreach, they’re approachable for all kinds of issues in the neighborhood, they maintain contact.”
“They work in supposed integration projects funded by public money—and in doing so, they are gradually gaining access to more and more areas and spaces, and more and more ways to reach young people,” she added.
It is noteworthy that both Germany’s domestic intelligence chief Sinan Selen, born in Istanbul and raised in a secular Turkish family that immigrated to Cologne, and Berlin-Neukölln Integration Commissioner Güner Balcı, the daughter of Turkish Alevi guest workers, have emerged as particularly clear-eyed voices on the Islamist threat. Their backgrounds underscore the critical distinction between Islam as a faith and Islamism as a political ideology. Those with intimate knowledge of Muslim-majority societies and communities often best appreciate this divide—and recognize that effectively countering Islamist infiltration requires supporting anti-Islamist Muslims and secular voices rather than blurring the lines between the religion and its totalitarian perversion.
I’m not convinced that those now called “Islamists” represent a “totalitarian perversion” of the faith. They are the Muslims who take their Islam straight, not on the rocks. It is the “moderate” Muslims who choose to ignore parts of the faith, but we have no way of knowing which Muslims are only feigning “moderation” or which, initially being real moderates, for whatever reason become more fanatical in their faith. The countries of the Western world have no way to distinguish the “moderates” from the “fanatic,” when they cross the border, and cannot be sure that those who initially may appear “moderate” will remain that way. European countries must strive to end migration by all Muslims into their midst.
“That the ones who are responsible for Europe even being in this situation are slowly waking up is one step in the right direction, as we need to counter Islamist infiltration,” Kent Ekeroth, a former Sweden Democrats MP, told Focus for Western Islamism….
But those who are “waking up” to the perils of Islamic political infiltration were never part of the leadership that allowed mass migration of Muslims into their countries in the first place. Such leaders as Jordan Bardella of the National Rally in France, Alice Weidel of the Alternative für Deutschland, Rupert Lowe of the Restore Britain party, and Giorgia Meloni of the Fratelli d’Italia party have always been leery of Muslim migrants. What has changed is popular sentiment. It has become ever more hostile to Muslim migrants, which explains why those leaders, and their anti-Muslim immigrant parties, have risen so spectacularly in the polls. The naïve enthusiasm for Muslim migrants, as famously expressed in former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence in 2015 that “Wir schaffen das!” — “We Can Do This!” — that is, we the people of Germany can successfully integrate large numbers of Muslims into our societies, has disappeared. Instead, the indigenous peoples of Europe have realized that the large-scale presence of Muslims in their countries has created a situation that for them is more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence.
It is the Muslim alliance with the left that has magnified the threat of Islamic penetration of Germany’s political institutions. This alliance should be publicized, and efforts made to convince the left that such an alliance is misconceived, given Islam’s misogyny and homophobia, and Islam’s refusal to uphold both freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Writing on X, the German political scientist Nina Scholz said she was “naturally delighted when security agencies share the analysis from our book.” Scholz’s book, Political Islam—A Hybrid Threat to Europe: The Muslim Brotherhood’s “Civilization Jihad,” was published in April.
According to Scholz’s findings, the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to delegitimize the state and its institutions by infiltrating state institutions, influencing legislation, and exploiting the state’s weakness caused by external and internal crises to shift norms.
“A central element of their strategy is citizenship, which grants civic rights to activists in the network,” she writes, explaining that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood, explicitly recommends that Muslims accept the citizenship of their host countries in his book on the interpretation of Islamic norms for Muslims in non-Muslim countries.
According to Al-Qaradawi, Muslims should accept citizenship not out of any sense of loyalty to the state, but only in order to vote for those who will support their Islamic penetration of domestic institutions. Think only of Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Sadiq Khan.
What begins as an alliance of seeming equals — Muslims and leftists — according to Scholz soon metamorphoses into an alliance where Muslims, that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, call the shots, and the leftists, having nowhere else to go, must follow. For all Muslims know, as Muhammad insisted, that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.”
Now the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service has issued his warning about Muslim infiltration of the country’s political institutions behind closed doors. Why should he not come out of the shadows and address the entire Bundestag with his warning? Surely he, who was born into a Muslim family, is not afraid to endure the predictable slander from the Muslims and the Left, that he is a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.”
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 