Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

The accusation that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza has become pervasive on the Left, and particularly in academia. I think that the accusation is absurd, so much so that until now I haven’t thought it worthy of a response. However, the accusation has recently arrived on my own website. In the comment thread on the prior post, one of the commenters (regular readers can guess who) has leveled against President Trump the charge that he “is sending weapons to Israel for the genocide in Gaza.” Really? It’s time for a response.

In my opinion, what’s going on in Gaza is not a genocide, but a war. Deaths in war are not a genocide. On October 7, 2023, the governing entity of Gaza, Hamas, conducted an unprovoked attack on Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostages. Israel has responded with a military action. This is a classic war. The norm in war is that the parties fight until one of the parties surrenders, or there is an armistice. When the parties are fighting, the whole idea is to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Hamas could end the war by surrendering. It has not done so. Moreover, it continues to hold hostages. Therefore, the normal expectation of war would be that Israel will continue to kill as many of the enemy as possible until there is a surrender.

You may disagree with my characterization that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was “unprovoked.” It doesn’t matter. Assume that the attack was provoked. This is still a war. In war, it is entirely the norm that a party that has been attacked tries to kill as many of the enemy as it can until the enemy surrenders.

Is there any other example of the term “genocide” being applied to a full-scale military response to an armed attack by an enemy state actor that has not surrendered? If there is, I don’t know of it.

Consider, for example, the Russia/Ukraine war. In this case I would say that Russia’s attack and invasion were unprovoked. The Russian version of events of course differs, and accuses Ukrainian of provocations that caused the conflict. But again, even if Russia’s invasion was completely unprovoked, the conflict is still a war between enemy state actors, where neither has surrendered. Unlike Israel, which makes extensive efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Russia regularly sends drones to bomb civilian targets and residential buildings in Ukrainian cities. But does anyone call Russia’s conduct toward Ukraine a “genocide”? Not that I’ve seen. Contrast this with the conduct of the Soviet Union toward Ukraine in the 1930s, when it imposed an intentional famine in which millions of innocents starved to death. There was no war going on; Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. That was a genocide.

Or consider World War II. Today that conflict is quickly fading out of living human memory. But it provides some obvious guideposts to distinguish between “genocide” and deaths from combat in war.

During World War II, Hitler and his minions engineered the deaths of some 6 million Jews and others, selected largely by racial and ethnic criteria, who were noncombatants and residents of either Germany or conquered territories. That is the classic “genocide.”

But there were far more deaths from fighting in the war. Here is a quote from a famous speech given by U.S. General George Patton to the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. army (under his command) on May 31, 1944 (a few days before D-Day and the Normandy beach invasion):

We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have or ever will have. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living g[-]damned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun c[***]suckers by the bushel-f[***]ing-basket.

(Quoted in Michael Walsh’s recent book A Rage to Conquer.)

In other words, with a war going on, we are going to kill the enemy, and as effectively as possible. And Patton was only talking about killing enemy soldiers. The U.S. and allied war effort was by no means limited to killing soldiers. For example, in 1943 and 1944 the U.S. and England carried out saturation bombing campaigns directed at German cities like Dresden, Bremen, Essen and even Berlin itself. There were many military targets, but these campaigns essentially leveled the cities, with very large numbers of civilian casualties. Indeed, a large part of the reason for these campaigns was the attempt to undermine civilian support for the Nazi regime. Nobody thought that the U.S. or England were under any obligation to deliver food aid to the suffering German civilians.

And then there were the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in these bombings. Shortly thereafter, Japan surrendered unconditionally, at which point the indiscriminate killings ended immediately.

I have no idea how it is that new rules seem to have emerged, applicable only to Israel (or maybe to only Israel and the United States) whereby any civilian casualties in war are now deemed “genocide.” The use of the term seems to be directed at appealing to soft-minded and historically ignorant students and academics in Western countries. But endless repetition of an inapplicable term cannot change a classic war into something else.

Hamas can end the deaths in Gaza by the simple expedient of unconditional surrender. Until then, it can expect large numbers of deaths, many of them civilians.

My office is exactly eleven steps from the waiting room. About a minute ago, I found myself standing out there; utterly clueless as to why I went in the first place. Whatever my perfectly good reason had been for taking those eleven steps simply vanished into thin air. I skulked back to my office and decided to turn my annoyance into something useful — like this week’s column.

Everyone has endured the elusive password, the vanishing keys or that pesky oven that might – or might not – be on. Or the front door that might or might not be locked. What is it about our mental storage and retrieval system that can be so exasperating?

As we try to do more and more in less and less time, what we call “multitasking” actually works against our ability to remember things. For something to be remembered, it has to be exciting or special. Throwing keys on the table is not exciting. Whatever I needed in the waiting room was, I guess, not very special. Based on this, we can come up with some useful tricks for improving our memory.

Dr. Zaldy Tan, author of “Age-Proof Your Mind,” offers a suggestion for episodes like my waiting room incident: Retrace your steps. By walking back to where you started, it’s possible you’ll remember what triggered your decision to go there in the first place. Indeed, pressuring yourself to remember something actually interferes with the recall process.

If I retrace my steps and still come up with nothing, I just tell myself, “Relax. It’ll come back.” This releases the immediate pressure and allows me to go back to other things.

As a mental health professional, I spend countless hours talking with people. In the course of these discussions, many clients will stop and say something like, “I don’t remember what I was going to say.” I remove the pressure by suggesting: “Don’t worry. It’ll come back.” It almost always comes back before the hour is over. Why? Because the stress is released and the subconscious has a chance to retrieve the lost thought, which most likely connects to our conversation.

What about situations where you lose your keys? Or your wallet? You don’t have the luxury to simply “forget about it.” In these more urgent circumstances you obviously have to retrace your steps. In this case, the resulting pressure helps you persevere in your search. If you constantly lose important items, then you’ll need to focus on prevention. Take psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Edgerly’s advice. “If you put your keys [or whatever] in the same place every day, you’ll always, without fail, know where they are.” The more you do something the same way, the more likely you are to remember it.

Association is another memory-enhancing technique. Do you ever worry that you didn’t lock the door? Or that perhaps you left the oven on? There are few things more annoying than going back, only to discover (in 99.99% of cases) that you did do what you thought you didn’t.

Associating something distinctive with an action can be helpful in remembering it. For example, singing a silly tune to yourself as you lock the door will help you remember it later. Dr. Edgerly points out that most people are visual learners, which explains why we rarely forget faces but often forget names. When you meet a new person, she suggests repeating the name to yourself and then using it at least once in conversation. “So, Murlene, how long do you plan to be in town?”

Memory problems can sometimes be a sign of increased stress. In these cases, you have to unlock the underlying causes to help open the door to a better memory and a less anxious life.

Door! Unlock! I just remembered why I walked out into the waiting room!

I left my keys in the front door.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

“How do we keep our inner fire alive? Two things, at minimum, are needed: an ability to appreciate the positives in our life – and a commitment to action. Every day, it’s important to ask and answer these questions: ‘What’s good in my life?’ and ‘What needs to be done?”

― Nathaniel Branden, psychologist & author

The German economy contracted 0.3% on a quarterly basis, according to the Federal Statistics Office. Germany’s stronghold on manufacturing is at risk. The government implemented new provisions to bypass the constitution and spend in perpetuity on the incoming war. Spending is up, revenues are down—the German economy is in a recession.

Annual GDP reached 0.2% in Q2, a 0.1% decline from Q1. Around 10% of all German exports are sent to the US, and some are blaming tariffs for the downfall without seeing that the trend was already in motion. Germany’s economy has been in a multi-year downturn caused by ignorant economic policies that directly damaged Germany’s mercantile stronghold in Europe.

German Net Worth

Politicians suffocated automobile manufacturing through net-zero regulations. Sanctions on Russia caused Germany to lose 50% of its oil imports. Its willingness to bend to Brussels has reshaped the demographic landscape with a spike in the population due to migration.

Lawmakers have adopted a war posture and are pushing to increase military spending while abandoning their austerity policy. Germany may be the wealthiest nation in the European Union, but individual households are not experiencing any benefits. In fact, the average German has far less than those living in countries with a smaller GDP. The cost of living has never meaningfully dropped since the pandemic and lockdowns.

Germany has not experienced such economic weakness since post-World War II. Estimates believe that the economy will decline 0.3% for the year or remain stagnant at best. Manufacturing has dropped 10% below pre-pandemic levels. Construction has shrunk by around 3% in recent quarters due to high costs. Exports, which are 34% of Germany’s GDP, are down as demand from the US and China wanes.

If Germany tanks, then the entire European Union will sink, as Germany alone comprises nearly a quarter of the Union’s entire GDP.

Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics

Thursday, the Supreme Court announced its opinion in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association. The case involved the fate of approximately $783 million in NIH research grants that were tied to DEI initiatives rather than to general scientific research. By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that a single federal judge could not compel the federal government to spend nearly $1 billion on nonsensical pseudo-research it no longer wished to fund.

This case may ultimately prove more important than the money it saved because it indicated the Supreme Court was losing patience with inferior courts and with one of its members.

Neil Gorsuch used a concurring opinion that effectively read the Riot Act to lower courts.

Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.  In Department of Ed. v. California, 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam), this Court granted a stay because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations. California explained that “suits based on ‘any express or implied contract with the United States’” do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act. Id., at ___ (slip op., at 2) (quoting 28 U. S. C. §1491(a)(1)).  Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA. As support for its course, the district court invoked the “persuasive authority” of “the dissent[s] in California” and an earlier court of appeals decision California repudiated. Massachusetts v. Kennedy, ___ F. Supp. 3d ___, ___ (Mass. 2025), App. to Application 232a (App.).  That was error. “[U]nless we wish anarchy to prevail within the federal judicial system, a precedent of this Court must be followed by the lower federal courts no matter how misguided the judges of those courts may think it to be.”  Hutto v. Davis, 454 U. S. 370, 375 (1982) (per curiam).

He concluded with this summary:

If the district court’s failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to “compel compliance” with a different “order that this Court ha[d] stayed.” Department of Homeland Security v. D. V. D., 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (KAGAN, J., concurring) (slip op., at 1).  Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court’s decisions even though the case at hand did not differ “in any pertinent respect” from the one this Court had decided. Boyle, 606 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 1). So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case “squarely controlled” by one of its precedents.  Ibid. All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect “the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.”  Hutto, 454 U. S., at 375.

Red State

By Susan Quinn

The Democrats and many Republicans are crying foul over the raid on John Bolton, former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump during his first term. They say that these actions are retribution for the nasty things that Bolton has said; that he included classified information in his book; and that he is being punished for alienating President Trump:

Federal investigators went to Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., at 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump administration official told The Post. Agents later went to Bolton’s office in downtown DC, but did not enter until a judge signed a warrant for that location late Friday morning.

‘NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,’ Patel said in a cryptic post to X shortly after the raid began. 

Although people are pointing to Bolton’s use of classified information for his book, the reasons identified for the raid are speculation. Another suggestion was made for the probe:

Investigators reopened a dormant probe into Bolton’s alleged use of a private email to send classified national security documents to his wife and daughter from his work desk before his dismissal by Trump in September 2019, according to a senior US official.

‘While Bolton was a national security adviser, he was literally stealing classified information, utilizing his family as a cutout,’ this person charged.

The probe was initially opened in 2020, and continued into the Biden administration, which froze the investigation.

People are prepared to criticize Trump for almost anything, but I think, so far, they are barking up the wrong tree. There is much speculation for the raid on Bolton’s home and office, but the facts are not available. It is true that both men disliked each other — hated, might be a more accurate term — but that premise still misses the point: If there is reason to think a person has broken a law, then an investigation is warranted. It doesn’t matter how much they hate each other.

As more andeople are investigated, Trump will probably suffer more attacks. For example, Adam Schiff is being investigated for mortgage fraud. So is Letitia James. So is Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve Board. Eventually, the DoJ will probably look into Alvin Bragg’s outrageous case against Donald Trump. Are these retribution, too?

It would be difficult to deny that Trump must be getting some satisfaction from these pursuits. Would anyone feel inclined to defend any of these people? Does anyone think that they are innocent of the charges or implications of their acts?

Democrats shouting “retribution” don’t surprise me; they are mainly projecting their own reactions onto Trump, whom they would love to endure more prosecutions. But it is time, at least for Republicans, to acknowledge that even if you are a Never Trumper, sometimes pursuing the truth and justice and the facts are more important than taking revenge.

It would be difficult to deny that Trump must be getting some satisfaction from these pursuits. Would anyone feel inclined to defend any of these people? Does anyone think that they are innocent of the charges or implications of their acts?

Democrats shouting “retribution” don’t surprise me; they are mainly projecting their own reactions onto Trump, whom they would love to endure more prosecutions. But it is time, at least for Republicans, to acknowledge that even if you are a Never Trumper, sometimes pursuing the truth and justice and the facts are more important than taking revenge.

More than that, has anyone noticed that these actions are putting cracks into the edifice of the Deep State?

If you take a careful look at the decision of a New York appellate court today to throw out the unconstitutional and disgraceful $500 million penalty on President Trump and his businesses…

And then you keep your nose in the newspapers and watch New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, getting busted for mortgage fraud…

And then you go back a bit and look at all the declassified documents released by Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel that show the entire Russiagate hoax was quarterbacked by President Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton…

And then you just think about this whole rotten sequence — what you see is the collapse of the legal and Deep State forces against Mr. Trump.

In many ways, you could argue it’s the collapse of the Democratic Party.

Not only because the Deep State couldn’t bust Mr. Trump, and the forces of treachery and sedition couldn’t break Mr. Trump, and the prominent liars are themselves now facing criminal indictment, and making it all worse for that crowd — Mr. Trump himself was re-elected.

Which was the Obama-Clinton Deep State’s worst nightmare.

And as far as the Deep State goes, it appears that all of those people who participated in the Russian hoax and various other phony trials — well, they’re getting fired from their jobs. And they’re all lawyering up.

And on top of all that, here’s Mr. Trump running a vastly successful administration — in terms of economic policy, domestic policy, foreign policy, you name it.

Wait a minute, though, don’t forget the president is going to inspect Washington, D.C., this evening — so let’s add law and order to that list.

And he closed the wide open border.

So that adds to the Deep State’s nightmare.

Not only could they not put him in jail for 750 years… Or bust his businesses… Or throw him off the ballot… Or tie him to the so-called Russia hoax…

The worst thing of all for the lawyered up Deep State crowd, though, is that Mr. Trump is succeeding in virtually every initiative he’s put forward.

And, not to rub it in, but I want to quote Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post today: “a great win for America” — which describes his victory in the New York appellate court.

It’s a great win for America for many different reasons.

What comes to mind to me, though, is that it shows that eventually, the American judicial system works.

As bad, inept, and corrupt as some of these judges and spies have been, with all of their political biases and weaponization and lawfare against Mr. Trump…

As bad as they are — as the cases moved up the judicial totem pole, Mr. Trump has won them all.

Larry Kudlow is a columnist for the New York Sun. From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.

 Democratic mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and his comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to wipe out the enforcement of all misdemeanor offenses, The Post has learned.

In its most recent platform, the group blasts policing and detention as “instruments of class war” designed to “guarantee the domination of the working class” — and demands an end what it calls “the criminalization of working-class survival.”

“For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,” according to the national party’s latest platform, adopted in 2021.

On the campaign trail, Mamdani has repeatedly called for police to stop focusing on what he’s referred to as “non serious crimes.”

“Police have a critical role to play but right now we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs,” he said in a campaign video posted to X Wednesday.

The DSA has also pushed to slash arrests, gut prosecutors’ budgets, abolish cash bail and all forms of pre-trial detention, scrap electronic monitoring, and end imprisonment for parole violations.

Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman and member of the NYC chapter of the DSA and its endorsed mayoral candidate, has questioned the purpose of prisons and repeatedly called to roll back punishment on so-called “non-violent offenses” – both as an Albany lawmaker and in his Gotham mayoral campaign.

On the campaign trail, Mamdani backtracked from his prior ‘defund the police’ views in the wake of the Park Avenue massacre, insisting he’d keep the NYPD roughly at its current size and redirect officers to focus only on “serious” crimes.

Critics remain unconvinced he can lead law enforcement and tame NYC crime.

“I don’t buy for a second that he is moderated on any of these policing questions because he has yet to really articulate in any deep way why he’s moderated or how he’s moderated,” said Rafael Mangual, a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. “All he has really said is that he no longer wants to defund the police, even though police and prison and jail abolition are core tenets of the DSA party platform.”

And Mamdani has even tried to challenge the definition of a violent offense.

“What violent crime is – is defined by the state,” he said at a 2021 protest outside the Manhattan DA’s office to nix cash bail and shut down Rikers – a promise he’s still making. ” Violence is an artificial construction,” he said at the time.

The misdemeanors the DSA wants to erase aren’t minor slip-ups. In the Empire State, they include theft or shoplifting up to $1,000, drug possession, assault without a weapon and even driving while intoxicated.

“They’re driving the city into a hole that’s never going to recover,” said Susan Ginsburg, a resident of Greenwich Village, which has descended into a lawless drug den since soft on crime policies created what neighbors have decried as a revolving door of justice.

“People will break the law with impunity. There has to be deterrent for breaking the law,” she said.

“It’s astonishing that we’re even having this conversation,” said Maria Danzilo, an Upper West Side resident who ran in the Democratic primary for state Senate in 2022 and founded the group One City Rising.

Everybody is so sick and tired of this, and we just want to have a normal, functional, reasonable way of getting through our day without worrying about being hurt. This is exactly the opposite of what New Yorkers need right now.”

To end misdemeanor arrests, Albany would have to pass a bill decriminalizing or downgrading those charges.

Gov. Hochul – who has yet to endorse her fellow Democrat – doesn’t back defunding the police.

If elected mayor, Mamdani can’t change state laws, but does have influence over how they’re enforced. He could force the NYPD to deprioritize certain arrests or pressure district attorneys not to prosecute certain cases – much like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg did in his controversial “day one” memo telling staff to go soft on armed robberies and drug dealing.

“That will create an EZ-Pass for criminals, enabling them to repeatedly commit misdemeanor crimes,” lambasted Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. “This will make the police even less effective at enforcement. Ultimately, this will cause the quality of life to decline dramatically, leading to a breakdown of law and order and resulting in chaos and disorder.

New Yorkers like Chelsea resident Alexander Kaplan are stunned by the pro-crime push.

“It’s just difficult to imagine how adults in their right mind could come up with it. I’m not exaggerating, I’m completely serious,” he said. “We’re already suffering from terrible crime. This is going to make it a thousand times worse. And perception matters – just the notion of this would embolden criminals.

Gabrielle Fahmy, New York Post

James Jackson, Yahoo News

The German welfare state is no longer financially sustainable, Friedrich Merz said on Saturday.

The chancellor argued for a fundamental reassessment of the benefits system as spending continues to soar past last year’s record of €47bn (£40bn).

In a state-level party conference meeting on Saturday, Mr Merz said: “The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford.”

Once the export champion of Europe, Germany’s economy has slowed dramatically since 2017, with GDP growing by only 1.6 per cent since then versus 9.5 per cent for the rest of the eurozone.

Germany’s economy shrank by 0.2 per cent last year following a 0.3 per cent dip in 2023 – the first time since the early 2000s the economy has retreated two years in a row.

Industrial production fell under the Left-leaning “traffic light” coalition of Olaf Scholz and continues to slide under the new government, with GDP declining by 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2025.

Meanwhile, spending on social welfare has exploded, and is set to increase further this year as Germany’s population ages and unemployment rises. Although the majority of benefit recipients are German, large numbers are non-German citizens.

The grim warning from the German chancellor will fuel concerns about the parlous state of Britain’s finances. Despite Mr Merz’s concerns, Germany’s financial problems pale in comparison to the UK.

At 62.5 per cent, Germany’s debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) is one of the lowest in the eurozone and far below the UK’s at 96.3 per cent.

Higher welfare spending, especially on disability benefits in Britain, has helped make the UK’s debt-to-GDP the fifth highest in the developed world.

In the UK, welfare spending costs about 10.8 per cent of GDP, with welfare payments at £326bn this year rising to £373bn over the next five years. Pensions are the biggest factor – predicted to rise from £159bn this year to £182bn by 2030.

State pensions in the UK are far lower than in Germany and account for about 5.1 per cent of GDP. In Germany, by contrast, state pensions alone account for about 12 per cent of GDP, according to Eurostat. Benefits for families and children added a further 3.4 per cent.

However, the UK has a higher disability benefit bill, which cost £36bn in 2023-24 but which is set to hit £56bn in 2029-30. That’s a 56 per cent increase over six years or about 8 per cent a year – far in excess of inflation.

Germany has in place a so-called “debt brake”, which limits how much the government can borrow to fund its spending plans.

Mr Merz’s views on the welfare state are likely to provoke discontent among his Social Democratic Party (SDP) coalition partners, whom he relies on for a thin majority in the Bundestag.

The SDP have typically seen themselves as defenders of the welfare state, but Mr Merz, a former corporate lawyer with little governing experience, said he would not be scared away from making necessary reforms by discontent within the party.

The German chancellor added that he was not satisfied with what his government had achieved during its time so far, saying: “Let’s show together that changes and reforms are possible.”

He called on both the SDP and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to commit to making tough decisions and to forming a joint “anti-migration and business-friendly” coalition path.

Radically curbing migration is one key policy area where the coalition is in agreement. Both parties have called for Germany to increase its ability to detain migrants pending deportation and to expand a list of safe countries that migrants could be returned to.

This stronger migration stance follows a new study by the German Economic Institute that listed migration as a “watershed” moment in the decline of German school performance after 2015.

The coalition’s more hard-line approach on migration has also aligned with an uptick in support for the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The AfD are now polling level with Mr Merz’s CDU among voters, while a survey by the INSA institute found that 59 per cent of voters were unhappy with the chancellor’s performance in his first 100 days in office. His performance among voters is notably worse than that of Mr Scholz, who was removed from office in February after the SPD’s worst result in modern history.

Lars Klingbeil, the SPD leader and vice-chancellor, hit back at Mr Merz’s announcement with calls for increased taxation on top earners.

He called for a summit focused on helping industry leaders respond or adapt to US tariffs and said “no option is off the table” when it comes to plugging the 30-billion-euro gap in Germany’s budget.

It’s commonly known blue states are experiencing enormous and financially debilitating out-migration from their people’s republics. Renting a U-Haul for the trip from LA to Austin is massively more expensive than renting one from Austin to LA. That trip is doing U-Haul a favor, so it’s accordingly and dramatically cheaper. My U-Haul experience when we retired and moved from Texas to Wyoming was pleasantly inexpensive. Most Americans haven’t yet discovered the joys of life in Wyoming, a situation with which Wyomingites in the least populated state in the union are satisfied.

Fortunately for red states, most people escaping blue utopias are refugees, not missionaries. They’re not making the mistake of transferring blue voting lunacy to their new homes. Unfortunately—my heart does not bleed—for blue states, most of the people fleeing are solid citizens who can afford to leave, people who take considerable tax revenues with them. Fleeing too are businesses small and large whose loss in tax revenue to blue states easily runs into the billions.

But’s that’s not the worst of what may be adding up to a Democrat death spiral. Democrats are losing millions of registered Democrat voters while Republicans are picking virtually all of them up.

“Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot,” the report reads. “That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.”

Encouraging news, but it’s always wise to remember Republicans daily earn the mocking title: “the stupid party.” They have a genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and often have spines made of linguini. 

“All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party,” the report adds. “(In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.

Many blue states, like massive California, register voters by party while many red states, including Texas, do not, so the number of nationwide registered voters by party does not tell the full story. But in those 30 states with partisan voter registration, Democrats’ eleven-point edge over Republicans on Election Day 2020 plummeted to just over six points in 2024, an alarming trend for Democrats. [skip]

By 2024, the Republican party’s share of new registered voters nationwide “had overtaken Democrats’,” rising by nine points compared to 2018, the report details, while Democrats’ fell by almost eight percent.

Democrats have always relied on huge networks of NGOs/nonprofits and massive fundraising and vote fraud. Even that has been badly disrupted, primarily with the extinction of USAID. Immediately after that agency–with eventual and grudging court blessings–was dismantled the Democrat Party announced it was out of money, which I’m sure was just a coincidence. Donald Trump has since been methodically obliterating Democrat’s other traditional government sources of illicit funding.

Democrats have also always relied on 90%+ of black votes, but since 2020, and particularly in 2024, an alarming number of blacks, and particularly young black men, have voted Republican. Democrats can’t afford to lose blacks. Without them, it’s nearly impossible for them to win.