Liana Graham | Ashley Reese

Far-left political influencer Hasan Piker was recently grilled on a satirical internet show—and the clips it generated were gold.

“Now, Karl Marx said, ‘To each according to his needs.’ You live in a $2.7 million house,” the host said. “Why are your needs more important than 90% of other Californians?”

Piker appeared uncomfortable as he answered—and it wasn’t because he was fully decked out in a Mao suit. 

To put it simply, proudly sporting the uniform of a regime that took the lives of an estimated 80 million people, all while enjoying the prosperity of a $2.7 million house and invitations to Oscar parties, isn’t a good look.

But of the socialist states Piker views favorably, former Yugoslavia arguably ranks among the highest. He once published a video titled “Yugoslavia Was Awesome!” in which he praised aspects of the former socialist country, including its living standards.

That idea might seem laughable to survivors like Slavenka Drakulic—literally.

In 1992, she published her book “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,” which recounts the stories of daily life under communism in Eastern Europe. While Piker may shrug off the textbook figures on communism’s death tolls, he may be less familiar with one of its nearly invisible effects: the subtle erosion of human dignity, hope, and personal responsibility.

Drakulic’s book brings a magnifying glass to these stories, starting with an account of the life of her friend Tanja. After the death of her lover and the destruction of her journalistic reputation for mildly criticizing nationalization, Tanja committed suicide.

For those under socialist rule, a lack of faith in the future was a characteristic feature of life. Everyone around Drakulic seemed to assume the permanence of the communist state.

“What communism instilled in us was precisely this immobility,” she wrote. “The absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining our lives differently.”

For Tanja, that loss of hope proved fatal.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about a similar effect in his well-known book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

Drawing from his experience in a concentration camp, Frankl concluded that the individuals who were able to persevere held on to a crucial ingredient for life: hope. Even in barbaric conditions, hope allowed prisoners to maintain their dignity and will to live.

Ordinary lives—not just political dissidents—were crushed under the weight of socialist regimes.

“Not big heroes, political prisoners, or dissidents,” Drakulic wrote, “but people who just could not stand it anymore.”

In a society with concentrated state power, citizens increasingly lose the sense that they have a stake in molding the future—and that has a devastating effect not only on hope, but also on individual responsibility.

Litter was therefore pervasive. Drakulic wrote that citizens, having lost a sense of their agency, behaved as if “the public belonged to nobody.”

She continued, “If you can’t destroy the system, you can certainly destroy a telephone booth, ticket machine, or flowers in a park. In this silent war, the losers are our cities

Frustration with the system found expression in small acts of neglect. The physical decay of the urban landscape is a mirror image of a population hollowed out from within.

Communism is economically unsustainable—that much is gleaned from the failure of the USSR and its satellite states. But even deeper is its spiritual cost. Forcing humans to live in impoverished conditions, fearful of the all-seeing eye of the state, degrades trust, freedom, and creativity; it degrades the human soul. We must heed Drakulic’s warning of the spiritual rather than merely economic cost of collectivism.

As she stated in the 1990s, “We may have survived communism, but we have not outlived it.” That is because communism is so much more than an economic ideology—it seeps into the very mind and soul of individuals forced to live under its reign.

Daily Signal

Everyone’s excited about Medicare for All. No more premiums. No more medical costs. No more worrying about health insurance. The government covers everything. Unfortunately, the Medicare program for seniors is going bankrupt, as is Social Security. In the next decade, it will collapse by the government’s own figures. So how is Medicare for All going to step in and cover everything and everyone? Taxes can’t go high enough. Democrats want to tax “the rich” as high as 90 percent. But even that won’t cover the cost of Medicare. The only possible solution? Rationing. Plus mandated euthanasia. There’s no other way. People voting for socialism (right now, in early voting) think they suffer so much under capitalism. But how will they cope with the medical equivalent of empty grocery store shelves? Oh, and empty store shelves are coming too. Perhaps when hunger and famine become part of American life, health care won’t matter as much.

But hey — we will have AFFORDABILITY under socialism. That’s all that matters.

*******

We use DNA as the final word in convicting violent criminals. DNA is so trusted that we will send a convicted criminal to Death Row based on it. Yet when it comes to men who decide they’re women, or women who decide they’re men, we no longer consider the DNA evidence. Gender is whatever you say it is, or feel it is, in a given moment. If your DNA proves you’re a man, but you claim you’re a woman — why then, you’re a woman. So much for “trust the science.”

*******

“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Rapid charging speeds are getting faster all the time. There are already a few cars capable of 400kW, while BYD’s Flash Charging tech supplies a whopping 1,500kW. But even the latter system involves stopping, plugging in and waiting for about 10 minutes. Honda, meanwhile, is envisioning a future in which you won’t have to stop at all.

The Japanese manufacturer is working with The Taisei Corporation and its Taisei Rotec subsidiary on wireless, road surface-integrated charging technology that’s capable of keeping an electric car topped up as it drives along. This isn’t a new idea, but the Honda project stands out firstly because of the potential output of up to 150kW, intended to charge up the especially large batteries of electric commercial vehicles on the go.

Another notable aspect is a planned test on a public road from April 2027 onwards. The Tateyama Expressway in Chiba, Japan is the chosen site, although the assessment will be preceded by testing at the Taisei Group’s Future Technology Field in Fukushima Prefecture starting later this year.

Each of the three companies will provide one key piece of the puzzle. It’s Honda’s job to sort the power receiver and transmitter units, while Taisei is developing the DC power supply system, and Taisei Rotec will work on the technology necessary for sticking all of this into the asphalt.

Matt Robinson, AutoExpressUK

A viral video showing a Portland, Oregon high school football player attacking a rival performing a patriotic act prior to their game last Friday is speaking outrage across the country.

As The Daily Mail reported, video footage has emerged showing the moment Grant football players run onto the field behind a teammate who was waving a large American flag prior their game against rivals Jefferson High School before an ugly scene unfolds.

As one will see in the video, a Jefferson player races toward the flag-bearer and levels him. This causes the Grant player to fall to the ground.

Grant players then charge toward the violent thug to confront him.

The account which shared the video (which is not officially affiliated with Jefferson High School) openly CELEBRATED this gross attack.

While the account was later deleted, Taren Feist, an Oregon-based campaign manager, saved the screenshots.

WATCH:

Football player for Jefferson High School (@PPSConnect) in Oregon AMBUSHED a player on the opposing team while he was carrying an American flag onto the field.

The team’s IG account then CELEBRATED the attack.

This is ASSAULT. He should be expelled.

Cullen Linebarger, Gateway Pundit

4

Applying a therapist’s understanding to the Democrats’ relationship with their progressive activists.      

Daniel Winston | October 21, 2026

There is a strange spectacle unfolding in American politics. The Democratic establishment calculatingly spends its dwindling energies bowing to its growing and increasingly radical left wing that has openly declared its intention to replace it. The Democratic Socialists of America, the streamers, the campus activists, and the insurgent candidates who style themselves as the party’s conscience have never hidden their goal. They do not want a seat at the table. They want the whole tent, and they have said so. Yet the establishment responds not with resistance but with flattery, cheerfully murmurating about how big that tent is. That now proverbial tent has become a cage, and the Democrats are in it.

To understand why, we have to understand the historically peculiar power of the radical left. In raw numbers, it remains a minority within the party, but numbers have never been its weapon. Its weapon is intensity. The far left is rich in volunteers who knock on doors in the rain, the small-dollar donors who give again and again, and the online armies that can make or break a candidate in a single news cycle. It punches far above its weight, and in an era of razor-thin margins, a few points of enthusiasm or apathy decide who sits in the Senate. The establishment knows it cannot win without that energy, and it knows that if it crosses these activists, it will be primaried out of existence. So the Democratic leadership is simultaneously dependent on and terrified of the very people who have promised to unseat it. Conservatives will recognize the dynamic from the Tea Party years, with one crucial difference: The Tea Party demanded that politicians keep the promises they campaigned on. The nouveau left demands that Democrats break them. That is not a coalition. That is the establishment’s captivity.

The enslavement takes two forms, and voters should learn to recognize both because failure to do so could truly create an existential threat to democracy. In the first, the candidate genuflects during the campaign. He obsequiously praises the radicals, adopts their language, nods along with positions he privately thinks are foolish, and quietly hopes that once he is safely elected with their help, he can shed the costume and govern as the moderate he claims to be in private conversations with donors. In the second form, the process runs in reverse. The candidate campaigns as a sensible centrist, wins the suburbs and the swing voters, and then, once in office, governs from the left, which is where she intended to go all along.

Whether the candidate fakes radicalism to win or fakes moderation to win, the voter is the mark in a shell game. He is never quite sure which cup holds the pea, and he is not supposed to be. He just needs to be kept confused well enough and long enough to stay in his own plebeian version of the cage.

The deeper humiliation is that the actual masters do not even pretend to be the junior partners they are. They aggressively say the quiet part out loud. Hasan Piker, who has become a kingmaker of sorts among young progressives, recently turned to the subject of James Talarico, the Democrat Senate candidate in Texas. Piker said his movement would need to remind Talarico that they are “the force that allowed him to win this seat of power,” and that if Talarico wanted to keep it, he would have to play ball. This is not the language of a constituent addressing a representative. It is the language of a creditor addressing a debtor, or of a taskmaster reminding a laborer who owns his time. Mixing metaphors is usually considered problematic. In this context, the chaos is so rich that such mixing is genuinely called for.

This is the trap from which there is no clean exit. The establishment Democrat imagines that if he just endures one more cycle, one more primary season, one more term, the radicals will eventually leave him alone and he can finally govern as he wishes. But the radicals will not leave him alone, because their leverage never expires. Every vote he casts and every position he takes is measured against the question of whether it will provoke a primary challenge, and so every vote is cast looking over his shoulder rather than looking ahead.

My clinical work with couples is rooted in the principles of differentiation, the capacity to hold on to yourself while remaining in meaningful connection with people who are pressuring you to abandon yourself. A well-differentiated person can say, “I hear you, I care about you, and I still disagree,” without collapsing into appeasement, exploding into rejection, or launching a frontal attack. A poorly differentiated person attempts to regulate himself by self-correcting according to the anxiety of those around him. He does not ask what he believes. He asks what will keep the loudest person in the room calm. The modern Democrat establishment is a case study in poor differentiation at the scale of a national party. It has fused itself to the emotional reactivity of its most intense faction, and it has publicly mistaken that fusion for unity.

That is why it cannot lead. Leadership requires a fixed point, a set of convictions you are willing to hold even when they cost you. A leader is a compass. He points in the same direction regardless of the weather, and those who follow him know where they are going. What the Democrats have offered instead is a weathervane, an instrument exquisitely sensitive to every gust from the left, spinning to face whichever direction the wind happens to blow that week. You cannot navigate by a weathervane. You can only learn from it which way the storm is going.

American voters deserve to know what they are choosing. When they vote for a supposedly moderate Democrat, they are not voting for the person on the ballot. They are voting for whoever holds that person’s cage key. And on the evidence of the past two years, the key is held by a uniquely energized and organized mob of activists who have announced, without embarrassment, that they intend to collect on their debt.

Daniel Winston is a marriage and family therapist who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch’s death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples, has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach, and volunteers as a first responder medic and on a search and rescue team.

American Thinker

Why would citizens defend governments that abuse them?

J.B. Shurk | October 21, 2026

Western governments have put themselves in mortal danger.  

They are actively doing things that are destroying their countries: (1) replacing their native citizens with unassimilable foreigners; (2) centralizing government power in unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies; (3) censoring and criminalizing public dissent; (4) offshoring industrial and manufacturing jobs; (5) exacerbating energy costs and general inflation by demonizing hydrocarbons and pushing “global warming” delusions; (6) increasing taxes, government spending, and public welfare in unsustainable ways; (7) demolishing their nations’ historical identities, traditions, beliefs, and common cultures; (8) providing foreigners with “free” homes, food, and educations, while accusing native citizens of being “racists,” “xenophobes,” and “white supremacists”; (9) discouraging healthy marriages and stable families; and (10) indoctrinating the youngest generations to believe that war, “climate change,” overpopulation, and economic collapse will prevent them from ever having happy, hopeful, purposeful futures.

Those are just ten ways that Western governments are hurting their citizens.  There are many more.  But a reasonable person should be able to read the above paragraph and understand that nations cannot survive under such a destructive barrage of harmful policies.  

Western governments are waging wars against their own nations.  The progress of these wars may look a little different in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the United States, but what happens in one country soon enough spreads to all the rest.  It is as if Western leaders got together many years ago and agreed that their countries would drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and take long dirt naps.  

Perhaps they formed this suicide pact during an “elite” gathering of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, or the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Perhaps they chanted, “Build back better,” in unison while voting to euthanize the West.  

Adversarial political parties ostensibly compete for control of Western governments, but, in reality, the party system is kabuki theater wherein the same special interests own the politicians on both sides of the aisle.  Until so-called “populist” parties emerged in the West, voters were given merely the illusion of choice.  

After all, the Conservative Party held power in the United Kingdom for fourteen years, and despite repeated promises to do so, its leaders failed to secure Britain’s borders from foreign invasion or to extract the kingdom from regulatory enslavement to the European Union. 

In the United States, President George W. Bush calls President Bill Clinton his “brother” and Hillary Clinton his “sister” and once described Michelle Obama as his “best friend.”  Establishment Republicans such as lame-duck senators Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis spend more time attacking President Trump and the 95% of Republican voters who support his MAGA policies than they do warning Americans about the growing number of communists in the Democrat Party.

Western nations have political Establishments that pretend to fight in front of the public but largely conspire behind closed doors and agree about most everything.  We know this to be true because we have witnessed how these political Establishments work together to prevent “outsider” political candidates from reaching higher office or holding power.  

In Europe, the political Establishment enjoy enforcing so-called “cordons sanitaire,” or “firewalls” meant to hinder the leaders of “unacceptable” political movements from obtaining power.  In the Netherlands, the political Establishment have blocked Geert Wilders from becoming prime minister because of his opposition to mass immigration, Islamic supremacy, and the European Union and despite the fact that the party he leads has significant public support.  In France, the political Establishment have done the same thing to Jean-Marie Le Pen, his daughter Marine, and their National Rally because of the party’s pro-national-sovereignty and anti-immigration policies.  In the United Kingdom, the political Establishment have blocked Brexit stalwart and Reform UK chief Nigel Farage from leadership roles in parliament.  In Germany, the political Establishment have attempted to delegitimize the popular anti-immigration party, Alternative for Deutschland, by defaming its members as “domestic terrorists,” “Russian agents,” and anti-constitutional “national security threats.”  

In the United States, Establishment Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to prevent President Trump’s election and then to remove him from office after he soundly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.  The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, actively campaigned against Trump in 2016.  So-called “conservative” political pundits, such as Bill Kristol and George Will, repudiated Republican voters and supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.  Even though Republicans controlled Congress, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan advanced the Clinton-Obama-Intelligence-Community operation to frame President Trump as a Russian spy.  Senator Romney twice voted to remove Trump from office.  Democrat prosecutors spent years trying to imprison Trump for life, and Establishment Republicans worked desperately to keep Trump from becoming the party’s presidential nominee once again in 2024.  America’s political Establishment tried to remove Trump from ballots, bully him with investigations, and paint him as a “dictator” in an incitement campaign that encouraged would-be assassins to seek his death.

What have these widespread Establishment efforts across the West to undermine elections and silence public dissent accomplished?  Western institutions — government agencies, universities, news media, banks, corporations, and NGOs — have never been more distrusted.  That makes sense.  Western institutions are hostile to Western citizens.  

While ordinary Westerners are proud of their countries, Western institutions tell them that they should be ashamed of their ancestors and their nations’ histories.  While ordinary Westerners wish to work, buy homes, and have families, Western institutions support mass immigration policies that replace Western workers, increase demand on housing, and make it much more difficult for Westerners to support and protect their families.  When Western citizens object to the political Establishments’ open borders, Western news media demonize them as “racists” and “white supremacists.”  When Western citizens organize around their national flags and march peacefully down city streets, the political Establishment demonize them as “fascists,” “right-wingers,” and “Nazis.”  When Western citizens try to protect themselves from violent foreign nationals, Western law enforcement agencies condemn the Westerners and defend the violent foreigners.  

The West’s political Establishments would rather allow foreigners to burn down churches, town halls, stores, schools, and private homes than take action to protect Western citizens from the deadly consequences of Establishment policies.  The U.K. Establishment allowed Islamic supremacists to rape tens of thousands of British girls without any consequence.  The French Establishment allowed Islamic supremacists to hunt police officers, loot stores, set buildings and vehicles ablaze, and terrorize French citizens without any consequence.  

In Germany, 87% of suspects with open arrest warrants are foreigners.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, London’s police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, says that it is critical to replace merit-based hiring with preferential treatment for black and Muslim applicants (and calls criticism of his “diversity” policies “toxic”).  Western NGOs preposterously claim that capitalism and “climate change” should be blamed for Islam’s penchant for sex slavery and child marriages.  In the U.K., 80% of jobs go to foreign immigrants.  In the U.S., Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin promises to politically prosecute President Trump’s supporters in order to “deter” them from opposing Establishment policies.  

Even as Western governments attack Western citizens, however, they still expect those citizens to sacrifice their lives in a looming global war.  The head of the British Army, General Sir Roland Walker, recently told soldiers: “Very soon, the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation with the citizens of this country about just what is going on.”  At that time, citizens “have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritize defense and security.”

Nearly half of military-aged Brits say there are “no circumstance” in which they would defend the United Kingdom.  That’s no surprise.  Why would Western citizens defend governments that abuse them?  If the West already “belongs” to foreigners, what else is there to defend?

Western governments’ cascading failures are leading to their demise.  Citizens owe them nothing.

J. B. Shurk, American Thinker

The unfinished work of ensuring there will never be another Donald Trump will be a total effort.

In a previous piece for American Greatness, I said accountability would be the dividing issue in the fast-approaching midterm elections. On the one hand are Democrats, seeking to hold Trump himself and those around him—cabinet members, prominent supporters like Elon Musk, and even corporations that have done deals with the administration—responsible for their role in the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of Trump’s second term in office. On the other are Republicans, wanting to take the Democrats to task for failing to stop the party’s slide into demented gay race communism, as exemplified by its ever-more-radical roster of new stars such as Zohran Mamdani, James Talarico, Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, and Vanessa Hong.

Over the last week, we got a better idea of exactly what accountability is going to look like in practice for the Democrats. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) appeared on a podcast and said she wanted to use the threat of prosecution to scare young people away from working for the Trump administration.

“I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.”

Slotkin responded to the inevitable backlash by doubling down on X and making clear exactly what she has in mind.

“America must be a place where the rule of law still matters,” she wrote.

“Those laws should apply to everyone equally. If you have aided in the corrupt use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to benefit the President or his family, or you have violated the law in order to carry out guidance from the President, you should be held accountable. And given how rampant that corruption appears to the average American, people looking to work for his Administration should realize that while the Supreme Court has granted the President immunity, it has not done the same for those who do illegal things at his behest.”

You don’t have to twist Slotkin’s words. Taken at face value, her proposal would give carte blanche to investigate and prosecute pretty much anybody who has done pretty much anything for the Trump administration since January 20, 2025, so long as it’s deemed to be “corrupt”—and corruption, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Slotkin has good reason to hate Trump. Last year, she was investigated by the DOJ for sedition. She appeared in a video with five other Democrat lawmakers with military or intelligence experience—Slotkin worked for the CIA—and advised soldiers, sailors, and airmen that they “must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.” Trump had deployed the National Guard to cities including Washington, D.C., and U.S. Southern Command was blowing narco-boats to kingdom come in the Caribbean and posting highlight reels on X.

The video was interpreted, quite rightly, as a call for military personnel to disobey orders, but for whatever reason the charges didn’t stick. Too bad.

In her clapback, Slotkin said it was rich for Trump supporters to cry about “weaponization” of justice for political goals, when that’s exactly what had been done to her. “Spare me the pearl-clutching,” she seethed.

It’s hard not to notice Slotkin’s CIA past and everything that suggests—hint: it rhymes with “creep state”—but don’t forget that she’s widely considered to be a moderate within the Democrat Party. This proposal to go after ordinary rank-and-file members of the current administration just for doing their jobs is not coming from the mouth of a James Talarico, fresh from a nine-day sojourn in an Ohio looney bin, or a Zohran Mamdani and his polyamorous friends in the DSA. This is the dead center of the Democrats in mid-October 2026.

There’s been plenty of pie-in-the-sky talk about the punishment that awaits Donald Trump and his allies, like Matt Ford’s call in The New Republic, for the President to be black-bagged by the International Criminal Court while he’s playing golf in Scotland. The real Democrat plan for retribution, beginning with the midterms, is taking shape under the very knowing rubric of “Project 2029,” which appears to have been coined by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Although the main focus is on regaining the White House in 2029, as the name suggests, detailed preparations are already underway to make life much harder for President Trump and his allies after the midterms.

Impeachment may be off the table, at least for President Trump himself, given how well he has turned proceedings against his enemies. “No one wants a failed vote on day one,” a senior Democrat told Reuters. Instead, the Democrats want to investigate and intimidate a wide range of commercial entities that have done business with the Trump administration. Among those companies are Apple, Alphabet, Blackstone, BlackRock, and Palantir. Companies owned by Elon Musk are also being targeted.

Reuters says, “Democrats are expected to examine Department of Homeland Security contracts, financing for Trump’s planned White House ballroom, corporate donors, and alleged pay-to-play arrangements… They also plan a probe of Trump-linked financial vehicles, including 1789 Capital—a venture capital firm where his son Donald Trump Jr. is a partner—and foreign sovereign wealth funds whose investments in Trump family-linked entities could raise questions about administration influence.”

Party leaders have already sent out letters as a prelude to future subpoenas. Paramount Skydance, Alphabet, and two security contractors that work with the Department of Homeland Security have all received requests for information from the Democrats.

The threat of investigations after the midterms may indeed be enough for Slotkin to get what we might call her “minimalist wish”: promising young men and women fresh out of college may very well decide against a career in the Trump administration in 2026, 2027, and 2028.

But a broader and deeper persecution—Slotkin’s “maximalist wish”—is entirely possible if Gavin Newsom or, heaven forbid, Kamala Harris becomes president in 2029. In fact, it’s almost inevitable. Just a few days before Slotkin made her remarks, we got a reminder of just how broad and deep such persecution has already been. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) published its new Debanking Review on October 14, after investigating 100,000 complaints and 50,000 internal bank records covering the years of the Biden presidency. The Review found that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO Bank all debanked customers on the basis of their political, social, and religious beliefs, using the opaque category of “reputation risk” to justify their behavior. “Negative press, protests, criticism from advocacy groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and reprisals from regulators or politicians were cited as the reputation risks most feared by the banks,” the New York Post reports. Individuals and organizations were targeted. Organizations were flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and screening lists were created to identify customers that were deemed to pose a “reputation risk.” After the events of January 6, 2021, various MAGA-related terms were added to internal screening lists that were used to subject customers to enhanced scrutiny.

All nine of the banks under review told the OCC they had changed their practices, but the regulator expressed skepticism, noting that not a single bank has “fully and publicly acknowledged” its “weaponization of finance against hardworking Americans.”

With the support of a very different administration, with very different priorities, it will be the easiest thing in the world for those policies to be reversed.

And maybe too we should remind ourselves of what was done to Douglass Mackey, the man behind the popular “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account that posted memes during the 2016 election. Mackey was prosecuted under a Reconstruction-era anti-Klan statute for voter suppression for posting a meme he didn’t even make. For the crime of mocking Hillary Clinton and helping Trump to win, Mackey’s enemies in the Democrat Party waited five years, and then within days of Biden’s inauguration, federal agents were kicking down the door.

Retribution was a long time coming, but come it did. That’s exactly what Elissa Slotkin is promising again. The unfinished work of ensuring there will never be another Donald Trump will be a total effort, touching every level of American society, from government to corporations, from MAGA-hat vendors to dudes who post memes on X. Bank on that.

Raw Egg Nationalist, American Greatness

Does anyone in the Democrat Party own a mirror?

Because Bill Clinton lecturing Americans about civility in this country is absolutely hilarious, given that he might want to spread the word to his fellow party members.

Starting with his wife. Hillary Clinton. She who dubbed anyone who would dare to vote for Donald Trump “a basket of deplorables.”

Former President Bill Clinton was campaigning for Democrats in Florida on Tuesday night when he issued a warning against politicians who try to win elections by demonizing their opponents.

Clinton criticized what he characterized as negative campaign tactics by Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds.

“If you think you can get elected on the cheap, you do it by demonizing whoever you’re running against — putting a label on them and trying to make them unacceptable,” Clinton told the audience.

A clip of Clinton’s remarks circulated Wednesday on X, where conservative commentator Western Lensman pointed out the irony of a member of the Clinton political dynasty warning against labeling political opponents.

“This is hilarious. Has Bill met his wife?” the account remarked.

Let’s take a brief walk through the grooveyard of forgotten favorites when it comes to the incivility of his wife Hillary Clinton.

At an LGBT fundraiser in New York, Clinton said:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. … Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

In the final 2016 presidential debate, after Trump said Putin had no respect for her or Obama, Clinton replied: “Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president.”

In a 2019 CBS interview, she called Trump an “illegitimate president” and said he knew it because of “voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories.” She added that she knew “he knows that this wasn’t on the level.”

In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour during the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, she said:

“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”

This is at the heart of our political disputes. If conservatives, by nature, want to preserve America as a freedom-loving, God-fearing, and Constitution-respecting nation, then what, pray tell, are they trying to “destroy”?

Round and round we go, and Bill Clinton’s remarks are neither intellectually honest, nor helpful. They are merely political cover for leftists like Democrat gubernatorial nominee David Jolly and his running mate, Gwen Graham, who are running for office in the State of Florida.

Meanwhile, we have former Democrat presidents stumping for partisan leftists, and former Republican presidents’ families cutting checks for left-wing Democrats. Maybe our political terrain is slightly rigged?

At the end of the day, I am going to have to agree with RedState colleague Ward Clark: Will Bill and Hillary Clinton please just go away?

What does it say about the Democrats’ perception of their own prospects, by the way, if they are dragging out these fossils? Oh, Bill may bring in a few middle-of-the-road types who remember his moderate (by today’s standards) presidency. Just to give the devil his due, Bill was, back in the day, a serious campaigner. He was glib, could speak contemporaneously at length on a variety of topics, he was charismatic and could be charming if he put his mind to it. He was also sleazy and corrupt, but those are things Democrats tend to overlook as long as one is ideologically pure.

Hillary, though, is everything Bill doesn’t appear to be. She is strident, shrill, nasty, abrasive, and she has a sense of entitlement that is so huge that one has to measure it in parsecs.

Thus, getting a lecture about political civility from a Clinton is kind of like getting a culinary lesson from Jeffrey Dahmer. Or flight instructions from Osama bin Laden. Or hair styling tips from Gavin Newsom.

The message may be good. But the messenger? Not so much.

Kyle Becker, Red State

Even before Trump entered office, although well after the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton and the FBI had already begun working on destroying Trump. Chuck Schumer gleefully told Rachel Maddow that the intelligence community was going to go after Trump and that they knew how to do it.

A few weeks after the election, both Maddow and Schumer were discussing the fact that Trump had angered the IC, and Schumer dropped his bombshell: [“Six Ways from Sunday” video at article source]

Well, those folks have spent a decade trying to take Trump down, concocting hoaxes (Steele Dossier and countless other bulls**t charges), pushing phony investigations, and turning a huge fraction of the FBI field agents into a cadre of Inspector Javerts digging into everything from Trump’s finances, his sex life, and his wife’s literal underwear drawer.

DataRepublican has been doing a very deep dive into the current Deep State project to take Donald Trump out after the Midterm elections, dropping chunks of her investigation, including receipts from an insider who leaked video, audio, and documents from a wide-ranging, shall we call it a “plot,” to amp up resistance to Trump and to create a Constitutional crisis that would, they hope, reshape the entire political landscape.

Including the Constitution.

The core groups involved are military alumni, various intelligence agencies, and, of course, the USAID folks. You may recall that as Trump closed down USAID, a bureaucrat walking out the door darkly insinuated that it was the biggest mistake Trump ever made.

“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one… They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.

Basically: “We know how to take regimes down, and Trump is next.”

All these alums from the IC and related agencies are now part of a massive NGO complex designing plans and wargaming ways to take Trump down, not in any namby-pamby way like using the courts or prosecutions, though they are intended to be part of the plan.

They want a full-blown confrontation between Blue States and the Trump administration, up to and including what could be low-level armed conflicts, more along the lines of an escalation from what we saw in Minnesota last winter.

You may recall Governor Walz’s language kept returning to the word “war.” “War with the federal government.” The references to the Minnesotans at Gettysburg during the Civil War. The fact that Democrats from the governor’s office on down to city and county officials helped coordinate the physical resistance to ICE officers, leading to two deaths and the injury of multiple federal officers.

Think along those lines, but amped up to 11, with all the troops mobilized on the left, and all the Democrats in governors’ offices and in Congress making a full-court press to take Trump out using any means necessary.

As many of you know, in recent days Data Republican has been releasing transcripts, videos and audio recordings of a group of groups plotting to use violence to force President Trump to take protective actions (i.e., the Insurrection Act) that will result in the overthrow of our Constitution in favor of the will of Democrat governors.

These groups include former USAID employees and other ex-national security officials, and the plans they discuss are straight out of the color revolution tactics, techniques and procedures those same people have been using for decades to overthrow foreign governments unfriendly to the USA.

This is the biggest news story in decades, right?

Yet no one in the mainstream media will touch it.

Except to defend it.

See the below headline from today’s Washington Post (I’ll link to the full article below).

The plotters behind this effort are obviously alarmed by the recent public uncovering of their conspiracy, so they have done what any reputable Democrat determined to overthrow the electoral choices of the American people would do: run to a friendly press outlet to drop a soft-pedaled puff piece to run top cover for their efforts, and blame Trump.

If you read this article, it does not talk about a coup conspiracy. Instead it talks about a bunch of well-meaning, patriotic, anonymous ex-national security officials simply trying to protect America from the evil dictator Trump destroying “our democracy.”

This article itself is straight out of the color revolution tactics—it’s propaganda designed to condition a populace to accept illegitimate actions.

DataRepublican has thousands of pages of documents, audio, and video, and started dropping the information yesterday.

So today, The Washington Post is already doing the counter-narrative, portraying what is happening as a bunch of happy-go-lucky folks who only want to save Democracy from the fascists.

Horizons Project is Erica Chenoweth’s brainchild, and brings foreign regime change techniques into the United States umbrella. Its goal is to “reimagine” the United States system of governance. Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET), shown here, in addition to being NSL4A founder and leading the United Democracy Alliance under the Horizons Project “Big Tent” initiative… also leads Horizons Project’s Insurrection Act Working Group.

I can’t go through all the data in one post, and DataRepublican is still putting what she has out in digestible chunks, but the bottom line is very clear: those USAID folks, along with the IC officials who have “six ways from Sunday” to get you are now organized, plotting, working with politicians and even the Democratic Socialists of America to create a crisis and the next best thing to a coup.

It’s not idle. This is what they do. And this is exactly what that USAID official said on his way out the door: we do color revolutions, and you just kicked us out the door. You will pay.

Yes, I know it sounds conspiratorial, and indeed it is a conspiracy, but like so many conspiracies it is not particularly hidden. The “eat the bugs” and “you will own nothing and be happy” were proudly displayed on the WEF website and had NPR stories all about it, and now, in their own defense, these plotters are explaining themselves to a very sympathetic Washington Post in order to get their side of the story out.

It’s all real. The only question left is, “Is a color revolution in America justified?” They say “yes.” That’s it. There’s really little dispute about WHAT they want to do, just whose side you are on.

Cynical Publius, a former full Colonel in the Army himself, made the case yesterday for why skeptics should take this all very seriously: [X post at source atricle]

Being Blinded by Loyalty to an Institution One of the hardest things for a human to do is to recognize that an institution they have devoted their life to is corrupt.

Loyalty to an institution often blinds us to the defects of that same institution. Because we define ourselves as being well-intentioned, moral and enthusiastic members of an institution, we have a hard time seeing defects in that same institution because to do so is to acknowledge that we are in some way personally enabling those defects.

This is human nature.

I am commenting on this because I have been troubled by some reactions to @DataRepublican’s recent and ongoing revelations regarding plans by ex-USAID employees to overthrow the Constitution. Many establishment types—people who have invested their lives in the U.S. military or other parts of our federal government—are mocking her findings as the insane ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, and they are similarly mocking those of us who are trying to make sure her findings reach a larger audience.

I kind of get that too—in my time in government there were, in fact, numerous outlandish conspiracy theories widely circulated in the civilian populace that I knew based on personal, insider knowledge were wildly baseless claims. One example was Hurricane Katrina. I was in the National Military Command Center coordinating support for that disaster, and the conspiracies about the CIA blowing up the levees or George Bush withholding support because he “doesn’t care about black people” were wildly inaccurate and wholly contrived. If you are an insider and you hear enough genuinely whacko conspiracy theories, you tend to start dismissing EVERYTHING you hear that smears your institution as being false.

“The institution I have devoted my life to would NEVER do that.”

That’s the thought process.

The fix is to be able to compartmentalize your personal contributions away from the defects of the institution that you had no part in. For example, I am proud of my service in Afghanistan and Iraq, without reservation, because I know the good things my service accomplished. At the same time, I acknowledge that the Department of Defense made many incredible, amoral mistakes in those wars. I am able to acknowledge those mistakes without condemning myself. It is a skill one must develop.

Which brings me back to @DataRepublican’s findings. If you are one of those institution defenders dismissing what she is showing, you need to look again at the evidence she is presenting. She is backing up everything she reports with video and written evidence—it’s all there. Don’t dismiss her out of hand. Listen to and read the unfiltered evidence she presents from primary sources. Let go of your allegiance to the institutions of our federal government long enough to realize that for decades USAID has been a rogue agency inside our government, and now that President Trump and Secretary Rubio have pushed them out the door, they are conspiring to overthrow our system of government using the very tools they developed during their time with USAID.

It’s all there. Go look for yourself. And realize you can safely condemn the institution without condemning yourself.

Just because many conspiracy theories are wrong does not mean that there are no conspiracies at all, and this one requires no secrecy. The NGOs are out there. The people have meetings, communicate with government officials, have tremendous funding from radical leftists, and have made dark threats for years.

Sure, they say they are plotting to do good. But they are most certainly plotting. And DataRepublican has many of their internal documents.

I suggest you follow CynicalPublius’ advice and go check the evidence yourself. There are multiple threads at DataRepublican.

David Strom, Hotair

Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is doubling down on a controversial ad featuring his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, but it seems to be catastrophically backfiring on him as his odds of winning the election have cratered.

In the ad, Donna Arthur, the candidate’s estranged mother who lost custody of her and her younger brother when Acton was 12, lambasts her daughter as a “liar” and urges viewers not to vote for her. Acton has publicly spoken about her troubled childhood for years, well before she ran for office, including the reason her mother lost custody: documented neglect and abuse, including Acton’s stepfather sexually abusing her from the ages of 9 to 12. Arthur sided with her husband against her daughter and the two have not spoken since she lost custody.

The ad drew swift and vociferous condemnation from a chorus of bipartisan voices, with many prominent conservatives declaring the ad made them more sympathetic towards Acton. Her campaign shared a statement and then a video message from her brother denouncing Ramaswamy for “platforming their estranged and abusive mother,” and National Review and other media outlets dug up the legal documents confirming Acton’s story, all of which increased the criticism of Ramaswamy.

It was not initially clear who paid for the ad, as it was circulating online without a disclaimer (apparently provided directly to conservative influencers, many of whom declared it a “bombshell” and devastating “October surprise”). The Ramaswamy campaign issued a statement that neither denied nor condemned the ad, instead attacking Acton as a “serial fabulist,” but the campaign and even the candidate himself did admit it was their ad a few hours later.

Ramaswamy campaign manager Jonathan Ewing told Axios the campaign was dropping $4 million to televise the ad across Ohio and declared “this is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton.”

Ewing may be right about it being a “campaign-ending moment,” but for his own candidate, not Acton.

Ramaswamy was already slipping behind Acton in the polling, with CNN data guru Harry Enten marveling at Ramaswamy’s “worst this century” polling among Ohio independents the day before the ad was shared.

The latest numbers from prediction market Polymarket show Ramaswamy got a minor, one-point bump on Tuesday morning, around the time the ad first started spreading online, but then his numbers cratered amid the bipartisan backlash as the day went on and reporting confirmed Acton’s story.

Polymarket’s political gamblers currently give Ramaswamy only a 22% chance of winning, nudging up from his low of 21% on Wednesday afternoon. The graph shows Ramaswamy was already on a downward trajectory and then his numbers plummeted as outrage about the ad grew throughout the day. Acton currently has a 79% chance of winning, according to Polymarket.

Mediaite