Links - 15th August 2026 (2 - Nolan's The Odyssey)

Rex Churchill on X - "Repeat after me: "The Odyssey is fiction, not history.""
The Medieval Scholar on X - "Lord of the rings is fiction and look at the exceptional armor WETA Workshop made. The odyssey takes place within an age of human history that is very much real. Trying to refute the criticism of bad looking costumes by just saying it’s fictional falls flat"
Mark Howard on X - "The costumes in Nolan's film aren't just aesthetically displeasing, but they also look cheap and anachronistic even within the film's setting."

Aɴᴛ on X - "Christopher Nolan has built such a strong reputation that, if he wanted to, he could have given Greece and its people not only an epic masterpiece, but also one that showcased Greek acting talent by hiring several actors who aren't internationally known, adding a huge degree of authenticity while celebrating Greek culture.  He wouldn't have had to bow to studio pressure to make it "woke." He's one of the few directors in Hollywood who could pretty much do whatever he wanted, and the movie still would have received all the funding it needed.  Instead, he chose the coward's route by capitulating to the Hollywood hive mind. It also comes across as a calculated move to maximise the film's chances of picking up multiple Oscar nominations.  Yes, The Odyssey is a work of fiction, but it's built on the foundations of Greek history, mythology and culture. It's something Greeks hold close to their hearts, something they're immensely proud of and fiercely protective of.  Instead, Nolan chose casting decisions that many Greeks see as insulting, forcing a modern ideological narrative onto one of the most important stories in Greek culture."

Jon Root on X - "John Leguizamo complains about the lack of Latino representation in Hollywood, while on the red carpet for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey where he stole the role from a Greek/European actor… What a hypocrite."
Josh Innes on X - "He stole that one role from mustachioed Italian plumbers…"

Meme - "VISION. LEADERSHIP. LEGACY. HISTORY tS WRITTEN BY THOSE WHO DARE TO DREAM
ELLIOT PAGE as MICHELLE OBAMA
ZENDAYA as BARACK OBAMA
WHOOPI GOLDBERG as JOE BIDEN
A CHRISTOPHER NOLAN FILM
OBAMA. THE MAN. THE PRESIDENT. THE LEGEND"

Nolan’s Odyssey cast angers Greek film fans - "Over the course of The Odyssey’s production, Greek and Greek Cypriot media platforms wrote open letters to Sir Christopher’s team and Hollywood, stating that Greek people “did not vanish” and were “still here” as “a living people whose story has never stopped being written”.  “We are not asking for exclusion or limitation,” wrote one such letter in Greek City Times. “We are not arguing against diversity, nor against reinterpretation. Greek culture itself has always been shaped by exchange, migration, and encounter across centuries.  “What we are asking is something simpler and more human. That, when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them.”  There is one Greek actor, Yannis Kokiasmenos, listed among the cast. He plays a coastal villager. Yannis Smaragdis, a filmmaker, said it would be “despicable” if Sir Christopher made the decision to cast Nyong’o to meet Academy Award diversity requirements... Lina Mendoni, the Greek culture minister, was forced to address calls for state intervention during production after it was revealed that the ministry of culture had granted The Odyssey a reported €6.5m (£5.6m) in subsidies.  She maintained that the Greek government’s approach since 2019 had been to treat culture as a strategic national investment and that “art cannot be censored”... After July 6, The Odyssey will be screened for critics only, in a move by Universal and Sir Christopher that bucks the trend of studios inviting fan-site bloggers and influencers to post enthusiastic reviews on social media in advance of a film’s general release in an attempt to pre-empt bad reviews."
Representation is not for white people
Apparently if you subsidise something and have conditions for your money, that's "censorship"

Meme - "Progressive Director *Christopher Nolan*
- Makes a film set in Ancient Greece
- Doesnt cast a single Greek
- The cast is as diverse as downtown L.A.
Racist Director *Mel Gibosn*
- Makes a film set in pre-colonial Mexico
- Only hires indigenous actors
- has them all speak Mayan"

Eren Bali on X - "Lupita Nyong’o role as Helen of Troy in Odyssey has already started a war, so in a way she has been a very historically accurate pick."

Fandom Pulse on X - "Christopher Nolan says his version of The Odyssey is for modern audiences: “When you look at the ancient world… there’s a lot of cultural prejudice….I want to make it feel very fresh for modern audiences.” Is this the final blow for the movie?"
Brandon Morse on X - "Let me translate this for you.   When they say "modern audience" they don't actually mean they're making this for those with modern sentiments. There aren't that many people with those sentiments to keep a movie studio afloat. Box office numbers have crashed and burned for films.   The point isn't to make films for you, or those small groups of people who like the message (and often still don't see it anyway), the "modern audience" is the youth. Teenagers and children.   The point is to redefine and restructure a story so that it loses it's intent and the value it serves to larger concepts like reinforcing Western civilization's values. The chief virtues it wants to push to replacement are things you often see repeated ad nauseum. "Inclusion" and "found family" are often held over actual family. You see a lot of moral ambiguity and nihilism as wisdom ("He sees the good in people, I see the truth" - James Gunn's Supergirl) and incredible amount of identity-based hierarchies.   So these "remakes" that continue to fail aren't cash grabs. The dice roll on them comes up snake eyes way too often, but the point isn't to make money, it's to take a story or characters that helped define the attitudes, morality, and virtues of the Western world and corrupt them so that they become the "updated" version for young sponges to consume and be influenced by."

Roman Helmet Guy on X - "It might seem hypocritical that Variety praises Moana for respecting Polynesian culture while attacking you for wanting Nolan’s Odyssey to respect Greek culture. But there’s actually a consistent moral through-line: They just hate White people."

Meme - "LOOK AT ME. I AM THE HELEN OF TROY NOW" *Lupita Nyong'o to Diane Kruger in Somali ship hijacking meme*

Fandom Pulse | Facebook - "Lupita Nyong'o, in a separate interview with DC Film Girl ahead of The Odyssey's July 17 release, on why she believes Homer's original epic needed correcting: "When you read The Iliad and The Odyssey, very little time is spent on the female perspective. The story is told from a very masculine point of view. But this film takes the time to really look at things from the women's point of view." Penelope holds Ithaca together for twenty years. Athena drives the entire plot. Circe turns men into pigs. Is Nyong'o describing Homer's Odyssey or a different book entirely?"

Austin Petersen | Facebook - "There's only one Greek cast member in the Odyssey. When Black Panther was made, Lupita Nyong'o praised it for drawing carefully from real African cultures and avoiding cultural misrepresentation.  Then they asked her to defend playing Helen of Troy and her answer was that it was a mythological story.  So was Wakanda.  When it came time to build that fictional space of Wakanda, fidelity was sacred. But when the myth was Greek suddenly we should all relax.  There are two rulebooks the left plays by. One for their protected cultures which are holy, and one for European civilization which should be considered open source."
Comment: "Unlike Wakanda, Troy was real."
Of course, left wingers are continuing to claim the Odyssey is fiction, so anything goes.

Nicholas Piff Peterson | Facebook - "It’s genuinely terrifying that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey trailer has more dislikes than the Snow White trailer did, and a lot of people did not like the Snow White movie with Rachel Zegler. It’s concerning that so many Christopher Nolan fans seem to be turning on him just based on a few characters being cast that are literally great actors in what is a massive ensemble. Nolan has put together a stacked cast of talented performers, and the backlash feels way overblown for a mythic story like The Odyssey. Fans are acting like one or two casting choices are going to ruin everything, ignoring that he has a proven track record of elevating actors and delivering incredible movies regardless of initial skepticism. I honestly believe that when the movie comes out, if the reviews are great similar to Oppenheimer — which was widely praised and a huge success — people are gonna go out regardless of what they think of his casting decisions. The story, visuals, and Nolan’s signature style are what ultimately drive audiences to theaters. All of the nonsense over the casting is actually so ridiculous to me. Nolan isn’t trying to troll anyone; he’s making an ambitious epic with the actors he believes will serve the vision best. Let’s wait for the actual film instead of judging a masterpiece in the making based on trailer reactions. Here’s hoping the positive word of mouth wins out like it has for so many of his previous projects. Nolan deserves better than this premature pile-on."
This guy is "terrified" by everything

Nolan's Odyssey Review: Beautiful but Dreary - "What is missing from Nolan’s film is the “rare excitement” that “stirs your spirit and your body.” The Odyssey is, to put it bluntly, a three-hour downer. In Nolan’s screenplay, Odysseus (Matt Damon), is not “the man of many tropes”, as Homer described him (andra...polytropon)—the wily king of Ithaca who leads his men in and out of trouble as they sail around the Mediterranean for years after Troy’s fall. Rather, he is a man of only one trope: guilt... After that confession, Odysseus’ rout of the suitors, drawn out and overproduced, feels like an anticlimax. We next see him abdicating his throne as a self-imposed punishment, leaving son Telemachus (Tom Holland) to rule over Ithaca while he sails off into mysterious exile with a veiled Penelope at his side. I had to ask: “What did she do to deserve this fate?” In Homer’s epic, by contrast, the ever-helpful Athena, goddess of wisdom, prolongs the night and signals rosy-fingered Dawn to take her time arriving so that Penelope and Odysseus can enjoy hours of love-making and he can regale her with the tales of his adventures. Watching the couple’s decidedly un-erotic exit in Nolan’s movie, I wondered if Odysseus would ever forgive himself long enough to realise that Penelope might be in the same room (or boat). This is not to say that The Odyssey doesn’t have admirable aspects, mostly in regard to its special effects... Nolan used next to no CGI... The effect is of a satisfyingly tangible reality that computer generation simply cannot produce.  Still, the sets are mostly dreary. The fall of Troy, if it occurred historically, took place around 1190 B.C., at the height of Greece’s Late Bronze Age civilisation. But the structures in Nolan’s movie, modelled after the Palace of Mycenae on the Peloponnesus and similar ruins, look already faded and decrepit. Nolan is notorious for his greyed-out cinematic palettes, and here the brilliantly sunny Mediterranean beach-scapes that enthral visitors to modern Greece and its islands look more like the fog-beset English Channel in his Dunkirk (2017). Odysseus and his men dress almost entirely in Batman black in this film, with dingy leather armour that has been criticised for bearing little resemblance to the colourful and brightly polished battle-wear of archaic Greeks. It’s supposed to be the Bronze Age, we’re told again and again, but where’s the bronze?... Lupita Nyong’o works out fine as Helen. Her beauty does not rise to the level of immortal perfection imagined by Homer. (What woman’s does?) But she is a skilled enough actress to convey Helen’s arresting glamour in her very brief scene. (She is less successful playing Helen’s half-sister, Clytemnestra, who, as she is murdering her husband, Agamemnon, glares in the banal fashion of a mother hectoring her children about housework.) The real diversity flop in Nolan’s movie is Elliot Page as Sinon, a character from Virgil’s Aeneid who has somehow wandered into Homer’s world. The 5’1” Sinon is supposed to be a warrior, yet cannot hit voice notes lower than what Tom Wolfe called the 'King Sano croak' of chain-smoking Upper East Side society ladies... The main problem is lacklustre acting in general"

Homeric Society - "The values of this society are quite different from those which many modern readers bring to the poem, as is evidenced by the tendency of today's students to dismiss Homer's heroes, especially Achilles, as childish, selfish, arrogant, testosterone-driven brats... The Iliad, like Beowulf and the other poems cited above, celebrates the achievements of the aristocratic warrior class who earn their privileged position in this society through their prowess in battle. The focus is on the adult male hero, whose martial exploits are celebrated as the acme of human achievement... The heroes of these poems display an overriding concern for personal glory and its external trappings, with relatively little concern for the common good or other moral issues... In describing societies such as that portrayed in the Iliad, anthropologists employ the term *Shame Culture (in contrast to the *Guilt Culture found in most of today's western societies). Individuals in a guilt culture tend to hold themselves up to a set of personal moral standards.... In a shame culture, by contrast, the focus is not on a set of personal standards but on one's public standing. The overriding concern is to save face... As in war, success is everything in such a society: good intentions, high moral standards, fairness, a peaceful conscience — none of these count in the face of public disgrace. The competition for public honors is often intense and takes the form of what is known as a zero-sum game: that is, honor is won only at someone else's expense. Thus the notion that winning or losing might be less important than how one plays the game is utterly foreign to such a culture. Winning is everything: results are much more important than means. The crucial thing is to prove one's superiority and to have that superiority publicly acknowledged by one's peers. This intense competition inevitably leads to factionalism. The Greeks divide the world very clearly into "friends" and "enemies," with the understanding that one should do everything in one's power to aid one's friends and to harm one's enemies; failure to do so results in disgrace. Thus the Greek equivalent of the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.") is, "Help your friends, harm your enemies." The contrast between these two aphorisms nicely captures the gulf that separates a guilt culture, with its cooperative values, from the competitive values of a shame culture. In Greek, the innate quality that renders one superior to others is called *aretê; (often translated "excellence" or, less happily, "virtue." The masculine, aggressive connotations of the word can be seen in its etymological connection to the name Ares; compare the English "virtue," which derives from the Latin vir ["man"] and originally meant "courage" or "manliness.") For the Homeric hero, war provides the occasion for the display of aretê; and the winning of glory (or *kleos). In a shame culture, however, mere success is not sufficient (it is not enough, for example, to know in your own mind that you are the best); public acknowledgment of one's superiority is essential. The Greek term for such acknowledgment is *timê. Timê refers to the public, concrete acknowledgment of aretê by means of prizes. In a pre-monetary society like that of the Iliad, such prizes are not financial in nature but symbolic: they represent, not income, but honor. As such, they have a strong emotional significance that is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate. (Students often think of the contract disputes of professional athletes.) You must remember: the hero's position in society is based upon his aretê; the surest sign of that aretê is the timê offered to the hero. Modern readers would prefer a hero who was "above" such concerns, but it is clear that the Greeks did not. Even as late as the 4th century (when cooperative values have sprung to greater prominence in Greek society) the philosopher Aristotle is able to describe the megalopsychos or "great-spirited man" as one who is innately superior to others and demands to be treated accordingly. For Aristotle, humility on the part of such an individual is a character flaw, a sign of some defect in his (note the masculine pronoun) personality."
Someone suggested that Achilles and Odysseus were anti-heroes. But that's because modern ideas of heroism have changed and Christian morality is not the same as Classical. Ergo why Nolan's portrayal of Odysseus as wracked with guilt is anachronistic. An imperfect hero is not a anti-hero

On the Iliad and Excellence - "Much of the Iliad celebrates the competitive, toxic pursuit of excellence and perfection. Heroes strive for glory over survival, with the risk of being a detriment to their family legacy... Achilles is later pushed into battle by the death of Patroclus, and ultimately fulfills his destiny and kills Hector, solidifying his legacy. To the ancient Greeks, these events proved that no one was able to escape destiny, and portrayed the glory of their predecessors... It wasn’t until I analyzed the Iliad in an academic setting that I began to realize that the ancient Greek ideal of a hero should not be idolized. It was in the analysis of the aristeiai that I learned of the flaws of both Achilles and the Homeric concept of heroism. The aristeia was the climax of the ancient hero’s greatness, when he demonstrated his power in battle and destroyed his enemy, and was often what solidified his legacy. Achilles’ aristeia, for example, was him killing Hector. However, these feats of greatness were often war crimes in disguise. Achilles’ aristeia continued after the death of Hector, when he proceeded to mutilate the body of the hero, dragging him behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. These demonstrations of so-called greatness show an alternative side to perfection, demonstrating the toxic nature of the expectation of excellence."

Odysseus vs. Achilles: The Two Faces of Ancient Greek Heroism - "Achilles is the kind of hero who charges into battle, sword in hand, ready to face any foe. His entire existence revolves around kleos, the Greek concept of glory that ensures his name will live on forever. He is nearly invincible, and his physical prowess is unmatched. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles is described as “the greatest warrior of the Greeks,” a title he earns through sheer force and bravery. His mother, Thetis, tells him that he faces two fates: a short, glorious life or a long, obscure one... In ancient Greece, Achilles was the hero everyone admired. His physical prowess and relentless pursuit of glory made him the ideal warrior. Cities like Sparta revered Achilles for his martial excellence, which aligned with their values of military might. The Iliad was a staple in Greek education, and Achilles’ heroism was something every young Greek boy was taught to emulate. His valor and tragic death became the gold standard for heroism in a society that prized martial prowess... Odysseus, while respected, was viewed differently. In Athens, a city that valued intelligence and strategy, Odysseus was admired for his cunning and adaptability. The Odyssey was cherished not just for its adventure but for its portrayal of human resilience. However, Odysseus’s reliance on deception made his heroism more complex and, at times, controversial. Some city-states preferred Achilles’ straightforward heroism, while others appreciated Odysseus’s more nuanced, cerebral qualities."

Odysseus and the Genus ‘Hero’ - "The presence of 'unheroic' features in the character of Homeric Odysseus was noticed long ago, and since the time of the ancient commentators it has become habitual to gloss those features by predicating them on Odysseus' metis, 'cunning', as opposed to the bie, 'might', of other Homeric heroes, first and foremost Achilles... The last labour of Odysseus is remarkable in that it is regarded as a crowning achievement in his life, an achievement which, in accordance with the view of labours outlined above, will guarantee him the approporiate reward. Indeed, according to the prophecy of Teiresias, only upon accomplishing this mission will Odysseus be able to return home, where he will live happily and die of old age: 'And from the sea shall thine own death come, the gentlest death that may be, which shall end thee foredone with smooth old age, and the folk shall dwell happily around thee.' This promise seems to be a clear indication of the fact that the Odyssey is not only aware of the popular notion of heroism as outlined above but also deliberately models its hero to fit into this notion... In full conformity with popular Greek ethics, Odysseus is represented as contented with his lot and preferring to immortality his own life even if it is a life of toil and suffering. In this, he proves as exemplary a hero as only a Greek hero can be... To sum up, either Homeric poem offers its own version of heroism. In the Iliad being a hero amounts to readiness to meet death on the battlefield: the sense in which the words 'heroism' and 'hero' are used today ultimately descends from this concept. According to the Odyssey a hero is one who is prepared to go through life enduring toil and suffering. Whatever the reasons for this difference, there can be no doubt that it is the Odyssey's version of heroism that conforms to the popular Greek attitude to the phenomenon of hero-worship."

The Smithsonian Forgot the One Job It Had

Taxpayer dollars only come with taxpayer accountability (not to mention, doing the job you're supposed to do on paper) when that pushes the left wing agenda. 

@amuse on X

The Smithsonian Forgot the One Job It Had

On July 4, as the country marked its 250th birthday, the White House released a 162-page report from the Domestic Policy Council titled Saving America's Story. The report, which follows President Trump's March 2025 executive order directing Vice President JD Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to steer the Smithsonian away from what the order called improper ideology, focuses on the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Its findings deserve a wider audience than a holiday news cycle will give them, because they document something more troubling than a few tendentious wall placards. They document a museum that has forgotten the one job it had.

Start with what that job is, because the museum's founders were not shy about stating it. When Smithsonian leadership made its case to Congress in 1953, it argued that a main reason to build the museum was to place before the millions who visit the capital a permanent exposition commemorating our heritage of freedom. In 1955, Secretary Leon Carmichael testified that the museum would tell the story of American national progress and instill in each citizen a deepened faith in the country's destiny as a champion of individual dignity and enterprise. Congress believed him and appropriated $36 million to build it. At the dedication in January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson expressed his hope that children would come to the building and see with their own eyes the ripe fruit of America's historical harvest, Whitney's cotton gin, Edison's phonograph, Bell's telephone, the victory of freedom and the genius of the country. The mandate was never subtle. The museum exists to tell the American story in full, sins included, but with gratitude for the civilization, liberty, prosperity, and constitutional order Americans inherited.

 

Now consider what the report found. A visitor walking through the National Museum of American History during the semiquincentennial of the American Founding will find no exhibit dedicated to George Washington. None dedicated to Thomas Jefferson. None to the Second Continental Congress, the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or Washington crossing the Delaware. Read that again slowly. The flagship history museum of the United States entered the 250th anniversary of the Revolution without a single exhibit, new or existing, devoted to the Founders or the pivotal events of the Founding. The Declaration and Constitution appear selectively. The constructive role of Christian belief in shaping American liberty receives scant attention. According to the report, the museum scheduled no special programming for Independence Day itself in either 2025 or 2026, despite being open on both days. 

 

Is this not simply an oversight, the kind of curatorial gap that afflicts any large institution? The report's most damning contribution is to show that it is not. The omissions trace directly to stated intent. Anthea Hartig, the museum's director since 2019, has described history as a prime tool of social justice and her role as connecting research and scholarship to activism and advocacy. She has said the museum works to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of US history. Most remarkably, she told her profession that it had to figure out how it was going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Problematize is a term of art in critical theory. It means to surface alleged oppressions within a subject in order to deconstruct and discredit the prevailing narrative about it. The nation asked for a birthday. The curators planned an intervention.

 

The institutional evidence runs deeper than one director's rhetoric. Under current leadership, the museum rewrote its mission statement, removing the phrase American history itself and replacing it with language about empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future. Hartig explained the change candidly: the goal was to get out of the America First mentality when telling history. Think about what that means in practice. The National Museum of American History deleted American history from its mission. If a bank removed the word deposits from its charter, depositors would be entitled to some alarm.

 

The museum's Interpretive Plan converts that mission into marching orders. It directs staff, whatever the topic, to tie exhibits back to seven core issues of our time: race and identity, gender and sexuality, climate change, immigration, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism versus globalism. The complaint here is not that these subjects are off limits. A serious history museum should address race, immigration, and inequality, because a serious history of America must. The complaint is that every subject, whether democracy, entertainment, childhood, women's labor, or sports, is now routed through the same ideological grid, one that treats American institutions chiefly as instruments of oppression and treats visitors as recruits. When Alexander Hamilton appears, he is an influential and flawed founding father who owned slaves, with no mention that he helped found the New York Manumission Society in 1785 or that its African Free Schools educated more than 1,400 students. When Benjamin Franklin appears in the Many Voices, One Nation exhibit, he appears once, not as a Founder but as a Philadelphian with allegedly ambivalent views of immigrants. The Pilgrims are framed as colonial oppressors and Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. This is not history with the hard parts included. It is prosecution with the exculpatory evidence excluded.

 

Why should the federal government care what a museum's curators believe? Because this is not a private gallery in Brooklyn spending donor money. The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality of the United States, overseen by a Board of Regents currently led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and populated by senior federal officials and congressional appointees. It received $1,080,500,000 in appropriations for Fiscal Year 2026, and federal money has covered roughly two thirds of its expenditures over the past two decades. Taxpayers are not being asked to tolerate a point of view they dislike in someone else's institution. They are being compelled to finance, in their own institution, a systematic campaign against the story that institution was chartered and funded to tell. Congress bought a museum of American history. It is entitled to receive one.

 

Defenders of the museum, including the American Historical Association, argue that the White House is trying to sanitize history and that political pressure threatens institutional independence. But notice what this objection must assume to succeed. It must assume that the only alternative to grievance curation is whitewash, that a museum which centers the Founding must therefore hide slavery, and that honoring Washington requires forgetting the enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Nothing in the report demands any such thing. Its own framework insists the museum should document the failures of the nation alongside its achievements, should tell the story of 750,000 dead in the Civil War, and should explain how Americans came to reject Jim Crow by appealing to the colorblind promise of the founding documents themselves. Telling history honestly is not the same as teaching contempt, and a curriculum of contempt is precisley what the current museum delivers. As for independence, no one proposes that curators take orders on individual label copy; the proposal is that a publicly chartered, publicly governed, publicly funded trust be held to its charter, which is what boards of regents and congressional oversight exist to do, and the notion that an institution can take more than $1 billion a year from the public while remaining accountable to no one but its own staff is not independence, it is capture, and calling capture independence does not make it so.

 

For decades, complaints about institutional bias in museums, universities, and cultural agencies produced columns and conference panels and little else, a pattern scholars at the Heritage Foundation have long described as conservatives funding their own marginalization. The Smithsonian report models a different approach: read the documents, quote the leadership, follow the money, and then use the legitimate levers of governance, budgets, appointments, and oversight, to restore an institution to its purpose. The report does not order exhibits torn down. It establishes a factual record and invites the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, and Congress to act on it. That is not a culture war stunt. That is what stewardship of a public trust looks like.

 

The deeper stakes are generational. Parents bring children to the National Museum of American History for the reason President Johnson named at the dedication, so that the young can touch the inheritance and understand the meaning of the past. A child who leaves that building never having encountered Washington's character, Jefferson's pen, Franklin's genius, or the improbable miracle of a republic conceived in liberty has been cheated of a birthright, and no amount of programming about the seven core issues of our time compensates for the theft. A nation that cannot explain to its children why it deserves their gratitude will eventually raise children who feel none. The prediction market currently gives strong odds that the Smithsonian fight becomes a defining cultural story of 2026, and it should, because memory is the ground on which every other political battle is fought.

 

The museum forgot the one job it had. On America's 250th birthday, the country noticed. The task now is not to burn the institution down but to hand it back its charter, point to the words American history, and insist that it do the job the American people built it, funded it, and trusted it to do.  

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 15th August 2026 (1 - Star Wars)

Meme - *Hutt*
Ahsoka: "STINKY? MY GOODNESS, YOU'VE GROWN!"
Hutt: "SO HAVE YOU. GROWN MORE BEAUTIFUL. FOR A JEDI, I MEAN."
Ahsoka: "STINKY, YOU'LL ALWAYS BE THAT LITTLE WORM I DROPPED OFF ON TATOOINE."

Meme - "Luke Skywalker. Anakin Skywalker. Rey
Overpowered - no, yes, yes
Unexplained power level - no, no, yes
Perfectly good - yes, no, yes
No personality - yes, no, yes
Instantly liked - no, kinda, yes
Feels like wish fulfillment - no, no, yes
Not embarrassed / fails - no, no, yes"
MaRey Sue strikes again. Of course if you think Rey is a Mary Sue you're a misogynist

Meme - "KNOW THE WORK RULES
APPROPRIATE
Princess Leia: I'm leading a rebellion & fight against a corrupt government.
You're a hero.
INAPPROPRIATE
General Grievous: I'm leading a rebellion & fight against a corrupt government.
Monster! War criminal!"

Meme - "Disney's creative decisions with Star Wars will never cease to baffle me. Choosing from the beginning to have the sequel trilogy swap each movie with the intention of having them all do completely separate things. Creating a release schedule to have a Star Wars film out every holiday season then abandoning it after 3 years to for some reason release a movie 5 months after the last one which also happens to be the same month as what will easily be the biggest film of the year. Then abandon making movies after that one flops, and instead of thinking that audiences might be getting tired of Star Wars they decide to start pumping out constant live action series. Then deciding to rework a movie that's essentially Star Wars Episode 3.5 into a series but take what's essentially a filler episode of their longest running series that's already lost steam and release it as a movie. These mistakes are so obvious it's insane."

Meme - Anakin Skywalker: "You can't! He must stand trial!"
Mace Windu: "Nute Gunray was once tried. He remained Viceroy of the Trade Federation and organized, probably together with this bastard, the assassination attempt on Senator Amidala. Any other objections?"

Meme - ""open minded freedom fighter" *Padme*
her friends: *Qui-Gon Jinn* human *Anakin Skywalker* human *Obi-Wan Kenobi* human *Captain Panaka* human *Bail Organa* human
"racist humanocentrist" *Count Dooku*
his friends: *General Grievous* kaleesh *Nute Gunray* neimoidian *Wat Tambor* skakoan *Admiral Trench* harch *Poggle the Lesser* geonosian *Shu Mai* gossam  *Passel Argente?* koorivar"

RUMOR: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy From Timeline to Resume Focus on Original Characters - "The future of Star Wars may be heading toward a massive course correction—and if a new insider report is accurate, Disney could be preparing to split the controversial Star Wars Sequel Trilogy off into its own isolated timeline and remove it from the mainline Star Wars storyline.  According to an exclusive report from That Park Place’s WDW Pro, a source close to Lucasfilm claims internal discussions are underway to “branch off” the Star Wars sequel trilogy to effectively remove it from the primary continuity and allow future storytelling to pivot back toward legacy characters from the original films.  If true, this would be one of the most dramatic franchise shifts in modern Hollywood history. A recent focus group conducted by Matthew Belloni of Puck News paints a bleak picture of where younger audiences stand with Star Wars. When teens were asked about the franchise, the response wasn’t passionate debate or excitement. It wasn't even hate or anger.  It was indifference.  “I like the old stuff, but the new stuff… nah. I’m not too excited for The Mandalorian. I never watched it, personally,” one teen said. Another claimed: “Anything that came out after I was born isn’t that great.”   The only bright spot mentioned was Andor—and even that came with a shrug before the conversation moved on.  That’s the nightmare scenario for Disney.  The sequel trilogy wasn’t just meant to revive Star Wars. It was supposed to create a new generation of fans. Instead, that generation appears largely disconnected from it.  And the box office outlook isn’t helping. The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently tracking for around an $80 million domestic opening over Memorial Day weekend—a number that would make it the lowest debut in Star Wars theatrical history. Even accounting for a reportedly smaller budget, that’s a glaring warning sign for a franchise that once defined blockbuster dominance... At Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge, cast members portraying Ahsoka have reportedly been giving a very specific, very consistent explanation when guests ask why characters from different eras are appearing together.  The answer? The “World Between Worlds” has been "shattered" and disrupted. That concept, introduced in Star Wars Rebels, is essentially a dimension that connects all points in time and space—making it a perfect narrative tool for timeline manipulation.  Disney Parks performers don’t improvise lore like this... Even beyond the parks, there are signs Disney has been slowly backing away from the sequel era.  Recent merchandising campaigns for May the 4th heavily favored the original trilogy. The Fortnite crossover event leaned in the same direction. Galaxy’s Edge itself has begun shifting its in-universe timeline, allowing characters like Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia to appear more prominently.  Meanwhile, sequel-era elements have been noticeably reduced. Rey—once positioned as the future face of the franchise—is increasingly absent from major promotional pushes. Her long-announced standalone film remains stalled, with little visible progress since its reveal.  And then there’s the Galactic Starcruiser.  The now-defunct hotel was built entirely around the sequel trilogy timeline. It lasted barely a year before shutting down, becoming one of the most high-profile misfires in Disney Parks history... For years, talk of resetting the sequel trilogy has been dismissed as wishful thinking from frustrated fans.  But the situation has changed.  Between declining engagement, weak box office projections, stalled projects, and failed investments tied directly to the sequel era, the financial incentive to pivot is stronger than ever. This isn’t just about fan complaints anymore. It’s about viability.  Disney doesn’t need to erase the sequel trilogy to move on from it. They just need to make it… optional."
Damn toxic entitled incel fanboys! Star Wars needs to be further feminised to own the chuds!

Aakash Gupta on X - "Disney is about to delete five years of canon because Rey doesn't move toys.  The sequel trilogy did $4.47B at the box office. Force Awakens $2.07B, Last Jedi $1.33B, Rise of Skywalker $1.07B. The merchandise tells a different story.  Star Wars merchandise peaked at $700M in 2015 when Force Awakens launched. By 2019, the year Rise of Skywalker shipped with a billion-dollar marketing push as the supposed finale of the Skywalker Saga, Hasbro's Star Wars line was doing roughly $150M. A 70%+ collapse during the trilogy's own theatrical run.  Then 2020 happened. No new movies. A streaming show legally unavailable in most international markets. Hasbro's Star Wars revenue grew 70% year-over-year. One character named Grogu outsold three years of sequel-trilogy merchandise.  The sequel cast specifically can't move inventory at any price point. Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, Holdo: Walmart clearance for years. Diamond Select's president said sales on TFA and TLJ products "were not too strong." Hasbro silently stopped producing Rise of Skywalker figures mid-line. There is no mass-market action figure for Poe, Finn, Lando, unmasked Kylo, Palpatine, or Leia from that movie. The licensees gave up before the trilogy finished releasing.  The Lucasfilm acquisition was a $4.05B bet on the merchandise flywheel that built modern Hollywood toy licensing. Kenner's best year selling Original Trilogy toys, adjusted for inflation, outperformed the entire Disney era combined. That's the asset Disney bought.  Galaxy's Edge runs the same play. Over $1B per park to build a Star Wars land set on a sequel-era planet nobody cared about. Both parks underperformed projections. The Mandalorian-themed expansion now under construction is the admission.  If the rumor lands, this is the most expensive retcon in entertainment history. Five years of IP development written off because the licensees voted with their order books. Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Boba, Mando, Grogu, Ahsoka generate revenue. The sequel cast generates returns."
Left wingers still insist that the sequel trilogy was a massive success, because they ignore George Lucas's key insight: it's not about the movie revenue, but the toy sales

Bizlet on X - "What’s hilarious about this whole fiasco is that Disney specifically bought Star Wars because they lacked a brand that appealed to boys. They had tons of merch sales to girls but had almost nothing for boys. So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with."

Zcure1 on X - "New footage The Mandalorian and Grogu promo spot . #TheMandalorianandGrogu #StarWars"
Duchess of Darksaber Light on X - ""The Empire will keep coming for us" is a brain-dead line. Just like with the sequel trilogy, the writers can't imagine a world where characters are anything other than Rebels against the Empire. An Empire that has been gone for more than 5 years."

'It's felt like homework': Why Star Wars went so wrong - "The Mandalorian & Grogu is released this week and is set for the lowest opening weekend of any Star Wars film ever. With the TV shows also struggling, here's why interest is waning.  It's been seven years since the Star Wars franchise visited a galaxy far, far away on the big screen. In December 2019, The Rise of Skywalker, the third and final film in the franchise's sequel trilogy, was released, earning $1.077bn (£806m) worldwide. It pulled in only around half what the first film in the trilogy, 2015's The Force Awakens had made. This disappointing amount reflected the increasingly poor audience and critical response to the three films. A year earlier, in 2018, the standalone film Solo: A Star Wars Story had also bombed hard, earning just $393m (£294m) globally. Since then, the film series has been on a lengthy hiatus, while Lucasfilm, bought by Disney for $4.05bn (£3.03bn) in 2012, has been busy expanding the Star Wars universe on TV with a whole host of live-action shows, starting with hit The Mandalorian. However, interest in these has declined as they have proliferated: the most recent new series, 2025's Skeleton Crew, recorded the lowest opening ratings for a Star Wars show yet, while 2024's The Acolyte was cancelled after one season... Prerelease tracking suggests it will score just $80 million domestically during its opening weekend – the lowest opening for a Star Wars film ever. So what exactly has gone wrong with the Star Wars universe?... Clarisse Loughrey, chief film critic for The Independent, agrees, pointing by contrast to Tony Gilroy's critically-acclaimed series Andor, which consistently grew its viewership through its two season run, as a standalone Star Wars show you could enjoy on its own: "That could be your first piece of Star Wars that you've ever seen, and you're not going to feel like you've been thrown in the deep end."   Andor also stood out from the other series as a defiantly prescient critique of authoritarianism, offered "in terms you could legibly graft on to the world right outside your door", wrote Vulture's Nicholas Quah. It was a Star Wars saga that didn't require a single lightsaber, Jedi-Sith battle, or an abundance of fan service to entice viewers but instead wielded characters that "felt like flesh-and-blood beings whose lives extended beyond their service to the story", as he put it. Yet where Andor succeeded, others have failed to capture its rejuvenating appeal. The Book of Boba Fett was criticised for being too much of a Mandalorian-linked mini-series, and reducing the beloved eponymous bounty hunter, who appeared in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, from a mysterious antagonist to what critics have described as a "superfluous bystander" in his own story. Meanwhile, critics suggested that Ahsoka, while visually appealing, relied too much on backstory from the two animated series Clone Wars and Rebels, in which its ex-Jedi lead character was a firm fixture.   The female-centric Acolyte series, set approximately 100 years before The Phantom Menace and costing $187m (£140m) to make, earned generally favourable reviews from critics, comparing it to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and calling it "bold," "fun", and a "breath of fresh air".  However, it was cancelled due to low viewership, according to Lucasfilm, while actress Amandla Stenberg publicly called out the "intolerable racism" she said she'd been subject to in the wake of starring in the show. "Had it been given more time and resource, maybe it would have been more successful," says Harrison. "If it wasn't part of this huge glut of other shows that you're somehow meant to keep up with."  Then there was Obi-Wan Kenobi's solo series which was an enjoyable enough return for Ewan McGregor's Jedi Knight. But also one that was indicative of post-George Lucas Star Wars, wrote The Guardian's Stuart Heritage, which "exists almost exclusively to bulk out thin gruel, joining various dots that didn’t need to be joined, for the delight of a quickly ageing fanbase."... the film cost approximately $165m (£123m) to make – the smallest amount spent on any big-screen Star Wars instalment, which certainly puts its box-office prediction in a healthier light. Lucasfilm managed to keep costs low by shooting entirely in California rather than the far-flung locations used on previous, very expensive Star Wars films."

Meme - "FUCK ICE"
"The SW Geek Hub
Love Star Wars? Want News but sick of Clickbait and Ragebait? Don't look in Alderaan places. Welcome to The SW Geek Hub, successor to The Star Wars Hub. Your go to place for Daily Star Wars News. A Star Wars Page for Star Wars Fans that want News & Memes"
The SW Geek Hub: "The World's a Stage..."
"The attempt on my life has left me in need of a ballroom"
Obi-Wan Kenobi: "You have become the very thing you swore to destroy"

Meme - Cara Dune: "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? DOES THAT HELMET HAVE X-RAY VISION?"
Din Djarin: "UMM. UHH. OF COURSE NOT"
Cara Dune: "OK MANDO. I FEEL I CAN TRUST YOU." *X-ray view of guns behind walls and Cara Dune with nipple stickers and frilly underwear*

Hail the Empire | Facebook - "The Hosnian system getting wiped out in The Force Awakens is a good example of how bigger stakes don’t always hit harder. In A New Hope, Alderaan’s destruction worked because the story made it personal. Tarkin didn’t just blow up a planet; he forced Leia to watch her home disappear, with around two billion people gone in one brutal display of Imperial power. Decades later, Starkiller Base tried to top that by destroying five New Republic planets at once, with the death toll pushed to an almost impossible scale of about 155 billion lives. The problem is that the larger number somehow made the moment feel smaller. Alderaan had Leia as the emotional anchor, so the audience understood the loss through someone who actually belonged to that world. Hosnian Prime and the other planets barely had that kind of connection. We mostly see strangers looking up as the red beam tears through the sky, which is horrifying in concept but strangely distant on screen. As some critics pointed out, the sequel trilogy looked at the original planet-destruction scene and “decided to multiply it by five,” turning what should have been devastating into something more like “distressing stuff.” That’s the trap of trying to raise the stakes by simply making the disaster bigger. When a whole capital system can vanish in seconds but the story barely stops to feel it, the tragedy becomes harder to process, not more powerful. Instead of landing like Alderaan, the Hosnian Cataclysm ends up feeling more like a massive plot button being pressed. By PDA01"

Box Office: 'Backrooms' $81M U.S, $118MWW Opening Is An A24 Record - "Disney/Lucasfilm’s Mandalorian and Grogu is taking a big fall, -69%, maybe steeper, with $25M in weekend 2. That’s a bigger crash than Solo: A Star Wars Story which -65% in weekend 2, likely the worst drop for a Star Wars movie. The argument per distribution sources is that the Jon Favreau movie didn’t lose audiences to Backrooms and Obsession, it’s just that the core Star Wars subset fandom for this IP is finite. One distribution source says, “Six weeks from now, it will be interesting to see the following: Mandalorian and Grogu will be at $180M, and Obsession and Backrooms not too far behind, if not ahead.”...   Disney/Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, despite the force of Imax, is eyeing third with a second weekend of $24M after a $6.5M Friday at 4,300. If those numbers stick, that’s a 69% second-weekend drop, steeper than Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s second weekend, which was down by 65% with $29.3M."
One cope is people don't watch movies anymore, but that is contradicted by data

Kevin Winslow's answer to Why have the Star Wars prequels aged well and the sequels aged worse? - Quora - "Well, the Prequels had a lot going for them and a ton of great ideas, it just could have used a little more editing. The “Sequel” trilogy is made by an entirely different group of people with no coherent vision: it’s mostly bad ideas strung together. Even though the Prequel trilogy didn’t measure up well against the Original Trilogy when they came out, they look like Rembrandts compared to the incoherent, depressing, pointless mess that is the “Fan Fiction Trilogy” Disney put together.
The Prequel Trilogy continued George Lucas’ tradition of making each Star Wars entry a slightly different type of film. Star Wars (A New Hope) was a throwback to serials he grew up with. The Empire Strikes Back is more of a space opera. The Return of the Jedi is a heroic war movie.  So the Prequel Trilogy starts with The Phantom Menace, which is basically one long prologue in a big novel. The Attack of the Clones is an attempt at a political thriller, and The Revenge of the Sith is basically a Greek tragedy where the hero is given a prediction of a horrible event and becomes the mechanism that fulfills it through his lack of patience and character. Each movie actually has a great set of bones in terms of plot, setting, and character. The problem was the pacing and the direction: Lucas made some bold choices that ended up hurting the overall work. He overexplained the Force (midichlorians), he tried to foreshadow with a prophecy that only muddied up the story, and he chose to cast Anakin as a really young boy which created production issues.  Still: the Phantom Menace (with some cleanup) is a solid prologue that hits a lot of the right plot beats but needed a central protagonist and a better character arc for that protagonist. The Attack of the Clones needed less heavy handed direction and better dialogue. The Revenge of the Sith is the best of the three, but could have used some clean up with the acting direction and story.
The “Sequel Trilogy”, (and I use that term loosely), is visually stunning, but has zero heart and terrible, terrible bones: “Plot, setting, and character” are our tripod of a good story. The people putting these films together didn’t really know where they wanted the story to go even in a loose outline (so the plot is a mess), they didn’t care about the older characters and didn’t make firm decisions on character relationships, (so there goes character), and ran rampant over all aspects of the setting in favor of meeting immediate plot needs, so it has no consistency with Lucas’ work.
I’ve written a lot about these films, but what it really boils down to is…
1) There was no plan
2) There was no united vision
Say what you will about Lucas, but he has a plan and a vision. Whether you agree with it or not is usually up for debate, but there’s no question he had big goals in mind and had at least worked out some of the major story beats in advance. Not all of them… but some of them. Enough that “Return of the Jedi” is a damn-fine trilogy conclusion and “Revenge of the Sith” does manage to bring the prequels to about the right spot to set up the Original Trilogy.  The “Sequel Trilogy” is more of loose collection of competing ideas. The Force Awakens shows our old heroes broken and tries to introduce new, inferior replacements. The Last Jedi tries to further piss on EVERYTHING: the old characters like Luke and Yoda are torn apart completely and the new characters like Finn and Poe get hit with the reset button or changed completely. The plot went nowhere, and things were in such bad shape by “The Rise of Skywalker”, villains were resurrected with no warning and the entire film is basically, “get the _______ to get to the _______” over and over again.
What does this all mean?  Well, the Disney Trilogy is pretty much a, “I watched it once and never felt like watching it again” type of film. The Prequel Trilogy, even if you didn’t love it like the Original Trilogy, still had stand out music, fights, visuals, and plot elements that make it worth coming back to. Watching this fight with this music in trailers and the big screen? It’s a highlight of my Star Wars fandom. I loved this soundtrack and I used to work out and run to “Duel of the Fates” and “Across the Stars”. I still have those plus all the entire prequel and sequel soundtracks on my phone, and “Sail Barge Assault” (renamed “Return of the Jedi” in later album versions on streaming platforms), is still my favorite Star Wars track of all time and I’ve listened to it more times than I’ll ever be able to count.  THAT is the power Lucas’ work. The attention to detail, the emotional punch of what we’re watching, the investment into the characters, and even if his direction of the actors and his written dialogue weren’t always on point, he had a unified story that was cohesive and very enjoyable.  The Sequel Trilogy, even with John Williams doing the score again, is completely lifeless because nothing is really happening on screen. There is no romance. There is no true tension. There are no true stakes. There are no true consequences. That’s why the “Sequel Trilogy” soundtrack doesn’t have nearly the impact of tracks like, “The Asteroid Field”, “Princess Leia’s Theme”, “Yoda’s Theme”, or “The Imperial March”. Even if a piece is good, (like, “The March of the Resistance” or “Rey’s Theme”) it doesn’t hit nearly as hard because we don’t really care about the Resistance and Rey is poorly written. We’ve been given no real reason to care about what happens to these characters because they’re floating through the story. The Sequels have already aged terribly because they’re not really re-watchable. You don’t go in and feel tingly when you leave. You don’t hum the tunes, imagine being those characters, you don’t daydream about fighting alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi as a stand-in brother or friend, or kissing Padme, and you don’t imagine yourself as a Jedi Knight in the Clone Wars or as a dashing pilot.  The Sequels were very lifeless and even their heroes didn’t really get a chance to do, (or be) very much. And with that… what’s really the point of rewatching them?  Visually, they look great, but they’ve aged like bad milk: they leave a terribly sour after taste and it’s not something anyone really enjoys in the moment or wants to think about going back to."

Jake Lloyd's Personal Saga: New Focus Is Helping Determine His Current Reality - "Jake Lloyd wants his fans to know something.  Years into dealing with a schizophrenia diagnosis that has largely hijacked his post-Star Wars acting life— he’s finally feeling “pretty good”."
Mother of 'Star Wars' child actor details his mental health struggles - "his mother, Lisa Lloyd, provided a glimpse into Jake’s personal saga in the years since appearing in that galaxy far, far away — sharing her son’s turbulent struggle with mental illness, family tragedy and the reasons she’s more hopeful today than she’s been in years.  She also wanted to set the record straight about what her son really thinks about "Star Wars."  Lisa noted that her son is aware that she is speaking out to tell his story.    “Jake started having some trouble in high school,” Lisa said, recalling the time she first noticed her son’s personality changing. “He started talking about ‘realities.’ He didn't know if he was in this reality, or a different reality. I didn't really know exactly what to say to that.”... Lisa is also eager to dispel what she says is a common misconception: that an avalanche of negative reaction to "The Phantom Menace" drove Jake to quit acting and contributed to his mental illness.  “It would have happened anyway,” Lisa insists, pointing to a history of schizophrenia on his biological father’s side of the family. “I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.” She also insists that in 1999, Jake was largely shielded from the toxic vitriol swirling around the prequel film.  “I protected him from the backlash. He was just riding his bike outside, playing with his friends. He didn't know. He didn't care,” Lisa said. “Everybody makes such a big deal about that. And it's rather annoying to me because Jake was a little kid when that came out, and he didn't really feel all that stuff because I didn't let him online.”"
Damn toxic fans bullying him! The cope is going to be that the bullying caused the schizophrenia, even though it's highly heritable

Links - 14th August 2026 (2 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

IDF specifies terror affiliations of 12 Gazan soccer players killed in Israeli strikes; one was a FIFA ref - "The Israeli military provided details Wednesday on 12 soccer players killed in the Gaza Strip during the war between Israel and Hamas who it said have been identified as terror operatives, slamming their international portrayal as innocent athletes. Seven of the 12, including one who was a FIFA referee, have been acknowledged as members by Gaza terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.  “Following an intelligence investigation, it is now possible to reveal the terrorists’ organizational affiliation and their roles, despite the fact that in many cases they were presented to the world solely as soccer players, without any mention of their affiliation with terror organizations,” the military said.  Some of the information was based on open sources, but all of those listed were identified by the IDF as members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  They were named by the military as:
Mohammed Barakat  Barakat, nicknamed “the Legend of Khan Younis” for his soccer prowess, was a terrorist in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, the IDF said...
Mahmoud Kamal Mohammed Ali Al-Rifi  Al-Rifi was the captain of the Al-Jalaa soccer club in Gaza and a company commander in Hamas’s aerial array.
Mohammed Mansour Mansour played for a soccer club in Nuseirat and coached the club’s youth division. He was a deputy commander of Hamas’s Nuseirat Battalion, who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas’s military wing identified him as a member in March.
Ahmed Mohammed Hassan Abu al-Atta  Al-Atta was a soccer player and a platoon commander in Islamic Jihad. Atta, who played for Al-Ahli Gaza, was recently identified by the terror group as the deputy commander of the Gaza City Brigade’s rocket unit.
Abdullah Riyad Abdullah Khattab  Khattab was a player for Gaza’s al-Ribat soccer team and Ittihad Shabab Deir al-Balah, and a member of Islamic Jihad’s anti-tank missile array. Islamic Jihad identified him as a commander in June.
Mohammed Sami Mohammed Khattab  Khattab, a FIFA international referee, was a member of Islamic Jihad in central Gaza. The IDF said Khattab refereed matches in the West Asian Championships and other international games. The Islamic Jihad also identified him as a platoon commander in the terror group.
Ali Mahmoud Ahmed al-Kurd  Al-Kurd was a soccer player and coach for two teams in Rafah, as well as a platoon commander in Islamic Jihad in the Strip’s southernmost city. Islamic Jihad identified him as a member in May.
Mohammed Imad Atta Hassouna  Hassouna was the captain of the Al-Shabab al-Zawaida soccer team and a Hamas terrorist who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Hassouna was identified by Hamas as a member of its military wing last week.
Tarek Ziad Hussein al-Hour  Al-Hour was a midfield soccer player who played for several teams in the Gaza Strip, according to the IDF, and was a member of Hamas’s military wing.
Mohammed Ziad Hussein al-Hour  Al-Hour was a beach soccer player and platoon commander in Hamas’s military wing in Nuseirat. The IDF said al-Hour competed on the Palestinian national team in the 2013 West Asian Beach Soccer Championship.
Mahmoud Osama al-Jazzar  Al-Jazzar was a goalkeeper for two soccer teams in Rafah, and an Islamic Jihad operative. Islamic Jihad identified al-Jazzar last week as a deputy commander of an elite unit in Rafah.
Mohammed Nidal Mohammed al-Hawajri  The IDF said al-Hawajri was a soccer player but did not say what teams he played for, and was a commander in Hamas’s military wing in Nuseirat."

Meme - "The zionist billionaire fears the friendly socialist"
Anonymous @YourAnonNews: "Mamdani just unlocked the rarest political achievement, actually scaring a final boss."
objkshn: "Wow. He's declaring Mamdani and Mamdani-policies to be what it will take to protect a city from Blackrock, a vulture predatory private equity firm that doesn't invest in community but bleeds them dry. He just elevated Mamdani to God-like status with this admission."
The General: "BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says he may abandon investing in New York City because Zohran Mamdani is a threat to his business"
There's no evidence he's a "Zionist". This is a good reminder that terrorist supporters just use "Zionist" as a dog whistle for Jew, and left wingers who are normally super keen on "exposing" "dog whistles" to claim their opponents are saying something they're not love the biggest dog whistle in the world. Also left wingers hate investment and want to destroy the economy

Islamist thugs are firebombing politicians into compliance is the US and UK - "a senior American politician made a highly disturbing admission.  Washington Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services committee, revealed that he had voted in favour of cutting American military aid to Israel because of the violence and intimidation he and his family were facing. Mr Smith said: “My family and I have had our home vandalised, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbours’ lives have been disrupted by demonstrations in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted.”...   In February 2024, Mike Freer, the Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, announced he would not stand again after his constituency office was firebombed.  It was, he said, “the final straw” after more than a decade of threats tied directly to his support for Israel and his work challenging anti-Semitism. “Because I have such strong views on the Middle East, and I’m pro-Israel, this has led me to become a target,” he said at the time.  What links Mr Smith’s Washington and Mr Freer’s Finchley is not a shared position on the Middle East – it is the methods being used against those who believe that the West should continue its support for the region’s only democracy in its fight against jihadism. The lesson these campaigns of political violence teach is explicit: back away from support for Israel and for the Jewish community, or your family pays the price. The experiences of Mr Smith and Mr Freer represent direct evidence of the growth of extreme Left-wing terrorism and intimidation. It is debate replaced by threats, the ballot box replaced by firebombs.  We cannot blame this simply on Iranian proxies operating on foreign soil, or on the destructive division deliberately driven by China’s TikTok. We must accept that citizens of our country believe that it is permissible to commit violence and bullying in service of their hatred for the Jewish State. We should also be in no doubt that this intimidation extends beyond our political representatives. Since October 7, this culture of intimidation has been felt across society by the Jewish community.  It has been experienced in the education system, in arts institutions and the workplace. It has left many British Jews feeling isolated, displaced and in fear."
Damn right wing violence! This shows why it's so important to crack down on Islamophobia and jail Islamophobes

The inconvenient truth about Gaza’s ability to govern - "First, there never was a sovereign, independent Gaza in recorded history. Ottoman Turkey, for instance, ruled Gaza for four centuries. No effort was made to establish a state. Later, Egypt governed Gaza for 19 years. Again, there was no move towards Palestinian independence. To the contrary, Cairo imposed harsh military rule.  Ironically, the first country to offer Gaza the opportunity to chart its own destiny was Israel. Yes, Israel. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew every last soldier and settler. It also left behind scores of greenhouses intended to help kick-start Gaza’s economy. Within days, however, those greenhouses were looted and destroyed. Second, over the strong objections of Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, the United States pressed for Hamas to participate in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. That legitimised a terrorist group which, predictably, took full advantage of the opportunity. Within a year, Hamas had violently seized total control of Gaza, killing or expelling Palestinian Authority officials. No election has been held in the ensuing two decades. Third, while some in the West romanticise, if not fetishise, Hamas as an “anti-colonial liberation” group, the truth is quite different. It is an outgrowth of the extremist, transnational Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated objective is to replace existing nation-states in the Middle East with a Sharia-based caliphate, while extending the reach of political Islam to the four corners of the world. At its core, it is virulently anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, authoritarian, and intolerant of “infidels”. The murderous Iranian regime has been its principal supplier of weapons and funding.  Fourth, when Israel gained control of Gaza in the 1967 war of self-defence, by all accounts, the strip’s population was under 400,000. When Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2005, the population had more than tripled to 1.3 million. Thirty-eight years of Israeli control clearly did not prevent rapid population growth. Fifth, in the past two decades, Gaza has been the recipient of billions of dollars from governments and nongovernmental organisations earmarked to develop its economy and address humanitarian and social needs. Instead, the funds were largely syphoned off to build a vast terrorist infrastructure, including a tunnel system reported to exceed the length of London’s Underground. In other words, instead of seeking to emulate Dubai or Singapore, Hamas’s leaders opted to weaponise Gaza as a launching pad for Israel’s destruction. Meanwhile, some of those same leaders managed to become billionaires in the process, with homes in hospitable Qatar.  Sixth, pro-Hamas voices frequently refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison”. That choice of words resonates with Hamas’s ideological sympathisers, but fails to note Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 and its long-standing interest in a peaceful and prosperous neighbour. It also conveniently ignores that Gaza has two borders, not one. The other is with Egypt, an Arab and Muslim-majority nation. Why is so little attention paid to Cairo’s opposition to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, its sealed border with Gaza, and its refusal to offer help to Gazans in need, either before or after October 7, 2023? Seventh, what happened on October 7, 2023 cannot simply be forgotten, dismissed, or minimised. It was the deadliest single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. In proportional terms, it would have been the equivalent of more than 8,000 British women, men, and children slaughtered in 24 hours, plus more than 1,750 people, including the elderly and babies, kidnapped. What would the British government’s response have been?  No, this was not an initiative from Gaza to advance a two-state solution, send a message of coexistence, or launch an interfaith, intercultural dialogue. It was a genocidal effort to kill as many people as possible simply because they lived in Israel and were presumed to be Jews.  Eighth, the immense challenge any Israeli government would have faced was how to cripple Hamas, rescue the hostages, ensure this could never happen again, and minimise harm to civilians. Not easy tasks when the enemy deliberately weaponises civilians by placing them in harm’s way, stores weapons and command centres in schools, mosques, and hospitals, cynically manipulates media images, and cares not a whit for notions of international humanitarian law, proportionality, de-escalation, Red Cross access to the hostages, and the like.  Ninth, in the fog of any war, innocent people are tragically killed and wounded. That is unspeakably heartbreaking. But one side, Hamas, cannot launch a war of aggression and then thunder to the world about its consequences. Despite all the freewheeling accusations launched against Israel, few armies in history have ever gone to its lengths to grapple with the moral dilemmas of war, even as its foes have no such scruples. Apropos, exactly how many humanitarian corridors were created by Allied nations to provide aid to German or Japanese civilians during the Second World War? None. Finally, the long-term goal must be to de-radicalise Gaza. Not an easy, overnight job, but a vital one. Is the American-created Gaza Peace Board, established in 2025, up to the challenge? Only time will tell.  Radicalism and rejectionism run deep throughout the coastal strip. And they are abetted, wittingly or unwittingly, by an extensive network of governments, United Nations officials, and nongovernmental organisations. Unless and until that changes, the prospects for peace and stability are, alas, dim."
The narrative is important. The truth is not

Uri Kurlianchik on X - "I wonder what the Middle East would have been like if Israel was as brutal as Turkey was in the 20th century? Israel would have been 99% Jewish with clear borders. No occupation, no intifadas, no Palestinians. Just one brief atrocity that only historians would speak about."
Anna Mae on X - "I think the historians would make an exception for Israel."

How would a doctor know who fired the bullet? - "Numerous reports came out a few years ago from doctors claiming that ‘IDF assassins’ were targeting innocent children in Gaza, which was accompanied by an image of a bullet imbedded in a child’s skull. Brutal and sick... the doctors wouldn’t have been at the scene - they would have been at the hospital when they were told what happened.  Why would they tell the world that this was the work of ‘IDF assassins’ when they couldn’t have possibly known if it was true, and why would so many news outlets run these stories with no fact checking?  And why would  so many of us buy it hook, line, and sinker? Maybe it’s because we want to.  Meanwhile, here is a photo of Hamas shooting their own citizens in the head ‘assassin style’. There are probably real cases of war crimes committed by IDF soldiers, which should be dealt with, but to believe that the IDF targets and assassinates innocent children, especially when it’s coming from people who think that strangling the life out of a seven month old baby is a legitimate form of ‘resistance’, shows some serious moral confusion.  If we actually care about the children in Gaza we should look at the cause of their suffering so we can help rather than using their suffering with the sole purpose of blaming everything on Israel."

Rawan Osman روان عثمان on X - "You can’t make this up.  Zionist Tracker posts faces on X, one at a time, over a dripping red handprint. Gal Gadot. Mayim Bialik. Helen Mirren. Gwyneth Paltrow. Jerry Seinfeld. Leonardo DiCaprio. An Israeli actor accused, without evidence, of things no article substantiates. And now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  The hand isn’t decoration but a direct lift from a specific photograph. October 12, 2000, Ramallah: two Israeli reservists, Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami, took a wrong turn and were seized by Palestinian police, then killed by a mob that broke into the station.   A man named Aziz Salha walked to the window afterward and held up his hands, covered in their blood, to the crowd below. They cheered. An Italian news crew filmed it. That image — a killer displaying his victim’s blood as a trophy, to applause — became one of the defining photographs of the Second Intifada. That is the symbol this account chose to brand every post with.  What does the visual grammar of a lynching, repurposed as a content template, invite? Post the face, post the hand, let the crowd do the rest.  And now AOC is in the crowd’s sights. This is a woman who tried to block a $735 million missile sale to Israel. Who told the Senate to choose between upholding the law and “cowering to Netanyahu.” Who pledged publicly to vote no on any Israel funding at all, defensive systems included. Her file, by the movement’s own logic, should read: ally.  Her crime was a single vote against an amendment that could never have passed (422 to 6) because the amendment also cut a missile defense system, and she said so out loud. That’s the whole indictment.  So what does this tell us. She isn’t hateful enough. And she was never anything but disposable. That’s the tell. The moment anyone in this camp declines to hate on command and obey blindly, the hand comes up, and it’s suddenly their face on the poster.  @trackzionist  @AOC  #zionism #israel"
Henshi on X - "If @AOC is a Zionist then you guys are all in trouble 😜"

No Room at the Inn: BDS Hotels in Europe That Won’t Accept Israelis or Jews
So much for people's existence not being political and discrimination based on national origin being bad. People's existence is only political when it pushes the left wing agenda
It's Islamophobic to expect all Muslims to condemn Islamist terrorism, but if Jews and/or Israelis don't condemn Israel, it's good for them to not receive service

Meme - "LEFTIST AMERICAN WOMAN WHO HAD "FUCK ICE" IN HER SOCIAL MEDIA BIOS, FOUND BEATEN TO BY HER ASYLUM SEEKER BOYFRIEND"
"Jamey Carney
1.1K friends . 4.5K posts
New Yorker in Ireland
Free Palestine
Fk Ice"

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "This is Jamey Carney, a 43-year-old woman from New York who became involved in the pro-Palestinian movement and decided to move to Ireland.  There she met her partner, Ahmad Al-Saqar, a Palestinian refugee from Jordan, and converted to Islam. She frequently posted on social media about their trips together.  It didn’t last long. She was brutally beaten to death by him. Her disfigured body was found by her 13-year-old daughter. The suspect has been on the run since Tuesday.  Western leftist pro-Palestinian women and those willing to convert to Islam need to wake the fuck up. Or they could end up like this."

Kosher on X - "Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He burnt an 82 year old female Holocaust survivor to death. “Justice for Palestine” at University of Colorado, Boulder just publicly declared support for him calling it an “act of resistance” This is the Pro-Palestine movement. They are the lowest of the low."
"Resistance" means murdering Jews everywhere in the world

Roz Rothstein on X - "A disabled elderly Jewish woman walked into a Vodafone store in Melbourne seeking help with a device. She left in tears on the street. The employee became agitated, shouted "Free Palestine" at her repeatedly, called her a "dirty Zionist," told her "Jews are disgusting," and filmed her without consent while she stood trapped at the counter, unable to leave without her device."
Ken Benneth on X - "So yelling at elderly disabled Jewish woman "Jews are disgusting" is a legitimate criticism of Netanyahu policies, while questioning real statistics on Muslim attitude on raping white girls and murdering Jews is Islamophobia. Got it."

Matthew Kolken on X - "For the first time in my life I have concerns about being a Jewish American, and it is the left that concerns me."
Fugitive Caesar on X - "Congratulations for your success as an Immigration Lawyer! You successfully imported tens of millions of people who hate you. This is your life's work."
Kaveman Reprobate on X - "They never seem to grasp the story of the Golem, and it's their story!"

StopAntisemitism on X - "Boston (Lexington), MA: William Diamond Middle School Principal Johnny Cole sent an email apologizing to Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and Lebanese students who were offended by a mandatory Holocaust lesson. Since when is teaching historical fact something that requires an apology?  And why is a school principal validating outrage over Holocaust education instead of defending it?"
Jonathan Eric Lewis on X - "This is going to be the newest front in the war against Jewish peoplehood in the United States and I'm not entirely sure legacy Jewish organizations are ready for it.  What we have here is the emergence of what I have previously called "neo-negationism," an ideological movement that doesn't seek to outright deny the Holocaust, but to marginalize it in western discourse.  The ultimate goal, of course, is to replace the Holocaust with the "Nakba" as the epitome of human evil, so as to position Jews not as the primary victims of the 20th-century, but as its perpetrators"
Clearly, there's no link between anti-Semitism and "anti-Zionism", and only bigots opt out of Pride so we need to make it compulsory, and it's right wingers and conservatives who are against accurate history being taught

Rabbi forced to condemn Israel before booking French holiday villa - "A rabbi from London was refused a holiday rental in France after the owners demanded that he condemn Israel before being allowed to stay at the property.  Rabbi Yoni Birnbaum was told he could only stay if he confirmed that he was “a member of a progressive, liberal Jewish movement”.  He was asked to “condemn the violent actions of the Israeli army” or his family’s holiday booking in eastern France would be cancelled. Mr Birnbaum, 45, labelled the request a “purity test” and said it reflected rising anti-Semitism around the world... The owners rejected his complaint and cancelled the booking. In their response, they did not apologise, insisting they did not discriminate on the basis of religion or ethnicity.  “We would indeed ask the same of someone whose email address starts with Imam,” they wrote. “Just as we sometimes check on Facebook, for example, and if we see that someone glorifies the far-Right or far-Left, he or she will not be admitted.”... Mr Birnbaum said the incident fitted a historical pattern in which Jews had repeatedly been forced to prove their acceptability to society. He noted that Jews in medieval Europe were often pressured to prove their religious purity through conversion, while the Nazis imposed racial tests... Mr Birnbaum said the incident reflected a wider climate in which anti-Semitism had been allowed to “fester” in parts of society.  He added: “I look visibly Jewish, I walk around with a kippah on, people can see that I’m Jewish, and I often experience this type of low-level anti-Semitism, people shouting things from cars at me.  “But this was of a different level, because this to me spoke of a deep entrenched problem in society, which is where Jews have once again got to pass a purity test, as the Nazis had a racial purity test, which is basically how pure are you vis-a-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict.”"
Weird. We're told it's Islamophobic to demand that Muslims condemn Islamist terrorism

Meme - Smug Soyjak: "Not everyone that criticizes Israel is antisemitic."
Normal person: "Oh, so what do you think about Jews?"
Confused Soyjak:
Angry Soyjak: "FUCK THOSE TALMUDIC BABY PENIS SUCKING BLOOD DRINKERS!!!"

Bruce Fenton | Facebook - "Is antisemitism increasing? Absolutely.  Without question.  100% yes it is.  Is this because people suddenly randomly decided to hate Jewish people around 2024?  No.   Antisemitism is rising is because
1) the majority of the USA and the world feel that Israel is committing war crimes and
2) both Israeli and Jewish leaders continually work to conflate the State of Israel with the religion of Judaism
Against and again we are told that criticism of Israel the country is antisemitic and equated to criticism of Jewish people.  Personally I don’t prefer to conflate the evil actions of Israeli politicians with an entire religion.  But the overwhelming majority of both Israeli people and Jewish people DO conflate the two.   The official spokespeople and most prominent leaders make a mission of conflating the two.  So either Israel and Jewish people are one in the same - in which case antisemitism is because of the actions of Israel (I don’t prefer this option) OR the actions of politicians in Israel do NOT reflect the religion - in which case Jewish people have not often or loudly enough condemned Israel and those who seek to conflate it with their religion."
Terrorism supporters once again claiming that the reason "anti Zionists" are anti semites is Jews claiming criticising Israel is antisemitic (which they don't claim, but that's another story). By this "logic", "Islamophobia" is the fault of Muslims and left wingers

Mazelit Airaksinen 🎗🇺🇸 🇮🇱 on X - "My freshman year at Barnard College — I was placed in the “Social Justice House” dorm with 3 pro-Palestine activists.   My roommate was co-president of SJP at Columbia.   Down the hall, the president of Barnard JVP was living.   Guess what happened when they found out I wouldn’t sign their petition against Israel?   I was 18.   I couldn’t even locate Israel on a map, yet I was attacked, harassed and eventually stalked for refusing to condemn it — a country I barely had heard of before.   This is the spark that led to my conversion. Read my story, and if you do, I’d love to know what you think 💕 "

Social Democracy in New York: A Cautionary Tale

Social Democracy in New York: A Cautionary Tale

"Progressives have long sought to transform the United States into a Scandinavian-style social democracy. New York City offers a plausible demonstration of what that might look like—and it’s not an encouraging picture.

Advocates of building a social democracy in the U.S., such as sociologist Lane Kenworthy, argue that it can be constructed atop the foundation already laid by the New Deal and the Great Society. That’s precisely what New York already does. Its welfare state consists of the federal programs available nationwide, plus generous state and locally funded initiatives. New Yorkers qualify for food stamps and Supplemental Security Income—but also City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) housing vouchers, Fair Fares transit subsidies, and homeless shelters on demand. New York State runs the nation’s most expensive Medicaid program; and Safety Net Assistance, a state cash-welfare initiative, supplements the federal TANF program. More than 2 million New York City residents live in rent-regulated housing.

New York’s political conditions are friendly to social democracy, too...

New York’s Scandinavia-on-the-Hudson model already costs billions annually in combined state and local spending. What does that money buy? The case for American social democracy rests on the claim that if government were more generous, we would enjoy stronger economic growth, a healthier middle class, and public spaces as clean and orderly as those of major European cities. New York delivers on none of these fronts. The city is still wealthy but grows slowly. Its middle class is fleeing. Public disorder remains chronic. Though New York continues to attract a disproportionate share of talent, the quality of its public services hardly justifies the cost of living. Progressives insist that there’s no reason America can’t be more like Sweden. They need to confront New York’s actual experience with big government.

Transit, housing, labor, and health-care benefits may be the social policies that best exemplify the social-democratic enterprise. In these areas, New York tries to deliver something that approaches progressive ambitions...

According to the New School’s Alex Schwartz, “New York City has persistently spent far more of its financial resources on affordable housing than any other municipality. . . . No other city government comes close to New York in its commitment to affordable housing programs.”...

On top of the spending, New York regulates the housing market within an inch of its life. Over half of New York’s rental stock is public housing, or formally “stabilized,” or, for some reason, rented out below what would be justified on the open market. New York’s housing court must rank as one of the most pro-tenant in the nation, thanks to powerful eviction protections. These were recently strengthened...

Housing benefits in New York are not restricted to low-income residents... Writing in the New York Post, Howard Husock noted that close to a third of tenants in rent-stabilized units earn six-figure incomes.

Homeless advocates often argue that housing investments will reduce street disorder and obviate the need for expensive shelter programs, thus helping to ease New York’s notorious homelessness problem. But notwithstanding New York’s all-hands-on-deck commitment to affordable housing, the city spends a few billion annually on homelessness, too—from shelter to prevention programs to supportive housing. The homeless population is 16.5 per 1,000, compared with 2.3 per 1,000 for the nation as a whole. New York grants a right to homeless shelter far more robust than any other U.S. city. Yet disorder in the streets and on subways remains a perennial source of public concern. During the first six months of 2025, New Yorkers filed 15,000 complaints with the city’s 311 public-services line about “homeless person assistance,” 21,000 about “encampment,” and 5,600 about “panhandling.”

The connection between housing and homeless services is characteristic of New York’s welfare system: new programs get launched to fix the flaws in old ones. Another example is universal pre-K and 3-K, the need for which would have been far less pressing were the Department of Education, which runs public K–12, more effective at its job. New York’s per-pupil expenditure on K–12 ranks as the highest among the largest 100 systems in the nation.

Labor policy is also a key part of the social-democratic model. New York City spends over half a billion dollars on job training annually. The region’s unionization rate (20 percent) is almost double the national average, the $16.50 minimum wage is more than double the national rate, and state and local versions of the Earned Income Tax Credit are in place.

Active labor-market policies were central to postwar Europe’s social democracies, designed to prevent extremism by sustaining employment and ensuring that generous welfare benefits did not erode the incentive to work. Planners aimed to make employment as attractive as possible—something socialist doctrine held that the private sector could not reliably achieve on its own. New York City has consistently failed to meet that standard. In every year since the early 1990s, the city’s unemployment rate has exceeded the nation’s, with the exception of the financial-crisis era and its attendant Wall Street bailouts. Its labor-force participation rate has trailed the nation’s in every year during that same span. The city’s “make work pay” policies have not forestalled rising public assistance rolls: 600,000 New Yorkers now receive cash welfare, an increase of more than 50 percent since Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022...

The DSA agenda of the 2020s builds on city government’s historical tendency toward expansion.

How sustainable is this trend? Big government can be supported either by high social trust or by taxing the rich. When social-democratic systems in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe were built, trust levels were exceptionally high. Writes historian Tony Judt in Postwar, “in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion.” In the postwar era, trust was indispensable: social democracy asked citizens to hand over money to the state to provide goods and services that they might otherwise secure on their own.

Yet trust comes easiest to ethnically homogenous places, and New York is the opposite. Its foreign-born population is 37 percent, compared with 14 percent for the nation; more than 100 languages are supposedly spoken in Queens alone. If diverse America relies more heavily on taxing the wealthy to fund government than homogenous Scandinavia, New York’s dependence is especially acute. New York City’s 34,000 income-tax millionaires pay about 40 percent of the city’s personal income-tax bill, on top of their equally outsize contribution to the state budget, which funds numerous city social programs. New York still grows millionaires, but not at the rate it once did. Policy analyst E. J. McMahon has documented that New York’s share of American millionaires has been shrinking, meaning a loss of billions in city and state resources.

Some progressives suggest that New York–style social democracy benefits when the wealthy flee because fewer millionaires will be around to vote. Economically, however, the exodus is unsustainable. Scandinavian systems rely on steep marginal income-tax rates that reach further into the middle class than do American tax regimes, and they energetically deploy broad-based consumption taxes. Everyone receives benefits, but everyone pays. More recently, New York Democrats have focused on lowering middle-class taxes as part of a broader affordability agenda. In a city budget of $120 billion, general sales taxes contribute only $10 billion.

This imbalance is compounded by the ideological bent of New York’s Democratic Socialists, who treat social democracy not as an end in itself but as a step toward a postcapitalist future. That outlook encourages a more reckless version of social democracy, reinforced by the city’s heavy reliance on the wealthy. When public services underperform, the reflexive answer is more spending—always on the assumption that someone else will foot the bill.

Social democrats argue that their preferred model is inevitable in America because the essence of a modern welfare state is insurance—and the richer a society, the more insurance it demands. Wealth partly explains why American health-care costs run so high—Americans have more to spend—and why New York spends more than the national average.

But wealth is not the same as growth. Scandinavia’s economies remain recognizably capitalist—more capitalist than some understand. While no rival to Silicon Valley, they have produced a respectable roster of global firms—Volvo, Spotify, IKEA, Novo Nordisk. Swedes and Danes take pride in this dynamism and their culture of entrepreneurship. Social democracy itself reflects this evolution: born from socialist intellectual ferment in the nineteenth century, it aspired at first to replace capitalism. By the mid-twentieth century, it had largely made its peace with the market, recasting itself as an alternative to pure socialism.

By contrast, in New York, progressives are moving in a steadily more anticapitalist direction... DSA members sometimes praise “small business” but on a highly selective basis: witness Mamdani’s proposal to cut regulations for halal carts.

DSA leadership embraces economic mediocrity. The economy will be fine, they say; tax hikes will never wreck New York. But a decent economy is a far cry from an excellent one. This decade, the “gross city product” has grown at a notably lower annual rate (1.7 percent, on average) than the national gross domestic product (2.4 percent).

However much New York may resemble a social-democratic paradise in its concern for the neediest, its commitment to the second-neediest—the working and middle classes—is far less impressive. Policies designed to make life maximally easy for the very poorest often shift burdens onto those who work. The city’s persistent failure to manage street homelessness, addiction, untreated serious mental illness, and crime falls hardest on its transit-dependent working class—costs that the wealthy rarely encounter.

New York’s increasingly stringent tenant protections have narrowed a traditional path of immigrant advancement. For generations, newcomers without corporate jobs or 401(k)s built wealth by becoming small landlords. But annual evictions are down by about 50 percent since the early 2010s, a trend that tenant advocates cheer but landlords find much less encouraging. Immigrant associations have been some of the most vocal critics of New York’s pro-tenant legislation. The progressive push to make housing a “de-commodified” good, much like infrastructure or public safety, for low- and moderate-income households, will harm upward mobility in twenty-first-century New York.

Between 2012 and 2023, New York City experienced a net domestic out-migration of about 670,000 middle- and upper-middle-income households. New York is increasingly becoming a city of intergenerational poverty, on the one hand, and intergenerational wealth, on the other... 

Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam has suggested that resentment of this city-of-heirs dynamic helped Mamdani secure victory in this year’s Democratic primary. Yet even many of Mamdani’s ostensibly privileged supporters appear eager to exchange reliance on parents for reliance on government, which he pledges to expand.

In the Scandinavian vision, as former Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven once told a New York University audience, “the welfare system must work as a trampoline.” That’s not an image evoked by the South Bronx, with its chronic stasis and city-leading rates of social-program use. A mid-2010s study by the New York comptroller’s office found that about one-fifth of homeless families were headed by an adult who, as a child, had spent some time in a city shelter. Harvard economist Raj Chetty, the leading scholar of U.S. mobility, has ranked regions for their success in facilitating intergenerational advancement. In one recent study that he led of the top 50 metros, New York ranked in the middle, one of those urban areas now seeing more downward than upward mobility. New York’s record on poverty alleviation is mediocre, despite no lack of awareness of the problem (it’s the media capital), an extensive philanthropic sector that adds private to already-great public resources, and a strong concentration of clinical and other professionals that other U.S. communities could only dream of enjoying.

The assumption that ever-larger health and human services will naturally yield a better social order—because Scandinavia looks pleasant—is a shaky proposition, at best. If Europe has less vagrancy because it is more generous, why does New York suffer far more of it than the American cities that it vastly outspends?

New York is the land where the Great Society never died. No social problem is thought too daunting for government to solve, given sufficient will and resources. Ronald Reagan challenged the notion that government’s natural tendency is expansion. In New York, that belief endures."