“One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.
For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy.”
–United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In New York City, anti-ICE terrorists were arrested after setting off a bomb outside a federal building. This movement has gone way too far.
President Trump’s Immigration Czar warned anti-ICE terrorists and activists that ICE would not be deterred. He promised sweeping actions in New York City, and warned Comrade Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration to not interfere with ICE operations.
“This is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This is ‘America’s birthday,’ and the question historically is going to be what were we doing on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Do we have the audacity to sit around and say that we want to build a document that is our values and our principles and bring millions of Americans around it?”
–“Palestinian” activist and communist Linda Sarsour advocating for the replacement of our founding documents with . . . what?
The Minnesota Star Tribune backed Governor Tampon Tim’s pardon of an illegal alien child rapist to the hilt. Of course it did! But the newspaper’s rationale was interesting. According to the editors, if President Trump could pardon the January 6 rioters, then Tampon Tim was more than justified in pardoning an illegal alien child rapist. Yeah, that follows, rioters=illegal alien child rapist. Got it!
This month, Con Edison has been imposing rolling black outs across parts of New York City and the surrounding suburbs. How are those “green energy” mandates working out?
And why is The Observations the first news outlet to inform you of these blackouts? Could it be that the mainstream media does not want you to know? Why yes! Of course, that is it!
Maine Democrats are poised to choose Troy Jackson as their replacement for former U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner (D. Me.). Mr. Jackson believes in the same things Mr. Platner does–abolishing ICE, packing the Supreme Court, and imposing socialized medicine on the American people. And the cherry on top of the sundae? Now Mr. Jackson has been credibly accused of federal mortgage fraud. But worry not; Mr. Jackson said it was not his fault. He is, instead, blaming his wife.
Well at least Mr. Platner was not accused of a federal fraud crime! Well . . . it seems that Mrs. Platner may have been involved in Medicaid fraud. Close enough.
Alameda County [Oakland], California is facing a $91 million budget shortfall. Nevertheless, the Board of Supervisors is pushing ahead with a “comprehensive reparations plan” for black residents. Wow. Stupid and racist.
Senator Darline Graham Nordone (R. S.C.) has not been in Washington, D.C. a week, and already she has decided to run for her brother’s seat for a full term of her own. A word to Senator Nordone; South Carolina is a much nicer place to be.
Representative Nancy Mace (R. S.C.) announced that she would not pursue the Republican Senate nomination. Good. That will spare her the embarrassment of finishing last in the primary.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland has clarified what could constitute a criminal violation of a law providing safe access for abortion. If you carry a Bible into a hospital, or in public near any medical facilities, if you engage in prayer, out loud or silently in a “sensitive area”, reading Scripture, or engaging in any obvious religious practice in a “sensitive area”, can lead to arrest, prosecution, conviction, and punishment, under the law. No intent is required to violate the law, just that you violated the prohibitions. And there are no exemptions for priests or ministers performing their duties.
I guess if you are an Irish Catholic dying in a hospital, your parish priest will have to decide if providing you Last Rites is worth going to prison. Sigh.
Professional golfer Bryson DeChambeau implored President Trump to intervene with the R&A over his assessed 2 stroke penalty during the 2nd round of the British Open. The President did not intervene. He never was going to do so. Bryson DeChambeau is such a big fat baby.
Both Scottie Scheffler and Max Homa defended Bryson DeChambeau, declaring that he was “not a cheater”. Yes. But no one accused him of cheating. The R&A went to great pains to state that it believed that the rules violation was inadvertent. No R&A official accused Bryson DeChambeau of cheating. His actions simply violated a rule, whether he acted purposefully or inadvertently. The rule does not require intent for the imposition of a penalty. Sigh. Let’s move on, please.
ERRATUM: Mark Lawrence, not Larkin Gross, won the 2026 Virginia State Open. Our apologies.
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Mamdani and his DSA comrades have one goal — a communist revolution in America
BY: Miranda Devine, The New York Post (July 19, 2026).
Our preening mayor, Zohran Mamdani, says his administration’s legal department is examining how best to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister visits New York for UN week in September.
“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mamdani told The New York Times in an interview published over the weekend.
Well, Marco Rubio has thoughts on that and much more.
The formidable secretary of state last week announced a campaign to “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”
“The ICC’s interfering with American military and law enforcement operations . . . would mean the death of the US as a sovereign and independent nation,” he said.
“But this is America . . . Independence is our birthright. We don’t intend to trade it for rule by a self-appointed priesthood of ‘international law.’ ”
Mamdani’s belief that, as a minor municipal functionary, he wields some imaginary international power to subvert American sovereignty just shows the delusions of his ideology.
His authority extends to fixing potholes and collecting garbage, neither of which he does competently.
DSA’s real aim
But his delusions of grandeur are shared by the misfits, ignoramuses, and foreign interlopers who make up his rancid branch of the Democratic Party — the DSA.
The Democratic Socialists of America know nothing, have built nothing and don’t understand the country they live in, yet they imagine they have the moral authority to tear it down.
Their aim is to import foreign conflicts and alien ideologies that are the antithesis of America’s founding principles.
The DSA’s intellectual buffoonery was on full display last week when Mamdani’s party capo, Peruvian-born Gustavo Gordillo, told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that his family was forced to come to America because of “capitalism and American imperialism,” despite having left Peru during the Maoist Shining Path’s revolutionary reign of terror.
“That doesn’t make much sense,” MacCallum said dryly.
No, it doesn’t make sense, to a normal person. But when you look at the ideology behind the DSA, there is a twisted internal logic.
Leftists are motivated by envy and a “poisonous resentment” that makes them hostile to everything that has made America successful, as Rubio said last week when opening a State Department conference on combatting left-wing violence, something his Cuban emigre family knows a thing or two about.
Like Gordillo, Ugandan-born Mamdani and so many of their DSA comrades — from Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar to Ecuador-born Assemblywoman Diana Moreno — came to America, or in some cases were born here, after their families fled countries crippled by socialism, authoritarianism or economic failure.
You would think they might appreciate better than anyone the freedom and prosperity secured by America’s constitutional system of self-government and ordered liberty.
That used to be the case. Refugees from the killing fields of Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Communist Vietnam and Pol Pot’s Cambodia were the canaries in the coal mine, warning us about the destructive evils of communism.
They did not seek to replicate the fatal mistakes of their homelands in the generous country that had offered them refuge.
But that is the mission of the DSA. To use the Democratic Party as their Trojan horse to foment a communist revolution in America.
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Thou Shalt Not Covet: Why You Cannot Love Your Neighbor and Embrace Socialism
BY: Erick Woods Erickson (July 21, 2026).
To summarize the Ten Commandments, Jesus gave us two: love God, and love your neighbor. The first four commandments govern our vertical relationship, our duty to God. The final six govern the horizontal, our duty to one another. Honor your father and mother.
Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. And, last of all, do not covet your neighbor’s house, his wife, his servant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.
That final commandment is the strange one. The other five in the second table forbid actions. Honor, murder, theft, adultery, and perjury are things you do. Coveting is the only sin on the list that lives entirely in the heart. God, who searches the heart, understood that every outward evil against a neighbor begins as an inward disorder of desire. You do not steal what you have not first coveted. You do not commit adultery with a spouse you have not first coveted. Covetousness is the seed; the other transgressions are the fruit. And so the American Left, which loudly proclaims that it alone truly loves its neighbor, has in fact built its entire political theology on the one commandment that poisons all the rest.
Consider how casually the modern progressive movement violates the second table of the law even as it claims the moral high ground. It bears false witness whenever the truth becomes inconvenient. Watch a candidate scrub his own record the moment the electorate turns against it. In Michigan, Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed spent years aligned with the “defund the police” movement, only to insist in 2026 that he never said any such thing, right up until surfaced audio and video contradicted him and CNN’s own Manu Raju confronted him with the receipts on camera. In Texas, James Talarico, who once suggested that concerns about border security were rooted in racism, has reinvented himself as a border hawk, unveiling a security plan and lamenting that the Biden administration “failed to secure our southern border.” These are not evolutions of conviction arrived at through prayer and reflection. They are the ninth commandment traded for a poll number. When the border and the police were fashionable causes, they embraced them; now that voters have recoiled, they simply deny the past ever happened. That is bearing false witness, and it is done in service of power.
The Left is soft on the eighth commandment as well, treating theft as a matter of perspective rather than of moral law. Shoplifting under a certain dollar threshold is decriminalized in city after city. Bail is eliminated for the very offenses that terrorize working neighborhoods. And they are soft on the sixth, murder, tolerant of the violence that follows when the rule of law is treated as an instrument of oppression rather than a shield for the innocent. But all of this, the lying, the leniency toward theft and violence, rests upon a deeper foundation. It rests upon the tenth commandment, and its systematic inversion.
Socialism is covetousness organized into a governing philosophy. It takes the private envy God warned against and dresses it in the language of justice. Where the commandment says do not desire what belongs to your neighbor, socialism answers that your neighbor’s house, his business, and his savings were never truly his to begin with, that they are the ill-gotten spoils of a rigged system, and that the righteous thing is to take them.
This is why Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, has waged open war on the city’s landlords, freezing the rents on stabilized apartments and surrounding himself with advocates who speak candidly of the desire to “seize private property” and who denounce homeownership itself as a species of white supremacy. Rent control is not compassion. It is a slow-motion confiscation of what another person built, dressed up as mercy for the tenant. It has failed everywhere it has been tried, from Vienna to San Francisco, producing housing shortages, decaying buildings, and the very scarcity it promised to cure. But its economic failure is almost beside the point, because its animating spirit is not the desire to build. It is the desire to take.
You can hear the same spirit in the rhetoric of the movement’s national voices. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made careers of demonizing the wealthy, of teaching Americans that a billionaire’s existence is itself a policy failure and a moral affront. The message is not let us lift the poor; it is let us tear down the rich, and there is a world of difference between the two. The first is charity. The second is covetousness with a press secretary. And the hypocrisy is total.
Sanders is a millionaire several times over with multiple homes. Warren built a personal fortune in the millions. El-Sayed, who ran denouncing the wealthy, filed tax returns placing his own household in the state’s top one percent. Meanwhile, the progressive donor class, the tech billionaires and hedge-fund heirs who bankroll these very campaigns, are quietly exempted from the moral fury. The envy is aimed downward and outward, never at the friendly rich who fund the machine. It is a selective, performative resentment, useful precisely because it never threatens the people writing the checks.
This is why the two great commandments and the socialist project cannot be reconciled.
To love your neighbor is to will his good, to rejoice when he prospers, to protect what he has built rather than to eye it as plunder. Covetousness does the opposite. It looks at a neighbor’s success and feels not gladness but grievance. It would rather see the world turned upside down, wealth destroyed, and lives dismantled, than tolerate the sight of someone else possessing what it does not have, so long as it, and not the neighbor, ends up in charge of who may have what. A movement built on that foundation may speak endlessly of justice and compassion, but at its root it has enthroned the one desire God specifically forbade. You cannot love your neighbor while coveting everything that is his. The tenth commandment forecloses it.
The Left must subvert the tenth commandment in order to strip our virtue from us so that they may strip our liberty. The founders understood that a free people must be a self-governing people, and that a nation incapable of governing its own appetites will inevitably be governed by force from without. Socialist and communist states grasp this too, which is why they set out to replace God with government and to replace virtue with mere value to the state. A citizen is no longer judged by his character but by his usefulness to the cause.
And as our virtue erodes, secular authoritarianism does not arrive all at once; it creeps in, filling the vacuum that self-government leaves behind. To hollow out a people’s virtue, they must first be turned against one another, and that process always starts in the same place — by teaching a man to covet his neighbor’s portion instead of tending his own. It ends in enslavement to the state.
This is not speculation. It is the recorded pattern of every communist regime in history.
Each one turns man against man through jealousy and envy, cultivating grievance until the citizens themselves demand a referee. Then the state steps forward as the arbiter of fairness, the great equalizer that alone may decide who deserves what. And in that moment the founding promise is quietly reversed. We are no longer endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights that no government may touch. Instead we have a state that grants rights, and revokes them, on the basis of fidelity to the cause. Rights become privileges, dispensed to the loyal and withdrawn from the dissenter. That is the terminus of the road that begins with covetousness, and it is why this is finally a question not of economics but of the soul of a free people.
The socialist advance is not theoretical. It is winning primaries, capturing city halls, and setting the intellectual weather inside the Democratic Party. Stopping it requires the GOP to stay relentlessly on its A-game. That means keeping the President focused, channeling his energy toward the argument that actually persuades persuadable voters rather than toward the distractions and self-inflicted controversies that hand the other side its talking points. Every day spent defending the President’s latest shenanigans is a day not spent prosecuting the case against a party drifting toward the hard left, and toward the ugly strain of anti-Semitism that has crept from the campus fringe into the mouths of elected officials and mainstream candidates. Discipline is not glamorous, but it is the difference between winning and losing.
The message, then, must be simple, unified, and unrelenting. Republicans should keep the spotlight fixed where the contrast is starkest: on Democrats who tolerate or excuse anti-Semitism, who scrub their radical records the moment voters notice, and who preach compassion while building a program on envy and confiscation. The GOP should deny the opposition the gift of a defensive crouch. The choice before the country is not between two ordinary governing philosophies. It is between a tradition that honors what a neighbor builds and a movement that covets it. If Republicans keep their eye on that ball, stay on offense, and refuse to be dragged off message, they can win. The alternative is to let the socialist advance continue unchecked.
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Does the Filibuster Still Serve a Purpose?
We’ve lost the noble goal of preserving legislative debate. The filibuster has become nothing more than a bludgeon.
BY: John Green, The American Thinker (July 20, 2026).
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) has ripped the scab off of the festering wound we call the Senate filibuster. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote is favored by over 80 percent of the electorate — at least of those voters who can legally vote. Its passage should be a no-brainer. But apparently the Senate lacks the brains for a no-brainer — or else our dedicated “public servants” have some motive they’re not sharing with us.
On prime-time television last Thursday night, President Trump announced the declassification of documents related to the 2020 election. Now we’re getting a glimpse into those burn bags Director Patel discovered, and our suspicions are confirmed: The 2020 election was not as advertised. No wonder ABC, NBC, and CNN refused to air the president’s address. They were the chief advertisers of “THE MOST SECURE ELECTION IN HISTORY.”
Was there a Chinese cyber-attack on our election infrastructure? Yes. Were there hundreds of thousands of illegal voters on the rolls? Yup. Did the Deep State hide the evidence of election-tampering? You betcha. Was a president kept in the dark about a foreign attack? Gulp…yes. Was the election too compromised to know who actually won? It seems so. Was an investigation of the election “back-burnered” by the Biden administration? You better believe it.
The evidence President Trump presented highlights the need to take corrective action, and Americans have given his party the legislative majority needed to do it (just barely). Just one thing stands in the way: the Senate filibuster.
In spite of the obvious need for election improvement, the resistance Democrat party has invoked the filibuster to prevent any election integrity measures from interfering with their midterm “drag a commie across the finish line” plans. Having experienced the thing that the Dems say never happens — three times — The Donald is demanding that the filibuster be eliminated to save the SAVE Act.
The excuses for not overhauling the filibuster rule are both insulting and mind-numbingly stupid.
The Democrat party insists that broad swaths of the electorate are too stupid to acquire government ID. That they can levy that insult, without the insulted taking offense, is a testament to the effectiveness of academic indoctrination. Expect the chants of “most secure election in history” to increase in the coming weeks — along with the rioting and assassination attempts.
The current Senate majority party — i.e., the Republican party — seems to be more concerned about the sanctity of the Senate rulebook than the sanctity of our method of self-governance. Maybe it’s me, but that sounds a bit backwards — in an intellectually rather than directionally challenged sort of way.
The establishment Republicans are worried that nuking the filibuster will look like autocratic overreach and jeopardize their fawning coverage on CNN (snark intended). They’d prefer to let the Dems nuke the filibuster after they’ve “mail-in balloted” AOC into the Oval Office, so the Grand Old Party can spend the next generation in the political wilderness whining about the unfair socialists who packed the Supreme Court and created seats for four more communist senators.
But as with all Senate debates, the argument over the filibuster is missing the point. Forget the politics and ask this simple question: Is the filibuster serving its intended purpose, or has the rule become a hindrance to our self-governance?
First, some background on this annoying Senate rule.
The Constitution empowers the Senate to create its own rules for how it will do business. In 1806, the Senate inadvertently created the filibuster when it dropped its “previous question” rule — which had enabled a simple majority to end debate. The change was intended to eliminate redundancy but instead helped make the Senate the government’s “most deliberative body” by preventing the majority from silencing the minority. Nobody votes until everyone has had his say.
When endless talking became a tool of obstruction, the Senate tweaked the rule a bit. In 1917, it implemented the “cloture” rule as a means to end debate. Cloture allowed two thirds of the Senate to say, “Enough already, let’s vote.” (Note: Cloture was lowered to 60 votes in 1975.)
That’s how things went for a little over five decades, until the government’s most deliberative body decided that deliberation is for chumps. In 1972, the Senate changed its rules again to adopt a “two-track” legislative system, and the “silent filibuster” was born. It’s just like a talking filibuster, but without all the annoying debate. Now a minority of 41 Senators can simply declare a filibuster and skip the tedious requirement of explaining their concerns.
With that little tweak, the Senate quit being our most deliberative body and became our most obstructive body. The minority can just declare a filibuster, and unless the majority has a super-majority, it stops the bill in its tracks with no vote, and everybody can make his 6:00 dinner reservation. No fuss. No muss. No movement.
Now the resistance party is free to ignore why it’s in the minority. It can block the will of the people, with little or no downside, as long as it keeps the SNAP benefits flowing to its tent cities.
So whenever a bill comes up that the commies don’t like, such as the SAVE Act, the minority leader just says the magic word — “filibuster” — and abracadabra: All debate ends, and the Senate moves on to other business, which will also be filibustered.
Hence, the rule intended to ensure full and complete debate now prevents any debate at all.
Should the filibuster be eliminated or revised? Given that it is currently used to resist our self-governance, I would say so. It no longer serves its intended purpose of ensuring complete debate. It has become a bludgeon, wielded by the minority to resist the will of voters. It’s time for an overhaul.
Majority Leader Thune should whip (and I wouldn’t be opposed to “literally”) his caucus to either eliminate the filibuster, or return it to its 1806 permutation, forcing senators to take to the floor and talk, until they have nothing else to say. I suspect that our “dedicated public servants” (snark intended) would rather eliminate the rule than put in any OT debating the business of the country. Heck, they might even have to start reading the bills before they vote on them. The horror.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 