Don't bite

/

Stephen Green:

Dear Young Americans: I'm Begging You Not to Take Trump's 50-Year Mortgage

The typical mortgage these days is $324,000. At 6% over 30 years, borrowers pay $1,942 a month, and over the course of the loan, $375,315.73. Extend that term to 50 years, and young homeowners get that monthly payment down to $1,705 — a savings of less than $250. But interest payments balloon to $699,331.

Let's call that what it really is: indentured servitude to a giant bank. 

But maybe the worst part is the loss of equity. As Glenn Reynolds mentioned earlier today on Instapundit, "this is basically something close to an interest-only mortgage." Buyers might save a couple hundred bucks a month in mortgage payments, but it will be years before they get any equity in their homes. When it's time to trade up because of a better job or a bun in the oven, they won't OWN enough of the house they bought to roll that value into their next house.

President Trump is a real estate guy, and he knows all this. Honestly, there isn't much the president can do about housing costs. Interest rates are largely determined by the Fed, and it's state and local regulations that put the squeeze on the supply.

Why he’s pushing these 50-year absurdities, I have no idea — maybe it’s just smart politics, a way to look like he’s tackling the housing-affordability crisis.

No, people don’t live in the same house for 50 years, but there’s no way to build equity while they do own a house if they’re paying what’s essentially an interest-only mortgage. Build more houses, not more debt.

It took 108 days, but finally, a buyer has stepped up

/

119 Hendrie Avenue, Riverside, was listed at $3.895 million on July 25th and never budged from that price until, perhaps, now, when a purchase contract has been reported. I’m a little surprised that the house lingered for so long because, these days, the price doesn’t seem all that far removed from reality. Closing price? I’m guessing closer to $3.4ish than $3.9, but we’ll see.

Guys and Gals

/

Part 1

POLICE OFFICER UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR CALLING A MAN A MAN:

Tucker, Georgia, is an eastern Atlanta suburb, located in the ultra-woke Dekalb County, so this story may not come as a surprise, but it’s infuriating a lot of people, so I thought I’d share.

It all started a few weeks ago with a man who identifies as a woman by the name of Sasha Swinson. He was at the Tucker-Reid H. Cofer Library, a place he claims he frequents regularly, and had just used the bathroom. The women’s bathroom. When he stepped outside, a DeKalb County police officer allegedly told him that he needed to use the men’s bathroom next time as there were women and young girls in the other. As you can imagine, that didn’t sit well with Swinson.

“I use the restroom, the women’s restroom, like I have been for months, if not years,” Swinson told local news outlets. “He says, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ So, misgendering me right away, just goes, ‘But you’re not a woman. That’s obvious.'”

In case you’re curious about just how obvious that was, here’s a video of Swinson enjoying his 15 minutes of fame as he complains about the situation. Even I didn’t expect that voice to come out that deep.

Part II

It’s just so hard these days to figure who’s on top of the victimhood totem pole (yes, that’s now a racist term, offense to Indians — screw ‘em). For instance, it wasn’t that long ago that a black female lesbian was pretty high in the rankings, and now she has to lie down for a man flopping his penis around while screaming, “I am woman, hear me roar!”.

It’s a mystery.

Gold’s Gym Just Canceled Real Woman for Standing Up to Naked Man

But wait, there’s more!

Trans person accused of exposing self in women’s locker room was convicted of brutally beating ex-wife before taking her name

The transgender person caught up in a viral Los Angeles gym bathroom row had been convicted of assaulting their now-ex-wife while living in Ohio as a man — before taking the victim’s first name as their own.

Alexis Black ran afoul of women at a gym in Beverly Hills, including singer-songwriter Tish Hyman, who accused them of exposing himself and harassing her in the locker room.

Black, formerly Grant Freeman, pleaded guilty in 2022 to savagely beating his wife Alexis Freeman, causing a compound fractured jaw among other serious injuries.

“Kyle Grant Freeman caused serious physical harm to the victim. The victim suffered a compound fractured mandible, which resulted in her needing surgery,” said court documents from Hamilton County, Ohio.

Black was sentenced to a year in prison, minus time served.

Black had been convicted of both domestic violence and drug trafficking in the past, and has faced a slew of other charges, including resisting arrest, records show.

Part 3

A couple of weeks ago Stephen Green published a deep dive essay on this subject. It’s behind the PJ paywall, which you can breach by subscribing to all Town Hall’s media outlets — a strategy I highly recommend — but here’s an excerpt:

Thursday Essay: You Only Think the 'Trans' Crisis Is Over

Matt Walsh crowed last week that "Transgenderism is effectively over."

"We destroyed it," he went on, calling it the "clearest and most decisive cultural win that conservatives have ever achieved."

Sorry, no — if Matt were any more wrong, he'd put on a dress and insist we call him Mathilda. But before you can understand where Walsh went wrong, you have to understand what's really going on.

I put "trans" in scare quotes up above in the headline because the word has been conflated beyond all meaning. So before you can understand why the crisis is far from over, we have to restore meaning to that word.

The confusion stems — and this is no accident, by the way — from taking the word transexual (which is the less scientific term for gender dysphoria) and expanding it to cover three other types of people who are not in any way gender dysphoric. 

The short version is that the catch-all term "trans" now includes four distinct groups: the genuinely gender dysphoric, predators, victims, and trendies. Before we get to the fakers and the harmed, let’s take a quick look at the real deal.

True dysphoria isn't a TikTok trend or a phase trendy kids go through — it's a real and painful disconnect between mind and body that makes the simple act of being feel out of tune. At best. It means waking up every day and believing the mirror lies to you about the most fundamental aspect of your biology. The gender dysphoric aren’t confused about who they are; they’re exhausted by how hard it is to live in the body they have.

The real tragedy is that we still don't have a handle, medically or psychologically, on how (or necessarily whether) to treat gender dysphoria. The reported attempted suicide rate for the gender dysphoric is higher than any other group of people you could name, at nearly 40%. That's an astonishing figure, and although the research is spotty on self-reported suicide attempts, the figure remains about the same regardless of whether a dysphoric person has medically transitioned. 

And Another Thing: For brevity's sake, I use "transitioning" for the series of hormonal and surgical procedures that we used to call "getting a sex change." But please know that I know that basic biology and common sense dictate that there's no actual transition or sex change taking place. Any changes are purely cosmetic. For some who are gender dysphoric, that's enough. For others, not so much.

A 2019 study found that "Despite professional recommendations to consider gender-affirming hormone and surgical interventions for transgender individuals experiencing gender incongruence, the long-term effect of such interventions on mental health is largely unknown." That's true even after six-plus decades of procedures performed on tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone.  

Some are happier after transition surgery and hormone treatments. Some are worse off, but have made changes to their bodies that can never be fully reversed. The medical profession is unable to tell in advance which person will fall into which group.

There are as yet no easy answers. Hell, there don't seem to be any difficult answers, either. People caught in the dysphoria dichotomy deserve our sympathy and our help, although the former is at risk from the "trans" movement, and the latter, we still don't really know how to provide. 

The gender dysphoric do not seek to draw attention to themselves; they just want to pass.

You know who does draw attention to themselves? Autogynephilic male predators who coopted the trans label.

The middle-aged straight man with the stringy "girl" hair, the beard, and the dress trying to barge into the girls' locker room so he can ogle and wave his penis around isn't "trans" anything. His kink, as sexologist Ray Blanchard described it, is sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body, and flaunting it in front of others.

In better times, he paraded around in front of his wife or whatever — in private. Today, he uses the law to force the rest of society to accept that he's just a girl, free to invade women's space and compete in women's sporting events.

On second thought, the predators are probably best divided into two subsets: Autogynephilics and losers. 

Here's an autogynephilic:

And here’s a loser:

But make no mistake: Both prey on women.

Autogynephilic men have shown all kinds of violent tendencies, over and over — though I still don’t fully understand why. Maybe someday I'll do enough research to write an essay on them, assuming I can stomach it. 

The Left loves promoting these male predators as having the same rights as women, because promoting predation, kink, and mental illness to individual rights obliterates the entire concept of individual rights. As I wrote above, the conflation between gender dysphoria and "trans" is no accident. 

Get woke, go broke

/

This logo is ableist! (unless, of course, that’s a gay, gender dysphoric powering the kayak from a wheelchair)

‘Toxic Intersectionality’: Sierra Club in ‘Downward Spiral’ After Pivot to Social Justice Warrioring

“It issued an ‘equity language guide,’ which warned employees to be cautious about using the words ‘vibrant’ and ‘hardworking,’ because they reinforced racist tropes.”

<

Legal Insurrection:

The New York Times published a fascinating read Friday detailing how the Sierra Club went from being a singularly focused, highly influential environmental group with big money backers like former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to one wracked with “internal chaos,” sexual harassment scandals, and an obsession with social justice warrioring, the latter of which appears to have been the catalyst for the “implosion” some current and former members say it is experiencing.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

The write-up also shared how, as President Donald Trump took office and began taking a bulldozer to what the Times called “environmental protections,” the Sierra Club was too distracted by infighting and sexual harassment scandals to fight back:

While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” a group of managers wrote in a letter reviewed by The New York Times to the club’s leadership in June.

That spiral helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself.

And how did they do that? The Times went on to explain:

During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.

This expansion into social justice warrioring caused the group to lose that singular focus.  As a result, “the club had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition” by 2022.

The idea behind the hard-left pivot was to bring in a younger generation of environmentalists while also trying to drag members along with the woketivism. That turned some folks off because, at the time, the Sierra Club had a sizable number of members who were not hardcore leftists but who nevertheless agreed with their stances on issues like coal and green energy.

Then, there was the “equity language guide”:

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.

One Sierra Club volunteer told the newspaper that she remembered a conversation with a staff member who she said was more interested in DEI than saving wolves:

Ms. Malone … recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.

“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Ms. Malone said.

Warning: Democrat genius mind at "work": If we give everyone in the country free food, we'll increase our GDP by 180%

/

infinite energy

And just imagine how wealthy we’d be if we gave everyone a free house and two cars?

The Pinsker Plan is better than anything else I've seen proposed (which is, essentially, nothing)

/

The one, possibly fatal, flaw in this proposal is that if it is to work, a threat to abolish the filibuster must be credible, and I’m not sure our RINOs can be counted on to support that; they seem to still believe, all evidence to the contrary, that the Senate remains a body of legislator who will set partisan politics aside and act “for the good of the country”, even if only occasionally, so that abolishing the filibuster and reverting to bare-majority rule would be ungentlemanly.

The days bi-partisanship are dead, if they ever existed, and it’s an absolute certainty that the new breed Democrat Socialists will abolish the filibuster as their very first order of business when they regain power. Harry Reid put the first crack in this protocol in 2013 when he and his fellow Democrats abolished it in order to cram Obama’s judicial nominees through the Senate; the next wave of Democrats will make Reid look like a RINO Republican in contrast.

So yes, acknowledge the new reality, accept what is coming, and act now to pass as much of the MAGA agenda as possible, and hope we can forestall the next Democrat administration long enough for those reforms to restart the economy and maybe — maybe — convince Americans that they’re better off in a capitalist economy than a Cuban one.

Scott Pinsker, PJMedia:

How MAGA Wins the ‘Schumer Shutdown’ PR War in 48 Hours!

It’s time to adjust our sails. On the heels of Tuesday’s electoral victories, the Democrats are motivated and energized: In their estimation, the so-called “Schumer Shutdown” is working marvelously, because the American people are blaming the Republicans.

And the Democrats are reaping the political benefits.

That’s because voters know that the White House, Senate, and House are all under GOP control, but they don’t really understand the nuances of parliamentary procedure. (Yawn: boring!) Instead of focusing on the 60-man threshold necessary to overcome a Democratic filibuster, they’re focusing on leadership: If the Republicans run it, they’re ultimately responsible… right?

“Hey, you broke it, you bought it.”

Which is why we need a new PR direction ASAP.

What I’m about to present is a shockingly simple PR plan: Only four key items. 

And it would only take 48 hours!

Here’s the Machiavellian bottom line: The shutdown won’t end until the Democrats conclude that the political cost is too great. Right now, they’re enjoying the perks of obstructionism, without any of the blowback. 

Which means it’s our job to change their calculus — by vastly increasing their pain points.

Here’s how we do it:

Step One: President Trump delivers a national, primetime address.

Announce to the American people that tomorrow afternoon, the Senate will vote on a new bill to pay military members, air traffic controllers, and essential federal workers. Trump should explain how much they’re suffering — and how unfair it is that rich, powerful politicians are using ‘em as political pawns.

Enough is enough!

Step Two: Announce that if the Dems once again block the vote, the Senate will immediately eliminate the filibuster and revote.

Which means, our military members, air traffic controllers, and essential federal workers WILL be paid tomorrow, no matter what.

If the Dems still wanna oppose it, that’s up to them.

This is critical, because it highlights the Democrats’ obstructionism, making it the #1 obstacle to reopening the government. (And it also reinforces Trump’s reputation for being a pragmatic problem-solver who finds novel ways to get things done.)

Step Three: Announce that once the vote is passed and our military members, air traffic controllers, and essential federal workers are paid, the Senate will immediately reinstate the filibuster.

That way, the Senate rules will stay the same. It negates the Dem’s “Trump is a dictator” talking point, instead highlighting their obstructionism. (And this would also quell GOP senators’ concerns about permanently scrapping the filibuster.)

In fact, Trump should tell the Democrats straight-up, if they wanna continue to hold the government hostage, they can — but what they’ve been doing to our military families and air traffic controllers is immoral, dangerous, and un-American — and one way or another, it’s coming to an end tomorrow.

It’s critical to establish a clear, concise narrative that explains the Dem’s culpability. 

Step Four: Announce that the bill will have one final provision: As of tomorrow, whenever there’s a government shutdown and federal workers aren’t getting paid, neither will the politicians in Congress!

It’s almost always a winning PR move to pit yourself against the career politicians on Capitol Hill, but this has a secondary purpose: Dare the wealthy, powerful Dems to vote in favor of receiving THEIR paychecks — while also voting to deprive military families from receiving theirs.

The PR backlash would be enormous. (And the attack ads that GOP challengers could run against ‘em would be brutal.)

Even though the shutdown wouldn’t be “over,” the Democrats would lose their biggest bargaining chip: federal workers and their families. 

No longer are they held hostage to Schumer’s negotiations!

And without that bargaining chip, their appetite to continue the shutdown would quickly extinguish: What’s the point anymore?

This PR plan advances the football; brands Donald Trump as a decisive, get-things-done leader; pays our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and air traffic controllers; and highlights the self-serving obstructionism of the Democratic Party. Best of all, it’s 100% realistic and easily executable.

And it could all be done in just 48 hours.

Minneapolis East: Sweden F**Ks Around, and Finds Out

/

You may have noticed something in common:  Malmö.  It's a city in Sweden, directly connected across the five-mile-long Øresund Bridge across the Øresund Straits from Copenhagen, Denmark - two places that might seem indistinguishable to Americans, but which had diametrically different immigration policies over the past decade.  

In 2015, when asylum-seeking from the Middle East and Central Asia turned into a flood tide, Sweden all but threw open its doors.   Denmark, on the other hand, clamped down hard:

With some of the strongest immigration laws in Europe, Denmark showed an unambiguous determination to keep migrants out. It cut benefits to asylum-seekers and passed a law that allowed authorities to seize valuables worth more than €1,340 ($1,565) from refugees to pay their food and housing costs. A court even fined a woman and her husband €6,000 for “human smuggling” when they drove a refugee family across the country.

The Swedes went in the opposite direction - taking in 160,000 migrants in a nation with a population a little smaller than Ohio.  And while the migration has touched most Swedish cities, its centered on Malmö - a city which has been to Middle Eastern in-migration to Sweden what El Paso during the Biden years was to the US.  

And...it's caused problems:

Mass rioting in Malmo, Sweden after a rumor gets out that someone burned a Koran. pic.twitter.com/CETqTDG5iI

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 28, 2020

As in much of Europe, it's driven the rise of "far right" anti-immigrant politics and parties in Sweden. 

Denmark has been watching what's happened across the Øresund, and has taken an intensely pragmatic approach:

Denmark’s answer has been to be extremely selective about the migrants it takes.

In 2024, it granted asylum to 864 people – a historic low for a nonpandemic year. In recent years, Denmark has also accepted 200 refugees annually from the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. (As of 2023, similar-size Norway was accepting 2,000.) A new policy allows for work migrants from only 16 countries whose nationals are believed to be easier to integrate, based on likely economic contributions. (None of the countries are in the Middle East or Africa.)

The Danes - led, perhaps counterintuitively by the Social Democrats, the promoters of open borders everywhere else in the West - have had a conversation that has been pretty well shouted off the stage in Sweden - and the US, as well:

Partly to inform the nation’s migration policy, the Finance Ministry calculates how much different groups either contribute to, or draw from, the national budget.

According to its 2019 report, people of Danish heritage contributed €15 billion ($17.6 billion) to state coffers, while migrants and first-generation descendants from the Middle East and North Africa cost Denmark €3.2 billion....

They did the math:

Denmark’s welfare system is the country’s “crown jewel,” says Rune Stubager, a political scientist at Aarhus University. In a recent magazine article, two government ministers declared, “It is the Nordic social democracies that have created the best societies in world history.”

That idea has huge support among Danish voters, creating a kind of “‘Danish Welfare State First’ policy,” says Professor Stubager.

One wonders if anyone, let alone a Democrat, could get away with doing that kind of math in the United States.  

Somaliland

/

Minnesota is just an advanced example of what we’re becoming as the “melting pot” vision of America has been educated away, and a new nation is emerging, one comprised of victims, a collection of oppressed tribes: straight women; lesbians; gender dysphorics; Mexicans; Venezuelans; Haitians; American blacks; African blacks; American Indians; sunni muslims; shia muslims; and on, and on, and on, with nothing in common except for being under the brutal heel of white, male capitalists.

All is going according to plan.

This Is Actually Happening in America: Jacob Frey Wins Mayor Race—Thanks to Imported Somali Clan Feud

Jacob Frey was the incumbent Mayor this week in a race for Minneapolis Mayor. His opposition was a man named Omar Fateh. Fateh is part of the Somali community and as such, many thought he had a good chance to win the election. There is a huge Somali population in Minnesota, after all. Well, apparently, clan 'wars' have come to the United States along with importing Somalis into our country, and Fateh lost because one Somali clan hates his clan. Yes, really.

I’m not one of Desantis’s “many Republicans”: who consider mass migration “good, so long as it’s legal”. I want to see an end to chain-migration” and birthright citizenship, a disqualification from welfare benefits, including Medicaid and food stamps, English-speaking-only education in public schools, and demonstrated English proficiency requirements for driving licenses and professional certifications. I’m sure I could come up with 100 additional conditions to admission if i gave it another ten minutes, but these will do for now.