Ted the French authorities have confirmed that it’s not Islamists doing this, but rather angry students for poor conditions in their high schools and universities once again you’re blaming Muslims for something that they are not responsible for

In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop? Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something. This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel. A. Where the book comes from. Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee. She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize. B. The story. In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good. And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?" John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them. The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt. C. The core idea. The strike isn't about money. It's about consent. Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless. D. What Musk just did. This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many." Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse. Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle. Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore. E. The difference that changes everything. Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark. Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant. That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything. F. Why now, and not in 1957. In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes. In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave. G. The ending. For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done. In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it. That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child. The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.

From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in. In France, students and teachers are asking for safe schools, enough teachers and smaller classes. In Spain, for affordable rent and housing. In Albania, for good jobs and an end to corruption. @JDVance says this is what happens when a nation lets in too many immigrants from the global south. He is not just morally wrong, but misreading the moment. The is what happens when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few. This is what happens when young people lose hope in their future. In America, let us listen to our young. We need an economic and political transformation. America's Next New Deal.

Gad Saad just delivered the most important political message of this midterm cycle—and he’s not even running for office. He called Jessica Tarlov a “Wood Cricket Jew.” Here’s why that matters. A wood cricket infected by a parasite stops acting in its own interest. The parasite hijacks its brain and forces it to jump into water and drown so the parasite can survive. Saad is using that image for a mindset he sees in some Jews (and plenty of others on the left): people so desperate to prove they’re not “Islamophobic,” and so loyal to progressive politics, that they ignore real threats to their own safety and to the West. That’s exactly what happened on The Five. Tarlov defended Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed by arguing that criticism of him is Islamophobia that “won’t sit well with Jews.” She leaned on private conversations instead of his public record—framing Israel’s actions as genocide and associations that raise legitimate concerns. Saad’s response has been blunt: she is willing to put partisan loyalty and fear of the wrong label above Jewish security and basic reality. He calls this suicidal empathy. This isn’t just about one Fox host. It’s a snapshot of something larger. Across the West, entire factions treat clear-eyed talk about certain Islamist ideologies, rising antisemitism, and demographic realities as the real danger—while downplaying the actual threats. In an election cycle already shaped by those pressures, Saad’s warning cuts through the noise better than most campaign ads. Pay attention. Gad Saad is right.

Here is a radical idea @SenSanders. Learn to think. You are standing on $40 trillion in debt, built by the morality you sell, and you point at the men who produce everything you use to sustain and enjoy your life, including the phone you posted this on, as the threat to humanity. It was $5.7 trillion in 2000. Two trillion more piles on every year. A child born tomorrow arrives owing roughly $300,000 per household, contracted by men he will never meet, for benefits consumed before he drew his first breath. That is replacing the human race, and not with robots. With debtors. No producer can touch your life without your consent. Your Congress mortgaged lives that do not yet exist. Wake up, Americans. The threat is not the men building your future. It is the men who already spent it.

Seriously, shut up. The amount of taxes we have to pay is ridiculous. Let me lay it out for ya, son. I work hard all week and earn a salary, which comes in a biweekly paycheck. But before I see a cent of it, the federal government takes its share. Depending on your income bracket, they take 10–37% of that right off the top. Then, it gets taxed again at 15.3% for FICA: 12.4% gets stolen for Social Security and 2.9% goes to Medicare. Then depending on which state you live in, you might be required to pay state income tax. States like Florida and Tennessee have none, some have a flat rate (e.g., Idaho and Georgia), and others have progressive rates based on income brackets. In California, high income earners take a 13.3% hit. Then after the federal and state governments have gotten their greedy hands on my paycheck, suppose I decide to be responsible and save a portion of what's left in a savings account and earn a little interest on it. Guess what? The IRS wants a cut of that, too. So, the money I earned that was already taxed is now subject to the same income taxes. Let's now suppose I decide to invest some of that in the stock market. I buy shares in a company (e.g., Tesla), take on the risk of losing my investment, and hopefully make a profit. Well, if I sell those shares for a gain, Uncle Sam comes knocking on my door again. Depending on how long I held the investment and my taxable income, I may owe 0%, 15%, or 20% in federal long-term capital gains taxes, potentially another 3.8% in net investment income tax, plus applicable state taxes. And short-term gains can be taxed at the ordinary income tax rates of 10–37%. And if I decide to spend my money? You guessed it. More taxes, baby! 45 states and many localities impose sales taxes, meaning I get taxed again when I buy groceries, clothes, household appliances, consumer electronics, and practically anything else. In some places, the combined state and local sales taxes exceed 10%. Louisiana's sales tax alone is 10.11%! Wanna buy a house with the money you have spent years saving? Congratulations, bucko! Now you're responsible for paying property taxes, which you will be obligated to pay every single year. And if you fail to pay it for long enough, you will eventually lose the property through a tax sale or foreclosure. So much for actually owning something, right? Wanna buy a vehicle? Depending on your state, you may owe sales tax and annual registration fees. And in some states (my home state of Virginia comes to mind), you are required to pay property taxes on that, too. Then, every time you fill up your tank at the pump, you have to pay gas taxes. The federal government collects $0.18 / gallon, and state and local governments pile their own taxes on top of that. Now, suppose I decide not to spend or invest any of my remaining money at all. I just keep it in cash. Well, inflation gradually erodes its purchasing power away year after year. It's not an enforced tax, but a hidden one that the federal government has done nothing to stop because we're no longer on the Gold Standard and we run massive deficits each year that is financed by monetary expansion (i.e., “printing”) to pay for socialist welfare and wealth transfer programs as well as endless wars in the Middle East. The bottom line is that I get taxed when I work hard and earn money. I get taxed again on the interest when I save that money. I get taxed a third time on the profits when I invest it. I get taxed when I spend it. I get taxed for “owning” property. And I get taxed when I drive. And yes, I'm much aware that we need at least some taxation to pay for things like national defense, public roads, and basic services to have a functioning society. Nobody really disagrees with that. But it does not mean every tax is justified or that the government should have an unlimited claim on the fruits of our labor. And if you look at the state of our roads in many states (Pennsylvania and New York's roads suck ass, Alabama's are nice, however) and public schools, it's abundantly clear that our tax dollars aren't being used wisely. Our founding fathers waged a revolution against Great Britain over far less atrocities than this.

🚨 WOW! Dave Portnoy just went on a TIRADE destroying MI Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed "This guy makes me PUKE. Everything about him makes me PUKE! [...] You ask him about his [Islamist] ties...his WHOLE FAMILY!" "He's like, how do you ask me this question?! [...] You have a MILLION RED FLAGS, DUDE!" "'Why are you asking me that? That's racist!' NO! [...] I want to send my niece and nephew to the Univ. of Michigan...I don't want them worried about getting harassed for being Jewish and leaders be like, TOO BAD." Spot on. The future of Michigan is DARK if Mohamed gets in! Mike Rogers is THE GUY for Michigan at this point in history, and even Dems should be crossing over to get him in the Senate His own half-sister once wrote, "My family has long been MB." Rogers has a history of defending America from terrorists and jihadists, we don't have to worry about him jeopardizing national security, which should be the BARE MINIMUM 🇺🇸

Let’s correct this ignorant take on white and black crime along with poverty and crime. It’s more about culture, decision making and values than it is about income..

What’s going on in France is another example of why I say who you let in your country matters. And in many cases that is downstream of who you vote for. Who you vote for matters. This started in a heavy immigrant area and is happening in heavy immigrant areas and that’s probably one of the reasons we’re seeing the Palestinian Flag..

Populists sweep Brazil, throwing out the Socialists. The right has now won 8 out of 8 elections in Latin America since Trump defunded USAID. What it means for the region. And the US Hispanic vote.

The hockey season just started & we already got the fight of the year

Most Americans blame Trump for the rising cost of gas, groceries, health care, and more. They are right.

No Kings Rally in NJ Draws Record Turnout From the Unhinged 🤪 🥴

I see the protests in France are trending. Since I just spent 10 days there during the heart of them, I figured I'd chime in with what's actually going on. The news and clickbait accounts on X will show you the outlier events: burning buildings, raging violence and everything that triggers you. I was in the heart of Aix en Provence during the biggest protest day and filmed the center where it was happening. (See below) This is right the University, across from the church, dead center of town. The students are dancing, singing, kicking soccer balls and have comically barricaded the entrance doors to force the school to close. I visited many cities in France during the protest period, and saw zero violence or malpractice of any kind. More broadly, I spent more than a month this year in France across 3 trips and 10+ cities, including Paris, Bordeaux, Aix en Provence, Nice, Antibes, Biarritz, and others, and it's incredibly safe, charming, peaceful and beautiful. Every city I visited is nicer than almost every American city, and there's zero comparison. So much that it wouldn't even be insulting to France to try, because nobody who has spent significant time in both countries would take this comparison seriously. I spoke with the students at length about their views. I also spoke with waiters, drivers, merchants, staff and whoever. They were all civil, well articulated and genuinely wanted to see change. We can disagree about their reasoning, logic or whatever, and it's true that France has fiscal problems, but to chalk up the France protests to raging extremist violence from "pick your favorite group to blame", is a laughable misrepresentation of what's actually going on. If you exclusively watch the news and believe the top 1% extreme situations, you have likely been psyoped.

I went on @BBCNewsnight and enraged all the usual radical-left loons stating these simple facts: ~1.85m foreign nationals claim £23 billion in welfare each year in Britain ~ 1.3m foreign nationals claim £11.9billion of Universal Credit Britain must put the British people first **Britains tax burden is the highest it’s been since the War (1948 to be exact)** If you want to lift people up, you have to create wealth. You have to incentivise work. Which means tax them less. Anyone who runs a business knows this. Since then, far-left X has launched a series of ad-hominem attacks. Some even saying these ideas are “extreme far-right” None of them have addressed the substance of my arguments. Instead they are trying to shame me for being in one of the most successful bands of last 20 years, whilst ignoring that I have one of the biggest independent politics podcasts in Britain. And ignoring that I’ve generated 10s of £millions in wealth and taxes for the economy, created 1000s of jobs, and built several successful companies. Likewise they think that I might be anything but immensely proud to be associated with my own dad, one of the most successful businessmen and generous individuals this country has produced since the War, and his association with GB News, officially the most viewed and trusted news channel in the country. He’s a hero. Thanks to Newsnight for having me!

I showed you France burning. This morning I showed you the machine behind it. Now there is only one question left: how do we get out? My answer: the West needs a Nuremberg for communism. In 1945, the Allies did something no civilization had done before. They put an ideology on trial through the men who carried it out. The Nuremberg Charter gave a name to what the Nazis had done: crimes against humanity. Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, committed against civilian populations. Read that list again. Then look at the 20th century. The Holodomor, millions of Ukrainians deliberately starved to death. The Gulag. Mao's Great Leap Forward, tens of millions dead in a famine created by ideology. The Khmer Rouge, who killed roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population in four years. Close to 100 million dead, by the estimate of the Black Book of Communism. Every item on the Nuremberg list, checked again and again, on three continents. Nazism was tried, condemned and buried. Communism never was. No trial. No reckoning. No moment where the West looked at it and said: never again. The closest we came was Cambodia, where a tribunal finally convicted Khmer Rouge leaders of genocide and crimes against humanity, almost forty years too late. So instead of being buried, the idea survived. It went to university. Today, nobody would walk into a lecture hall wearing a swastika. But you can wear Che Guevara on a T-shirt, wave the hammer and sickle at a march, and build a career teaching Marx as a guide to justice. One totalitarianism became a moral taboo. The other became a fashion. That double standard is the root of everything I described this weekend. Marxism didn't die in 1991. It changed costume. The class struggle became the identity struggle. The proletariat was replaced by any group that could be cast as a victim, and the bourgeoisie by the West itself. Same logic: split society into oppressors and oppressed, tear down the old order, hand power to those who claim to speak for the oppressed. It spent seventy years marching through the institutions: universities, media, schools, NGOs, the civil service. Today it sits at their center. That's how a civilization falls. First the idea, then the invasion. And here is the part most people still don't see. The alliance between the far left and Islamism is not an accident. It's a strategy. By the end of the 20th century, Marxism had a problem: it had lost its revolutionary class. The Western working class never wanted the revolution. It wanted good jobs, safe streets, and a country that still looked like home. And it started voting for the right. In France, the industrial towns that once voted communist now vote for the national right. So the left went looking for a new proletariat. In 1994, the British Trotskyist Chris Harman published The Prophet and the Proletariat, a strategy text on how revolutionaries should ally with Islamist movements. In 2011, Terra Nova, a think tank close to the French Socialist Party, advised the left to stop chasing the working class and build its majority on graduates, young people and minorities. From there, mass immigration stopped being just a policy. It became a political project. Open borders to bring in a new base. Islamism to supply the energy, the numbers and the hatred of the Western order that the left could no longer produce on its own. And Marxist theory to supply the vocabulary: every Islamist is "oppressed," every critic is "racist," every attack is "a reaction to discrimination." Islamism is the Trojan horse. Marxism is the army hiding inside it. Except the left forgot one thing: this horse has its own rider. History already ran the experiment. In 1979, Iran's communists and leftists marched alongside Khomeini against the Shah. They were sure they were using the mullahs. Within four years, the Tudeh communist party was banned and its leaders were paraded on television making forced confessions. In 1988, the regime executed thousands of political prisoners, leftists among them. The useful idiots were among the first to hang. That is the future the far left is building for itself. Islamism does not share power. Once it has used them, it will devour them first: the feminists, the gay activists, the secular teachers, the students waving its flags today. Then everyone else. And let's be precise about the enemy. It is Islamism, a political project of domination. Not the Muslims who came to work, live in peace and raise their children in the West. Many of them fled exactly these fanatics, and they know better than anyone what happens when they win. Now watch what the far left does when its strategy starts to show. It reaches for the oldest trick in history: blame the Jews. Since October 7, movements that call themselves antiracist have marched behind Hamas flags, chanted for Israel's erasure "from the river to the sea," and refused to call the massacre of civilians terrorism. In France, antisemitic acts nearly quadrupled in a single year. Israel has become the universal culprit: of colonialism, of capitalism, of every injustice on earth. Once again, the Jews are the people a movement points at so its own followers never have to look at themselves. René Girard spent his life explaining this mechanism. When a society falls into crisis, the crowd needs a scapegoat: a victim it can blame for the chaos, unite against, and sacrifice. His book The Scapegoat opens with a 14th-century poet calmly recounting how the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells during the Black Death, and then massacred. Seven centuries later, the mechanism hasn't changed. Only the vocabulary has. Girard saw something else too. Christianity gave the West its unique concern for victims. And he described a new totalitarianism that would seize that concern, radicalize it, and turn it into a weapon. That's exactly what Marxism does: it presents itself as the defender of the oppressed, and then it goes hunting for someone to blame. So let's be clear about who the enemy is. Our enemy is not the Jews. It is not Israel. It is not the Muslim family next door. It is not the twenty-year-old who was taught all this in school and never heard anything else. Our enemies are ideas. Marxism, and every variant it has spawned: the heirs of the Frankfurt School and critical theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, decolonialism, wokism, the "social justice" industry, the DEI bureaucracy, eco-radicalism, and degrowth, which wants the West poorer as penance for existing. Different labels, same machinery. Split the world into oppressors and oppressed. Designate a culprit. Demand that the West pay for its own existence. Islamo-leftism is just the latest alliance that machinery has built. That's why this is a civilizational war, not a seminar debate. Ideas have consequences. These ones have armies, budgets, and a body count. Not every Western country is equally sick. Europe is deep in it. America is the least infected, and I believe it owes that to its Constitution: the First Amendment, the Second, a federal structure that makes it hard for one ideology to capture everything at once. But protection is not immunity. The same ideas are in your campuses, your newsrooms, your HR departments. You have less time than you think. So what does a Nuremberg for communism look like? First, the verdict. Western nations formally recognize the crimes of communist regimes as crimes against humanity, with the same moral weight as Nazi crimes. Europe has started. The 2008 Prague Declaration, signed by Václav Havel, and the European Parliament's 2019 resolution both put the two totalitarianisms side by side. Now make it mean something. Second, the same rules. In France, glorifying Nazi crimes is a criminal offense. Glorifying the Holodomor, the Gulag or the killing fields of Cambodia should be treated exactly the same way. Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine already ban communist symbols alongside Nazi ones. They lived under both. They know. Third, the institutions. Bring back real neutrality in schools, universities and the civil service. Stop handing public money to activist NGOs. Make every foundation that shapes policy as transparent as a political party. And take back control of who enters our countries, because a nation that cannot choose its own people is no longer a nation. Fourth, and most important: culture. Nazism didn't become taboo because of a courtroom. It became taboo because of Schindler's List, Band of Brothers, Shoah, the Diary of Anne Frank, thousands of documentaries, novels and school trips to Auschwitz. Every child in the West knows what a swastika means. Almost none of them know what the Holodomor was. We need the same work for communism. Films, series, documentaries, animated films for kids, games. The Ukrainian farmer whose last grain was confiscated. The Cambodian teacher executed for wearing glasses. The Soviet dissident locked in a psychiatric ward. The Iranian communist who cheered for Khomeini and died in his prisons. And the story of how the West itself was captured for seventy years without a single shot fired. Hollywood taught us to weep for the victims of one totalitarianism. Someone has to teach us to weep for the victims of the other. And for the first time, you don't need a studio to do it. A small team with the right tools can. The Nuremberg I'm calling for is not about banning thought. Read Marx, study him, debate him, the way historians study Mein Kampf. What has to end is the glorification. The romance. The idea that an ideology with 100 million corpses behind it is a respectable starting point for "social justice." Nazism was defeated twice: once on the battlefield, then in our minds. Communism lost the Cold War, but it never lost the battle for minds. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The one in our heads is still standing. Time to finish the job.

Federal investigators collected DNA from Ilhan Omar and her family by searching discarded trash at multiple locations before the raids. New revelations into the case of Ilhan Omar broader than the existing allegation that she married her brother. The goal is to determine whether the people who naturalized as a single family unit are biologically related. Family members have become difficult to locate. Her sister has cancelled events and gone missing. This is getting serious. Ilhan Omar is in big trouble.