California’s Road to Serfdom

 

California’s Road to Serfdom

Property rights are an essential liberty. Violating them is the very definition of tyranny.

Marc Wheat & Mitchell Bahnsen, essay,  Law & Liberty

Several years ago, California brothers Arron and Arthur Benedetti inherited 267 acres of farmland from their father, a turkey farmer who spent his life working that land. They were not asking for a subsidy, tax break, or any government benefit. They simply wanted to build a home on property they had lawfully inherited. The government of Marin County, however, took it upon itself to say that the brothers could have their permit, but only if they signed a covenant permanently committing the land to commercial agricultural use, farming it themselves, or contracting it out in perpetuity.

The result is a trap with three exits, none of them acceptable: sell the land, farm it commercially, or sit on it and do nothing. Even though the brothers have a strong incentive to take good care of the land they own, building a home and living on what their father built is, apparently, not among the options Marin County is prepared to allow. Now, with a petition before the Supreme Court, the Benedetti brothers, two plumbers who have resided in California their entire lives, are asking the nation’s highest court to affirm a freedom the rest of the Western world has long held dear. Their case is not merely about a building permit or a zoning dispute, but whether the government may use its regulatory leverage to conscript private citizens into occupations of its choosing, and whether property rights in America retain any real meaning at all.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that the path to tyranny is rarely dramatic. It does not typically announce itself with jackboots and seizures, but arrives quietly, incrementally, through the accumulated weight of regulatory conditions that strip individuals of the freedom to direct their own lives and labor. It may start as small as a permit denial, and before long the citizen finds himself not the master of his property but its captive, working it as the state commands, or not at all. Marin County, California, has offered a case study in exactly this dynamic, and the Supreme Court now can say, clearly and finally, that this is not how American property law works.

When Americans want to modify their property, they must first ask permission from the state. That requirement may sound innocuous, but it gives local government the power to withhold the permit until the owner surrenders something the government wants but cannot legally demand outright. Marin County pulled that lever here, in direct defiance of controlling precedent.

In Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a California agency’s demand that homeowners grant public beach access as the price of a building permit. The condition, the Court held, lacked any “essential nexus” to a legitimate government interest, making it not a regulation at all, but what the Court bluntly called “an out-and-out plan of extortion.”

Building on this, Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994) held that even where a nexus exists, the burden imposed on the property owner must be “roughly proportional” to the government’s actual interest. Marin County’s demand satisfies neither test. There is no meaningful correlation between Arthur Benedetti’s desire to build a home and the county’s interest in preserving agricultural land, especially since agricultural land already accounts for over half of the US land base. Even worse, permanently conscripting a family’s property into commercial farming is wildly disproportionate to any legitimate regulatory goal. As the Court made clear in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District (2013), this framework applies regardless of how the government structures its demand. It is a foundational truth in constitutional law that the state cannot do indirectly what it is forbidden to do directly. The county may argue it is simply protecting open space and agriculture, both legitimate interests, but that is precisely the problem. If those interests are legitimate, the county has legitimate tools, by purchasing the land, negotiating a voluntary conservation easement, or deploying its taxing power. What it cannot do is coerce a private citizen into a particular occupation by holding his building permit hostage.

To understand what Marin County is doing to the Benedetti brothers, it helps to understand what it is undoing. The instinct to protect private property is not a modern political preference. It is a thread woven through the entire fabric of Western civilization, from the earliest moral codes to the constitutional settlements that shaped American law. Russell Kirk, in his classic The Roots of American Order, traced the moral inheritance of America through four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. Each contributed something essential to the Western understanding of property, and together they form a tradition that Marin County’s permit condition casually discards.

From Jerusalem came the foundational moral prohibition against violating private property. The Ten Commandments, Kirk wrote, were intended as “liberating rules that enable a people to diminish the tyranny of sin.” Prominent among them is the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” The prohibition is brief, but its implications are vast, with the commandment presupposing private ownership as a moral fact, and its violation as a moral wrong. This means property, stewardship, and justice were woven together from the beginning of Western moral order.

Athens refined the intuition about property into philosophy. Aristotle, laboring for years to define justice, concluded that people will be equals and partners in a community precisely when people still have their own things, “for when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another and they will make progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business.” Ownership, for Aristotle, was not merely an economic arrangement but a precondition for the kind of exchange and reciprocity that makes justice possible. When the state disrupts that arrangement, forcing an owner to use his property as the government prefers, it substitutes bureaucratic preference for the merit-based distribution that justice requires. “All agree,” Aristotle wrote, “that what is just in distributions ought to accord with a certain merit.” Marin County’s permit condition holds no merit at all.

Roman statesman Cicero maintained that “each one should retain possession of that which has fallen to his lot,” in opposition to the redistribution of property. Nearly two millennia later, Justice James Wilson of the early Supreme Court would later paraphrase Cicero in describing a just state as one formed by free persons united “to enjoy peaceably what is their own” in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793).

From London came the philosophical architecture that most directly shaped the American founding. John Locke argued in the Second Treatise that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself,” and that “the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Property, on Locke’s account, is not a gift of the state. It precedes the state, arising from the natural relationship between a person and the fruits of his labor. Edmund Burke, writing as the French Revolution unfolded in 1790, was equally direct, maintaining that people “have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful,” and “whatever each man can separately do without trespassing on others he has a right to do for himself.”

The turkey farmer who worked 267 acres of Marin County land had a claim on that land that no county permit condition can extinguish, and his sons’ claim is no less legitimate. Across every city in Kirk’s moral geography, the conclusion is the same. Forced occupation, or the compulsion to use one’s property as the state commands, is not regulation, but simply tyranny by another name.

The Founders did not merely inherit this tradition but secured into the heart of early American governance. James Madison wrote in 1792 that “that alone is just a government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” He was equally clear about what an unjust government looks like, primarily one that uses “arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies” to “deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called.” This was a consensus shared widely among the Founders, including Hamilton, Jefferson, and others. Property rights were, as William Michael Treanor points out, understood by “the key writers who set the intellectual framework of our Constitution—John Locke, David Hume, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and James Madison” as “a bulwark of the individual against the arbitrary power of the state.”

What Marin County is attempting, in the end, is to make the Benedettis serfs on their own land, forced by regulatory fiat to work on the soil as the government prefers, or else forfeit what their father built. The Supreme Court has the tools to stop it, including earlier judicial precedent, the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and a tradition of Western jurisprudence stretching back through London, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.

Hayek understood that the road to serfdom is paved not with dramatic usurpations but with small, incremental surrenders of economic freedom, each one justified by some legitimate public interest, each one eroding a little further the citizen’s ability to direct his own life and labor. A permit condition in Marin County may seem like a small thing, but the principle at stake is far from small—it concerns the foundations of our civilization itself. The Supreme Court should remind California and other governments tempted by the same logic that property rights are not a second-class freedom.

Marc Wheat is the general counsel for Advancing American Freedom, the advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Mitchell G. Bahnsen is a policy & legal intern at Advancing American Freedom and a student of politics, philosophy, and economics at Westmont College. He concurrently serves as a research assistant at the California Policy Center, and his commentary on constitutional principles, technology, and culture has been featured widely across conservative and classical liberal publications.

Mamdani fuels racial rift

 

Mamdani and his DSA cronies are fueling a racial rift

within the already fractured Dem party

Michael Goodwin, New York Post

The explosive charge by a black politician that Mayor Mamdani and his socialist army are guilty of “white supremacy” reveals another front in the war for New York launched by the radical left.

“White supremacy comes in all forms,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards posted on social media.

He also referenced a well-known quote from the late Malcolm X about “dangerous white liberals.”

At heart, the issue boils down to political power, who has it and competing visions for how it should be used.

A major flashpoint is that Richards is a career pol who has consistently advocated for expanded black and Latino ownership of private homes as a means of creating intergenerational wealth.

That’s totally at odds with the views of Mamdani’s agenda, and especially his top housing aide, Cea Weaver, who has made comments about housing that are ­beyond bizarre.

She once celebrated the government’s “sacred right to seize private property,” called homeownership “racist” and said it is “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

Dems under attack

In one of his many warnings about the excesses of the Mamdani machine that drove him from City Hall, former Mayor Eric Adams weighed in on the topic.

He correctly noted on X that “Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle. You have to be completely out of your f***ing mind to call that ‘white supremacy.’ ”

The spark for Richards’ latest comments is a growing resentment among the black political establishment that it is losing its hold on power and influence to the DSA, which, a 2021 survey found, is 85% white.

The group used its superior organizational skills, mostly in gentrifying neighborhoods, to turn out their voters and successfully knock off a slew of congressional and Albany Dems in last month’s primaries.

The coup alarmed the entire party, but black and Latino officials especially see themselves as under attack.

(Republicans are such an insignificant factor in the city’s political landscape that nobody blames them!)

State Attorney General Letitia James, although she had supported Mamdani’s election last year, pounced on the primary results to accuse him and the radicals he supported of being ignorant of the racial and social history of the neighborhoods they would be representing.

“Some of the candidates he has supported do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic,” James said on CNN about the ­primary results.

By then, housing ownership was already a racial flash point under Mamdani.

‘Unfair system’

It first arose in February, when he threatened to raise all city property taxes by nearly 10% if ­Albany did not hike income taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and big corporations.

The outcry was especially sharp in Cambria Heights, a suburban-like neighborhood in southeastern Queens near the Long Island border that is home to numerous black and other nonwhite families.

Many own their homes and some also own rental units.

Richards called the proposed tax plan a “nonstarter” and said at the time that he told the mayor as much.

“Under no circumstance should we consider balancing our budget on the backs of working-class New Yorkers, especially seniors on fixed incomes and workers who keep our city running,” he said in an interview.

A black homeowner named James Johnson, who attended a Cambria Heights protest aimed at Mamdani, was quoted in The Post as saying: “You screamed affordability. You ran on it. You said affordability, affordability, affordability . . . And the first thing, not even three months into your administration, into your term. You wanna hit us with a 9.5% property tax increase? Not happening.”

Another resident, Darryl Smith, added, “You keep raising the taxes, you’re gonna run us out of here. Where are we gonna go?”

The sentiment was widely shared in white liberal political circles as well, with Council Speaker Julie Menin rejecting the mayor’s property tax threat.

Signaling that it would be dead on arrival, Menin said, “We cannot be raising property taxes 9.5% on the backs of small property owners, small business owners, black and brown communities throughout our city.”

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso agreed: “This would only make an unfair system worse and hit black and brown communities hardest.”

Gov. Hochul, fearing she would be blamed for any tax hikes in an election year, satisfied Mamdani’s need for quick cash by shipping him billions in state money.

Power play

A key aspect of the racial heat is timing.

The surge of mostly white socialists comes as black politicians have reached the height of their political power in the city and state.

Adams, the city’s second black mayor, was forced out after a single term by Mamdani’s followers.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate, Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, respectively, are black.

Hochul’s running mate this year is Adrienne Adams, a former speaker of the City Council and the first black woman to hold the post.

Other top black officials include Attorney General James and the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams.

An additional front in the rising racial antagonism is that DSA members have been sharply critical of Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn pol who, as House minority leader, is the first nonwhite official to hold the top leadership spot of either party in either chamber.

As if to rub salt in black wounds, many socialist newcomers are calling for him to step down and threatening to remove him if he won’t go voluntarily.

It’s a Tehran Death Trap

A troubling report in The Washington Post paints a bleak picture of President Trump’s options in Iran.

It finds, “Analysts at American spy agencies have concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war.”

The newspaper says the report was written primarily by the CIA, whose analysts “underscored the Tehran regime’s staying power despite the loss of many of its top leaders and much of its military hardware to U.S. and Israeli attacks.”

The finding reflects what has surprised me most about the war. The regime’s willingness to accept so much pain and destruction defies logic — and Western assumptions.

The only explanation that makes a whit of sense is widespread in Israel: that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a Shia Islamist cult of martyrdom.

Controlled by psychopaths, it tortures and kills resisters and aims to impose its fanatical will on the region, and then the world, no matter the cost.

Only death will stop them.

Lies and the Language of Violence

 

Lies and the Language of Violence

Seth Mandel, Commentary

Abe Greenwaild's July 15 newsletter discussed a bizarre scene in which Rep. Ro Khanna, an anti-Israel demagogue testing a run for president, was repeatedly badgered by left-wing podcasters to say that Palestinians have a right to kill Israelis, which they did on October 7.

The Dropsite podcasters were precisely the sort of company Khanna has been keeping lately—anti-Zionists obsessed with violence. As Abe wrote:

“Khanna came face to face with the lunacy of the mob that he’s been trying to please with tweets, speeches, stunts. And he let [Jeremy] Scahill down by refusing to speak the monstrous words that would have admitted him into the esteemed ranks of the radicals. Khanna instead called October 7 a terrorist attack, denied Hamas’s right to kill Israelis, and offered some mush about nonviolent resistance.”

To progressives, the logical endpoint of their rhetoric about the evils of the Jewish state is violence against the Jewish state, and Khanna can’t pretend otherwise without getting himself called out for the contradiction.

Now it turns out that the very day Khanna went on the Dropsite show, the Democratic Socialists of America—the intellectual force behind the progressive coalition of which Dropsite is a part—released its updated national platform. And coincidentally, their platform also made explicit the group’s support for violence against Israel.

The wording of the DSA platform was slightly less overtly violent than the Dropsite crew’s on Tuesday. But not less-violent enough to leave any doubt. Under the Free Palestine subheading in the section on “a working-class foreign policy,” the DSA writes:

“Recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right to resist military occupation, and the right to self determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.”

In politics, when there is a mass coordinated campaign to sell a lie, that lie has a specific purpose. We would do well to get used to asking ourselves what might be the purpose of the lies we come across. The purpose of the “genocide” lie is clear if you just listen long enough to the people spreading it. The reason they falsely accuse Israel of genocide is that they want to justify violence against Israelis.

The same is true for the “occupation” lie. Both the DSA and the Dropsite folks know Israel left Gaza 20 years ago. They are not ignorant of the fact that the occupation is long over. They just don’t care, so they use it to pressure a congressman (unsuccessfully) to say that murdering Israelis is permitted. And the DSA uses the same lie to support Palestinian “resistance.”

As Dropsite and others have made clear, October 7 is included in “resistance.” That word, resistance, is the key to understanding how all this incitement works in broad daylight. “Resistance” is meant to substitute for “self-defense.” But because what these activists are describing is not actually self-defense, they generally don’t use that phrase. They use “resistance” to evoke the concept.

The next step is to expand the targets of resistance beyond Israelis. Violent anti-Semitic incidents in Canada in 2026 have more than doubled the number of such incidents in 2025, and the year is barely half over. Why are people attacking Jews in near-record numbers, 6,000 miles away from the conflict? Because the resistance ideologists have expanded the definition of culpability: The people being attacked in 2026 for a war that ended in 2025, which was launched by Palestinians in 2023, “are complicit,” the extremists tell us.

So are politicians. I wrote yesterday about Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who was bullied into changing his vote on an Israel-related bill by Hamasniks in America. We talked about the case further on the podcast this morning. The gist of it is that Smith voted against his own beliefs and principles because he was giving in to a campaign of intimidation. As Smith himself said after the vote:

“I am deeply concerned about the tactics used by those on the far left to advocate for cutting off aid to Israel. To date, my family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbors’ 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. Those who engage in this type of behavior model a dangerous form of corrosive politics that seeks to intimidate those who disagree with them. We must be able to have civil discourse if we want to solve difficult problems, and I remain committed to open, respectful engagement.”

Smith had already flipped on a different anti-Israel amendment after pressure last month. It has clearly been a difficult six weeks for him. His statement sounds like a plea for mercy. But the DSA and the rest of the Hamasniks have made it equally clear that whatever happened over the past six weeks is a prelude to more.

Putin Has Lost the War

Putin Has Lost the War in Ukraine

The only question is what the endgame will look like.

Gregory W. Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko, National Review

In February 2022, Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked military attack on Ukraine assuming that Kyiv would fold in a week, that its president would flee or be killed by one of Russia’s hit squads, and that a soft, divided West would issue a strongly worded communiqué and get back to buying gas from Russia. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. Four-and-a-half years later, his military has been humiliated, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still in charge, and the West — despite some tenuous moments — has bankrolled the methodical destruction of much of the Russian military. Putin may yet hold a ribbon of scorched Ukrainian soil when the guns fall silent. He has already lost this war; the only question is what the endgame will look like.

Consider what “winning” now looks like from Moscow. In June, after months of grinding assault, Russian forces seized perhaps a dozen square miles of Ukraine — a patch smaller than Manhattan — and paid for it with something close to 40,000 casualties. The Institute for the Study of War reckons the exchange at roughly 1,300 Russian dead and wounded for every square kilometer taken, up from 68 the year before. That is more men lost in a month than the Kremlin can recruit, despite ever-higher signing bonuses and the clearing out of prisons. For Russia, the war has become a meat grinder, and Putin keeps feeding it his own people. With Ukraine’s drone advantage constantly growing both in numbers and sophistication, the eventual outcome is now clear.

To grasp the scope of Russia’s impending defeat, it is helpful to remember Putin’s original goals included halting NATO’s expansion; instead, he frightened Finland and Sweden into the alliance and roughly doubled the length of Russia’s NATO frontier. He also invaded to prove Ukraine was not a real nation; instead, his “special military operation” has forged a fractious, partially Russophone country into a proud and patriotic people who will hate Moscow for at least a century. He invaded to shatter Western unity; instead, he provoked German rearmament, revived the NATO alliance, and reduced his own country to a resource colony of Beijing.

Diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” Putin has spent four years proving the maxim true about his own regime. The Kremlin is now so panicked about the direction of the war it is reported to be resorting to biowarfare: dumping dead, anthrax-infected cows in fields near residential areas in Kherson. Perhaps worst of all for Putin, his beloved Crimea, which he took by force in 2014, is now under a state of emergency, with Russians fleeing by the thousands back to Russia. In fact, Crimea is at risk of being retaken by Ukraine in part this year and eventually fully as the Russian military continues to falter. Such a defeat would be Putin’s Waterloo.

President Trump always wants to be on the winning side, and even he and his team now see that Russia “doesn’t have the cards.” His comments on July 8 at the NATO summit encouraging Ukraine to strike targets deep in Russia marked strengthening of U.S. support for Ukraine, another bad sign for Putin. In fact, the summit itself was a complete about-face from last year’s, with allies openly discussing the Kremlin’s rapidly worsening military situation.

The economic realities are, if anything, more damning. Sanctions were never a guillotine; they were a slow puncture, and the tire is finally going flat. Oil and gas revenue — the lifeblood of the Russian state, some 40 percent of the federal budget — fell by roughly a quarter last year. The National Wealth Fund’s liquid reserves have dropped by 61 percent since the Russian invasion and now holds mostly hard-to-sell Chinese yuan and gold bullion, which Moscow continues to sell aggressively to finance the war. Growth has collapsed from the wartime “sugar rush” of 4 percent to something the Kremlin’s own ministers now admit was near zero for 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, the Russian economy actually contracted. It appears Q2 was more of the same. The Russian government now spends close to 50 percent of its resources on the war, crowding out spending on education, health care, infrastructure, and everything else not war-related.

To plug the ever-expanding national deficit, Putin has raised the value-added tax and expanded taxes on small businesses. As a result, a quarter-million small businesses have closed. Prices for basic food items were up 20 to 30 percent in Moscow in just the month of January. Interest rates remain in the punishing mid-teens and in truth are only available for companies in military-related industries. And with Ukrainian drones and missiles damaging Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure nightly, average Russians are furious about the kilometer-long gas lines that are the new normal in most areas. Russian social media channels reflect widespread frustration with Putin and the war, scenes that were nonexistent just a year ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, Putin himself is showing signs of severe stress. In a recent interview with a Russian journalist, Putin spoke at times incoherently about battle plans for Ukrainian towns and cities that do not exist. Russian elites are increasingly convinced Putin has led Russia into a death trap and has no credible plan to bring the war to an end.

Some in the West — wary of the costs and suspicious of every foreign entanglement — will object that Russia still holds Crimea and much of the Donbas, that Ukraine’s counteroffensives have stalled and that this looks less like victory than a bloody stalemate. The truth is that Russia is increasingly unable to supply or support its troops in Crimea. With a kill rate in the Donbas estimated at 10:1 in Ukraine’s favor, Russia is bleeding with an actual net loss of territory in June. A great power that sets out to subjugate its neighbor and, four-plus years on, cannot take a single fortress town without spending whole battalions has proven it cannot win. It has advertised the hollowness of its own threat. Putin wagered the future of Russia — its men, its treasury, its standing, its access to the modern world — on a quick imperial restoration. He got a frozen, ruinous quagmire and a NATO twice as long as the one he feared. Since 2022, he has even lost many of his former global allies such as Syria, Venezuela, and Armenia, with Iran and Cuba on the edge. And now he is losing his own people, who see with their own eyes that the war has come to Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention their gas stations and grocery stores.

Putin has failed in each of his pre-war objectives and has lost the upper hand in the war. Without the use of nuclear weapons, which would risk a retaliation that could easily wipe out his entire regime and much of Russia’s major cities, Putin has lost the war in Ukraine.

The task before the West is clear, but it is not easy. We must keep our nerve, keep Kyiv armed, and let the brutal math finish its work — as a bankrupt state bleeds money and men faster than it can bear. As in the Cold War, the U.S. must lead this effort. Signing the Russian Sanctions Bill courageously passed by the House recently would be a strong step forward.

Ronald Reagan grasped what Kennan taught: Against a brittle tyranny, time and pressure accomplish what armies cannot without unacceptable costs. The only question for Putin now is how many more Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians he will kill before he admits defeat or is removed from power by those he has led into this disaster. He has already lost 1.5 million Russian soldiers, killed or left homeless tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, and kidnapped more than 20,000 innocent Ukrainian children. It is time Putin ends the insanity or is removed from office. Continued strong Western support for Ukraine will hasten that blessed day.

Gregory Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko are co-authors of the recent book Portraits of Ukraine: A Nation at War and are giving all profits from book sales to pro-Ukrainian charities. 

Shanghai sabotage, our true enemy

Shanghai sabotage

Inside Singham's secret strategy to demonize America

Brooke Caruto, Nikolas Lanum and Kyle Schmidbauer, Fox News Digital

Fox News Digital follows the money into the House of Singham’s propaganda machine, including $9.1M to a company in China, Shanghai Maku, for pro-China propaganda, as lawmakers raise questions about malign foreign influence

Early Tuesday, CodePink professional activist Olivia DiNucci raised her fist as she stood on the deck of a boat renamed "Granma 2.0," in a tribute to the yacht Fidel Castro’s guerrillas used to launch the Cuban Revolution in 1956.

Standing behind a banner reading "LET CUBA LIVE" as the boat arrived at the port of Havana, DiNucci, who normally organizes protests in Washington, D.C., mugged for the cameras with her fellow revolutionaries, chanting and pumping their fists in the air, as camera crews rolled.

Luis De Jesús, who writes for a site called BreakThrough News, recorded the arrival, part of days of coverage promoting the cause of pro-communism activists, including the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap, and packaging the week's activities not just as activism, but as revolutionary political "resistance" against the U.S. "empire."

By afternoon, BreakThrough News posted a video of De Jesús' report on the boat's arrival, with a beaming DiNucci on board. Other pro-communist media platforms turned the staged event into a media moment, from the Cuban News Agency to Brazil de Fato.

The scene offered a real-time glimpse of how a network built by an American-born, China-based tech tycoon, Neville Roy Singham, turns activism into propaganda and then propaganda into political and psychological weapons. In this case, the story of the Granma 2.0 framed Cuba as a victim of the imperialist U.S., and Cuba's communist benefactor and trading partner – China – as a liberator, providing rice to a hungry citizenry.

As he fought the People’s War in the late 1930s in China, infamous communist leader Mao Zedong emphasized the importance of "Propaganda Work" and "the practice of changing reality."

Decades later, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping announced a strategy of "telling China's story well."

Last fall, pro-China academics, like Vijay Prashad, a trusted communist in Singham's inner circle, spoke at a conference of the Global South Academic Forum about creating a "New World Information and Communication Order," an idea popularized in the 1980s by Third World countries now called the "Global South." 

The conference was co-sponsored by Singham, Prashad's Tricontinental Ltd. think tank and the Shanghai-based East China Normal University, and administered by the Chinese Communist Party. The university features a School of Marxism and teaches "Marxist journalism." Singham, Prashad and conference attendees closed the conference, standing at attention as "The Internationale," a communist anthem played, attendees pumping their fists in the air in solidarity.

A Fox News Digital investigation found that the "new information" strategy operates through a network of organizations that produce, fund and amplify messaging across borders. 

Fox News Digital has identified at least 200 organizations in Singham's network of about 2,000 organizations that directly work on propaganda that parrots the anti-American messaging of the Chinese Communist Party but is dramatically homegrown in digital shops from New York City to Los Angeles.

The investigation found that three Singham-linked U.S. nonprofits sent a total of $9.1 million in seven payments to a pro-China propaganda firm, Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co. Ltd. The payments haven't been reported before.

Using large-language models, Fox News Digital analyzed 223 transactions that moved $591 million in total across five continents from 2017 through 2025, the latest year for which figures are available, in the Singham network and found the money flows through five concentric rings of an ideological pipeline that spreads pro-China propaganda.

Eleven U.S. nonprofit organizations form a core hub of the work that pumps pro-China, anti-America propaganda into the world, with a total of about $401 million flowing from Singham and his network into these organizations. The organizations didn't respond to requests for comment.

Fox News Digital previously documented $278 million that flowed directly from Singham into organizations that "sow discord" in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it recently at a hearing on foreign malign influence in the nonprofit industry. The rest went through layers of funding.

The 11 nonprofits and their total revenue from within the Singham network, including direct contributions from Singham himself, make most of these organizations well-funded: 

• BreakThrough BT Media: $3.5 million, with $1.1 million directly from Singham
• CodePink Women for Peace: $1.8 million, with $1.3 million from SIngham
• Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization Inc.: $420,000
• Justice and Education Fund Inc.: $74.2 million, with $68.7 million from Singham
• People's Dispatch: $1.9 million
• People's Forum Inc.: $28 million, with $22.4 million from Singham
• People's Support Foundation: $181.8 million, with $167.5 from Singham
• People's Welfare Association: $70 million
• Progress Unity Fund: $442,524, with additional revenues from other sources
• Tricontinental Ltd.: $16.8 million from Singham
• United Community Fund: $21.8 million

Mao’s strategy relied on embedding revolutionary actors within social, cultural, labor and educational organizations to shape public consciousness, normalize radical narratives and gradually erode the legitimacy of the state from within. 

Similarly, experts say, Singham's network cultivates activist ecosystems, using nonprofits and advocacy groups as force multipliers and framing local political and social conflicts as part of a broader systemic struggle. 

That same dynamic is visible in real time, as protests, trips and political events are filmed, packaged and circulated as part of a broader narrative. DiNucci is a key figure, for example, regularly getting filmed and then broadcast on Singham network social media channels, interrupting the dinners, hearings and events of Trump administration officials.

In this model, disruption and polarization aren’t incidental but strategic, designed to weaken societal cohesion and authority over time, precisely the conditions Mao argued are necessary for victory against a stronger adversary.

"There is a war waging for the brains of Americans. It’s critical that America shore up its defenses before the nation is hijacked by confusion, manipulation and malign narratives," psychologist Orli Peter told Fox News Digital.

‘Information Laundering Operation’

A Fox News Digital investigation, scouring scores of financial filings, writings and social media posts, shows not only money moving from Singham-funded entities into U.S. nonprofits, but these nonprofits in turn funding media production, political education and organizing campaigns that promote the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. nonprofits pushing the anti-America agenda benefit from tax-exempt status and tax-deductible donations.

What begins as content — videos, livestreams and commentary — often feeds directly into organizing and protest activity, creating a feedback loop between messaging and action.

"Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans are running an information laundering operation," said Adam Sohn, co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, a multidisciplinary lab in Princeton, N.J. "It’s a narrative laundering operation that is selling China’s story to the world and sowing discord in America."

A wedding in Jamaica in February 2017 between Singham and Jodie Evans, co-founder of CodePink Women for Peace, brought together ideologues who would later appear on the boards, funding streams and public messaging of this network. Tax filings document the transfers. The emergence of a network of "Liberation Centers" document the physical infrastructure.

That network has matured into a transnational protest and media machine. Nearly a decade later, its infrastructure is visible on American streets, coordinated, funded and amplified by groups built quietly, deliberately and in plain sight. Singham and Evans didn't respond to requests for comment.

Last week, BreakThrough News broadcast DiNucci outside the White House protesting to support the regime that the U.S. and Israel are targeting with missile strikes in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co.

Part of that system operates overseas, where funding supports media production aligned with Chinese Communist Party narratives. Significantly, there are a series of two line items that reveal just how closely this supposed charitable network works with organizations tied to the Chinese Communist Party.

Buried inside the tax filings are the receipts on how three U.S. nonprofits from the Singham network sent seven payments totaling $9.1 million in money back to Shanghai to pay a pro-China propaganda firm, Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co. Ltd., housed in the same luxury building as Singham’s operation. It’s not far from the university where Singham’s sister holds an academic position.

Guo Xiao, a former executive at Thoughtworks, the tech company founded by Singham and sold in 2017 for nearly $800 million, sits on the board of Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications, according to company records. Xiao didn't respond to a request for comment.

Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co. identifies itself as producing content aligned with Chinese Communist Party narratives. 

Beginning in 2021, according to Fox News Digital analysis, three organizations from Singham's network sent over $9 million directly to Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co. in seven payments for "production of online news program," according to its tax filing.

BreakThrough BT Media Inc. 

One of the key organizations inside the broader transnational media apparatus in the Singham network is BreakThrough News, whose reporter met the Granma 2.0 at the port in Havana.

In a letter he sent to BreakThrough News last month, Smith said the House Ways and Means Committee is concerned that BreakThrough News is "part of a larger multipronged effort from the CCP to sow discord in our country" and that it has been "funded and influenced by Mr. Singham’s CCP affiliations."

In early December 2019, BreakThroughNews.org was registered online. Early the next year, in early March 2020, "Breakthrough / BT Media Inc." was registered in Delaware as a new company. It got IRS 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in June 2020 as Breakthrough BT Media Inc. 

Singham gave a total of $1.1 million to BreakThrough BT Media Inc. over two years with the purpose of the tax-deductible donations written simply as "public service" and "medical / public services" in IRS Form 990 filings.

In its first IRS filing, documenting its 2020 work, Breakthrough BT Media Inc. listed familiar names among its three-person board of directors. Ben Becker, the son of another trusted Singham adviser, Brian Becker, was the chairman of the board. Today, Becker is on the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s "Central Committee." Becker was also in Cuba this week to support the communist regime.

Another director was Claudia De La Cruz, a leader at the Party for Socialism and Liberation with Becker and a wedding guest.

Finally, a socialist leader named Karla Reyes was on the board. She is the daughter of immigrants from El Salvador and rose in the ranks from joining Occupy Wall Street protests to landing a spot on the Central Committee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. She is today an active member of "ICE Out of New York," started by the People’s Forum, its protests filmed regularly by BreakThrough News.

In his letter to Reyes, Smith demanded records related to the organization’s ties to Singham and the Chinese Communist Party. He requested that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent remove the nonprofit status of organizations in the Singham network. 

While BreakThrough News doesn’t usually name the Chinese Communist Party directly, it regularly lauds Xi's regime. In 2021, BreakThrough News’ host Rania Khalek promoted the "Chinese government" and its "eradication of extreme poverty within its border." She co-hosted the session with Tings Chak, a researcher at Tricontinental, the arm of the House of Singham that pumps out pro-China academic work.

The Singham network functions like a coordinated unit. In 2022, People’s Forum gave BreakThrough a "non-cash" lease worth $318,596 for studio space at its W. 37th Street address. 

BreakThrough’s mission statement claims to be "unbiased towards any political candidates," but the far-left outlet even created videos during the 2024 presidential election highly critical of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as wanting to "out-Trump Trump."

What began as a small, ideologically driven news platform became a broad multimedia machine producing documentaries, podcasts and social media content that amplified protest movements, international solidarity campaigns, especially around Palestinian issues and "anti-imperialist," anti-America narratives. 

It’s a member of the International People’s Media Network, another part of the global House of Singham and a coalition of media platforms often publishing anti-America, pro-China content and sharing personnel with Tricontinental.

In 2023, BreakThrough News sent representatives to a conference hosted by the School of Communications at the East China Normal University, the public institution funded by the Chinese Communist Party's Ministry of Education. Singham’s sister, Shanti Singham, and his friend, Prashad, work closely with those institutions. 

Following the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, groups in Singham's network organized protests within hours. BreakThrough News posted videos from the demonstrations. It did the same with protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

NewsClick

Fox News Digital has also tracked $10.5 million the Justice and Education Fund sent to New Delhi-based PPK NewsClick Studio Pvt. Ltd. in five payments from 2019 through 2023 when the government of India shut the operation down for allegedly using donations improperly to run an anti-India, pro-China propaganda media outlet.

The government of India has sent Singham a criminal summons for alleged election interference, money laundering and terrorism, alleging he engaged in schemes to sow discord in India. The NewsClick case is still awaiting a trial date.

National security experts say it is critical to understand the big picture to fully value the command control of this global propaganda war with a tech tycoon as the motherlode.

Back in Havana, as DiNucci stepped onto the dock and cameras rolled, the moment reflected more than a single act of activism.

It showed how the Singham network’s messaging system works in real time, capturing events, shaping narratives and distributing them to audiences far beyond the street or, in this case, the dock.

In Mao’s terms, it is "Propaganda Work," not just reporting on the news, but helping define it.

From the dock in Havana, DiNucci played her role, shouting, "Viva la Cuba."

REQUIEM FOR THE 'A' TEAM

 

REQUIEM FOR THE 'A' TEAM

 Don Jaffa...

Lieutenant Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith and the ‘A Team,’ after 45 minutes of chaotic improvisation, wild chases, improbable engineering feats, and non-lethal gunfire, the team’s seemingly scattered efforts would miraculously align to achieve their mission. At the moment of victory, often while lighting his iconic cigar, Hannibal would smile and utter those satisfied words:

“I love it when a plan comes together!”

President Trump ordered “Operation Absolute Resolve,” which was executed on 3 January 2026. Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured and flown to New York City to face their trial on Federal ‘narcoterrorism’ charges. At two hours and 28 minutes, it qualifies as one of the shortest wars in history. 

Back in 1976 and 2007 Venezuela nationalized Americal oil companies operating crude oil production: in 1976 Gulf Oil, and Texaco, and in 2007, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. “Operation Absolute Resolve” addressed this issue:

“Trump and his administration made clear that access to Venezuelan oil was a core reason for the action. The US Announced a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal with the remaining government in Venezuela, with the first $300 million already received on 20 January. On 29 January, a new law was passed by Rodriguez to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil.”^(Wikipedia)

The expropriation of assets by Latin American socialist and Marxist regimes was one of the issues that needed to be addressed.  To make the point, merely applying sanctions is insufficient, not merely in Latin America, but absolutely to Russia and Iran. Secretary of State Rubio on this:

“The funds from that (oil sales) will be deposited into an account that we will have oversight over,” Rubio said, adding that the U.S. Treasury would control the process. Venezuela, he said, “will spend that money for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.”

George Peppard, as Lieutenant Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, would here, light his cigar and announce ““I love it when a plan comes together!” President Trump, after January 29^th, no doubt (with or without the cigar) smiled, and announced  “I love it when a plan comes together!” 

“On June 10^th President Trump announced that the U.S. military had killed Hector Rutherford Guerrero Flores, the alleged leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, in a strike inside Venezuela.”^{(OPED LA Times 16 June 2026)}

This blew every gasket in the engine of ‘fake news.’ The title of that LA TIMES OPED was the following: “Military now enables Trump’s Lawlessness!” But here is the indictment:

“The military has become one of the mechanisms by which the President is ignoring constitutional limits.”

On May 2^nd 2011, “Operation Neptune Spear” was executed by Order of the President. Launched from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, two Blackhawk helicopters flew 24 Navy SEALS (SEAL TEAM SIX) into Abbottabad, Pakistan, to assassinate Osama bin Laden, retrieve the body for forensic examination, and his burial at sea.

President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton were sitting around the table in the White House Operations Center waiting on confirmation of the kill. I suspect that it was only Hilary Clinton who lit up her cigar to announce:

“I love it when a plan comes together!”

Of the three, only Hilary came equipped with ‘cojones.’ Obama could only bow and scrape in front of a real Muslim King (Saudi Arabia), and the best Biden could do is come up with a plan to derail the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court using a coke can with pubic hair on it. 

In a short but devastating operation against Iran, its theocratic leadership was decapitated, and the successor has not been seen in public, nor his whereabouts even hinted at. Iran has been segmented into military organizations, and its’ government, regional and Provincial, has also been decapitated. 

Iran’s financial well being is based on its’ on-going crude oil production, storage and transfer at Kharg Island onto oil tankers for sale. With the Naval Blockade and no loading of crude at Kharg Island, crude storage filled capacity. To that end, production would have to be shut down. 

Iranian officials are all theocratic fanatics. Reading their pronouncements during the 60 days demonstrated their willingness to babble theocratic nonsense the entire time. It was also evident that these theocrats were willing to execute any Iranian anti-government demonstrators in public. (Do you get the message?) 

Both Russia and Iran do not honor civil negotiations nor brokered agreements which they can refuse to honor when it suits them. During their war with Iraq they conscripted boys ages 9 through 14 for de-mining operations. 

“During the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian government recruited an estimated 550,000 children into a volunteer paramilitary militia known as the Basij. These boys—some as young as nine—were deployed in "human wave" infantry attacks against fortified Iraqi positions, serving as cannon fodder to overwhelm enemy lines.” ^{(Amesty International)}

Russia remains equally stalwart in its refusal to give value to human life. Some 228,000 Russian officers and soldiers have been identified by name, out of a possible 550,000 dead. Total casualties approximately 1,393,140.

“South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported that out of the estimated 11,000 to 15,000 North Korean troops deployed to Russia's western Kursk region, roughly 6,000 had been killed or wounded.” ^(BBC)

Putin’s Russia engaged in war with Ukraine, not over land, but over greed. During the Cold War the Soviet Union built a natural gas pipeline from Siberian gas fields, through Ukraine, to customers in the European Union. Natural gas sales in the EU have been paid in cash, some 40 billion Euros per annum. 

Under the original contract with the Ukrainian SSR, the pipeline was completed in 1984, and Ukraine received a tariff (transport fee) based on cubic meters through the pipeline. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine announced that at the Expiration of the Contract, 1 Jan 2025, the tariff would quadruple. But natural gas is still flowing as both sides need the cash.

The actual mindset of all sides, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza was defined by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the 24^th of September 2007, when he announced during a speech at Columbia University, “You are the Crazy Ones!” 

 

At the moment, both President Trump and Vice President Vance, are not lighting up cigars, not smiling, and are each grumbling “I hate it when a plan does not come together.” The threat of last resort should have been the mission of first resort: the destruction of all electrical production inside Iran. The second mission objective should have been the destruction of all refining capacity inside Iran. With no electrical power, and no logistics, the Iranian people and the Iranian military, starve. 

 

With little or no capacity to respond and fight, the destruction of Iran’s military assets would have been easier. Iran would have been forced, for its own survival, to cede to the United States, whatever was deemed necessary to end Iran’s posture as a state sponsor of terrorism: control of Kharg Island and the unrestricted export of Iranian Oil for sale, control of all Iranian oil sales, and all payments into a US Treasury account to purchase whatever was needed for the Iranian people. 

 

To begin the reconstruction of Iran, the theocrats will order Hezbollah and all Iranians in Lebanon and Syria to return home and become labor battalions. The allies, the United States and Israel, will provide an airlift to relocate the “Palestinians” to Iran to assist in the reconstruction of their new home.

 

“Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?” 

 

 

 

Keir Starmer’s Tyranny of Greyness

 

Good riddance to Keir Starmer’s tyranny of greyness

Starmer’s premiership was devoted to suffocating the popular will.

No wonder he was hated.

Brendan O'Neill, Spiked-Online

So he’s gone. Keir Starmer has resigned. The adults are out of the room. He waltzed into Downing St two years ago to the effusive gushing of the liberal commentariat, and now he’s slinking out. He and his slack-jawed media cheerleaders promised us an era of blissful if boring stability. What they gave us were riots, division, betrayal after betrayal, and an unprecedented assault on the ancient liberties of our nation. The lesson of the Starmer epoch? Never trust a technocrat.

Few tears will flow over the death of his insipid premiership. He’ll be remembered as the human-rights lawyer who took a cudgel to the sacred right of trial by jury. The self-styled worshipper of competence who was staggeringly incompetent. The man with the great work ethic who often switched off for the whole weekend, leaving ministers stumped and the nation leaderless. The ‘details man’ who didn’t even know Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting to become our ambassador to the US. Starmer was a mirage. A hologram of competence operated by an army of the inept.

It pays to look back on the media fawning that followed his electoral victory in July 2024. There was an explosion of onanistic glee in Britain’s moneyed quarters. ‘Keir Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels’, said Caitlin Moran of The Times. She claimed ‘every middle-aged woman’ she knew had felt ‘kind of fruity’ upon watching Sir Keir go into Downing St. Other sad centrists wanted less to be fucked by Sir Keir than sedated by him. They made a holy virtue of his dullness. They prayed he would Make Britain Boring Again. He ‘embodies the politics of boring’, said one giddy scribe, which is just what ‘mayhem-weary’ Britain needs. After the Brexit wars, the Boris years and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Liz Truss era, we’ve had enough of ‘fireworks and political circus’, declared the BBC – now is the time for ‘vague, even boring [politics]’.

So he’s gone. Keir Starmer has resigned. The adults are out of the room. He waltzed into Downing St two years ago to the effusive gushing of the liberal commentariat, and now he’s slinking out. He and his slack-jawed media cheerleaders promised us an era of blissful if boring stability. What they gave us were riots, division, betrayal after betrayal, and an unprecedented assault on the ancient liberties of our nation. The lesson of the Starmer epoch? Never trust a technocrat.

Few tears will flow over the death of his insipid premiership. He’ll be remembered as the human-rights lawyer who took a cudgel to the sacred right of trial by jury. The self-styled worshipper of competence who was staggeringly incompetent. The man with the great work ethic who often switched off for the whole weekend, leaving ministers stumped and the nation leaderless. The ‘details man’ who didn’t even know Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting to become our ambassador to the US. Starmer was a mirage. A hologram of competence operated by an army of the inept.

It pays to look back on the media fawning that followed his electoral victory in July 2024. There was an explosion of onanistic glee in Britain’s moneyed quarters. ‘Keir Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels’, said Caitlin Moran of The Times. She claimed ‘every middle-aged woman’ she knew had felt ‘kind of fruity’ upon watching Sir Keir go into Downing St. Other sad centrists wanted less to be fucked by Sir Keir than sedated by him. They made a holy virtue of his dullness. They prayed he would Make Britain Boring Again. He ‘embodies the politics of boring’, said one giddy scribe, which is just what ‘mayhem-weary’ Britain needs. After the Brexit wars, the Boris years and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Liz Truss era, we’ve had enough of ‘fireworks and political circus’, declared the BBC – now is the time for ‘vague, even boring [politics]’.

It was extraordinary the extent to which they sacralised Starmer’s blandless. His very lack of charisma was fetishised as a virtue. ‘Haven’t we had enough of charismatic leaders?’, asked one columnist. Surely what we need now is ‘someone who will manage the government in a cool and calm way’. Sir Keir’s ‘dull ordinariness’ is the best weapon we have against the ‘unchained forces of mayhem’ in British politics, said Politico. And there it was, the brutal truth about why they fell at the feet of this adenoidal personality void – they believed, they prayed, that his sheer greyness would smother the fires of dissent lit by Brexit and the broader populist thirst for a realigned, reimagined politics.

The Starmer project, at root, was a bloodless coup of bureaucratic vengeance. It was the institutionalisation of boredom as an antidote to the spirit of Brexit. The chattering classes swooned over Starmer’s lifeless, flavourless style because it was such sweet relief from the unpredictable passions of the little people. It was technocracy summed up: politics as fire extinguisher, designed less to represent the people than to tame them, less to heed our angry demands than to bury them under a slagheap of managerialism. The great hope of Starmer’s high-status backers was that he would ‘lower the temperature’.

It wasn’t long before this illiberal crusade to sanitise public life crashed against the shores of reality. The first problem was Starmer’s own shortcomings. Having won the General Election on just 33.7 per cent of the vote, he lacked moral authority. It was said by some that he won on the basis of four words: ‘I am not them.’ But that was the problem. Not being the Tories was not enough. His was a victory by default, driven more by public exhaustion after 14 years of Tory misrule than by public enthusiasm for this celebrated lacker of charisma. From Day 1, the favoured bore of the priestly class struggled to connect with your average unboring Brit.

Then there was the fact that Mr Competent was not so competent. He was rarely across his brief. He u-turned constantly. His administration lurched from scandal to scandal, from Angela Rayner’s tax idiocy to that whole installing of a pervert’s buddy as US ambassador. Starmer was a staggeringly incurious prime minister. His was a ‘passive premiership’, as that gobsmacking Sunday Times feature described it in March. People were often struck by the ‘unnatural, overwhelming silence’ in Downing St as the PM and his equally grey minions got on with things ‘wordlessly behind closed doors’. Let the fall of Starmer be a lesson to the Western elites: managerialism might be fine for a smalltown bank but it is death itself in a realm where argument, contestation, morality and noise ought to be the norm.

But the larger problem for limp, damp Starmerism was that it was so catastrophically at odds with public sentiment. You see, people didn’t want to be sedated. They didn’t want to be tranquilised into an infantile state by the halfwits and dullards of Westminster. They didn’t want to see the grey slaying of what media snobs called ‘the unchained forces of mayhem’ but which we called democracy.

But the larger problem for limp, damp Starmerism was that it was so catastrophically at odds with public sentiment. You see, people didn’t want to be sedated. They didn’t want to be tranquilised into an infantile state by the halfwits and dullards of Westminster. They didn’t want to see the grey slaying of what media snobs called ‘the unchained forces of mayhem’ but which we called democracy.

Everything Starmer did was about ‘lowering the temperature’ of the public. His rule laid bare the calculated authoritarianism of a ruling class that considers management of the masses to be the highest goal of public life. From his attack on trial by jury to his mad insistence on bringing in a new definition of ‘Islamophobia’ to his allergic reaction to the public fury over Henry Nowak, he was always driven by a patrician impulse to subdue the popular will. To neutralise political contestation itself in order that the mythical competence of his kind might enjoy free rein. All the civil unrest we’ve seen these past two years – some of it democratic, some of it violent and ugly – is best understood as a fuming reaction against the rule of the boring and its black dream of public disenfranchisement.

And now we have the prospect of prime minister Andy Burnham, the man who edged Starmer out of Downing St with his victory in the Makerfield by-election last week. The elites want Burnham to do what Starmer failed to: quell the ‘mayhem’ of Britain’s resurgent democratic spirit. Only where they thought Starmer’s dearth of charisma might achieve that, now they hope Burnham’s much-hyped charisma will. They’ve tried boring us into submission, now they’ll try Burnhaming us into submission. They’ve learned nothing. Ten years since Brexit and we’re still lumbered with an expert class that is breathtakingly dumb.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.