There's no real estate news to report yet, so let's continue on the lesser matter of the collapse of the Republic

/

Newsom Just Endorsed a New National Wealth Tax, Signaling Huge Shift Toward Socialism

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday proposed a national tax on billionaires that he says is the first part of an “economic reset for America” agenda, which aides explicitly say is part of his considering to launch a presidential campaign.

“The system America’s founders built was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades,” Newsom writes. “We can reverse it together, as a country.”

It is extremely early in the presidential campaign cycle for a policy proposal — but comes as Democrats continue to embrace economic populism and moves against the wealthy. It also comes as California voters in November will decide on a billionaires’ tax after the governor and opponents of the tax late Thursday failed to reach a deal to keep it off the ballot. [The State Employees Union, which runs California, refused to let Noisome back off — ED]

(cont.)

2. Among Democrats, Newsom is considered a moderate, not a progressive. His endorsement of a wealth tax makes it an official part of the Democratic Party platform for moderates and progressives alike; the policy is now table stakes for any Democrat seeking office at any level and in any region. We are no longer going to be able to escape this by simply claiming it’s the fringe left advocating for it.

3. Notice that Newsom calls it a “billionaires tax” but references the wealth of the top 10%. If you think a tax such as this would be limited to billionaires, you are delusional (remember that the income tax originally applied to less than 1% of earners). Billionaires have an entire industry of wealth managers, lawyers, and tax advisors helping them shelter assets. When this “billionaires tax” fails to collect even a small percentage of what Democrats promise it will, they will quickly expand it to apply to anyone with even $5M of assets (which is a top 2% net worth). Ordinary people far below the level of the ultra-wealthy—main street small business owners, mom-and-pop real estate investors, farmers, anyone with a decent-size nest egg in their IRA or 401k account—will quickly feel the pain as well.

Pay attention. This is serious, it’s not going away, and it’s going to come for all of us, billionaire or not.

I've been writing about the Democrat Socialists of America since AOC first crawled out from behind her Starbucks counter; here's another warning

/

Understanding The Masterminds Behind The Communist Revolution

Chloe Trapanotto• Daily Wire, Jun 25, 2026

The socialists are infecting the Democratic Party, hollowing it out, and boot-stomping its corpse.

It’s 1917 all over again. Some communists weren’t communist enough, so the truly radical ones ate them alive. This time, it’s not the Bolsheviks destroying the Mensheviks. It’s the socialists destroying the Democrats. And the organization leading the charge isn’t marching under a red flag; it’s marching under a donkey.

Meet the Democratic Socialists of America.

Their mission is to hollow out a country they are convinced is the root of all genocide, poverty, and malfeasance in the world, and replace it with third-worldist, communist radicalism that leaves the United States in permanent ignominy.

,,,, To prevent that very bleak reality, we need to understand what the DSA is — and why it is the antithesis of America.

The DSA is the largest explicitly socialist organization in the United States, with over 100,000 members and chapters across nearly all 50 states. They use young people, TikTok, and apathetic voters to propel obscure candidates to victory and make themselves look more mainstream than they are. They’re a radical, multi-tendency activist organization that runs carefully recruited candidates exclusively as Democrats, while simultaneously pushing campus radicalism, street organizing, and a platform of “democratic socialism.”

Which is a fancy new way of saying communism.

They want to replace capitalism with top-down government control over private property, housing, healthcare, energy, and more. Democrat policies aren’t radical enough for them. The Democratic Party is simply the vehicle they’re using to Trojan Horse their revolution through.

We know this because their leaders are saying it openly.

NYC DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo recently boasted that the group needs to “turn DSA into a factory,” and admitted their alliance with the Democratic Party is more for a ballot-access vehicle — not because they share its goals. Most of them, in fact, detest the Democratic Party. They compete in Democratic primaries, make their liberal opponents look like MAGA Cavemen by comparison, get elected with a “D” next to their name, and then treat the Democratic establishment as an obstacle to be discarded. Never a home. Always a beachhead.

It’s the classic “entryism” — or “dirty break” — strategy: infiltrate the larger party, use its infrastructure and ballot access to grow, then fracture from within. They aren’t hiding it.

It’s no wonder they idolize Vladimir Lenin.

The long-term plan may seem far-fetched, but its seeds are already sprouting. The DSA started with the Squad: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib — the usual suspects. Then they expanded to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the communist terror-sympathizer who recently declared: “[These] were not just victories from one elected office. They were victories of a movement.” He’s right. That’s exactly the point.

The blueprint is methodical: start small in winnable local and state races, build name recognition and infrastructure, primary moderate Democrats, shift the Overton window left on wealth redistribution, housing, policing, immigration, and foreign policy (hating Israel), and eventually capture enough leverage inside the Democratic Party to make it a fully functioning vehicle for socialist priorities.

They will do this for as long as it takes. Their stamina outlasts your attention span.

They can sustain it because their promises will never go out of style: “Free housing!” “Abolish the police!” “Healthcare is a human right!” (It’s not.) But make no mistake: the only way to fulfill those promises is to seize the means of production, tax your ideas and innovation into the ground, and handicap the creative, the strong, and the successful in the name of forced equality. Vonnegut wrote about where that leads in 1961. Venezuela lived it more recently. The DSA is apparently unaware of either.

In the meantime, the mask slips. At a DSA Socialism conference, a panelist openly declared, “I want to perform abortions in a church before it’s all said and done.” This came from a panel on “The Left and the Family,” which also featured arguments for abolishing the nuclear family, placing children under state supervision rather than with parents, and celebrating sex work. Separately, DSA members have stated: “It should not be controversial to say ‘Death to U.S. empire’ — this should be the moderate position,” and “We need to orient ourselves toward insurrection.”

So yes. These people exist. They are organized. And while you’re watching Love Island and going on matcha dates, they are winning races.

They are also the direct antithesis of everything this country was built on. America’s foundation rests on individual liberty, limited government, secure property rights, free enterprise, and a civic culture rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition. The DSA’s project — collective economic control, mass redistribution, cultural radicalism targeting the family, and the deliberate erosion of American power abroad — attacks every single one of those pillars.

Like the Frankfurt School before them, they use American institutions as temporary hosts before devouring them from within.

These are not cartoon villains in ski masks plotting gulags for tomorrow. They are organized, funded, patient, and growing today. They believe capitalism is immoral (It’s actually the most moral economic system ever devised), and they are doing everything in their power to kill it. The Democratic Party is just a stepping stone.

The Bolsheviks didn’t win because they were right. They won because nobody took them seriously until it was too late. Don’t make the same mistake.

Like socialism itself, rent control has never worked, and a rent freeze is rent control on steroids

/

NYC enacts rent freeze on 1M stabilized units after Mamdani accused of stacking board

The board passed a rent freeze on both one-year and two-year leases for the Big Apple’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units in a 7-1 vote.

The vote, during a meeting at El Museo del Barrio in Upper Manhattan, sparked an eruption of cheers from the crowd of mostly tenant groups.

But landlords have been sounding the alarm for months on the dangers of a rent freeze while costs continue to skyrocket.

A report released by the Rent Guidelines Board in April showed rent-stabilized housing insurance soared 10.5% in 2026 year-over-year, while fuel and maintenance rose 11% and 6%, respectively.

James Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, also blasted the rent freeze as a “terrible decision.”

“The Rent Guidelines Board ignored its own data and made a terrible decision tonight. Older rent-stabilized buildings are already struggling under rising operating costs, yet the Board chose to disregard those realities,” Whelan said in a statement. 

“This decision will mean less investment in maintenance and repairs, accelerating the deterioration of the housing stock that millions of New Yorkers call home. Tonight’s vote may be politically popular, but it will make New York’s housing crisis worse.”

Maksim Wynn, a Mamdani-appointed landlord representative, gave a lengthy speech at the meeting acknowledging landlords’ struggles — but ultimately said the rent freeze was in their best interest.

“There is a substantial subset of housing stock in distress,” Wynn told the crowd. “Still, a 0% increase on 1 and 2-year leases is in landlords’ best interest.”

How can operating an apartment building at a loss be “in the landlords’ best interest”? Mandamni’s flunky doesn’t say, but I’d interpret that as a threat: “go along with us, and we might delay confiscating your properties, for now”. Mamdani has already announced his intention to seize “unmaintained” buildings and this is all a part of that plan; landlords will be unable to maintain, even heat their buildings, and the communists running the city will move in, declare the buildings “neglected” and take them over.*

Tinfoil hat thinking? Take a look at the picture above, and notice all the preprinted signs and orange T shirts, all supplied by an organization (that files no financial reports or donor list) ,“NY Tenants Bloc.

We’re building a bloc of 250,000 tenants to take control over our homes.

There are over 9 million tenants in New York. We keep our state running every day. But now a small group of landlords and real estate executives holds disproportionate power over our homes, neighborhoods, and even our democracy.

The real estate industry is squeezing us for every dollar we’ve got, getting rich off our backs by raising our rents, refusing to make basic repairs, and pushing us out of the places we call home. 

But we have the numbers: there’s millions more tenants than there are landlords. We have the power to break the real estate industry’s grip on our lives by uniting as a bloc, and working together in our homes, our neighborhoods, and at the ballot box.

*AI Overview

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's “Block by Block” housing plan includes a "Fix the City" initiative that aims to seize properties from negligent or abusive landlords and transfer them to responsible stewards like community land trusts, nonprofits, or the tenants themselves. [1, 2, 3]

The strategy utilizes aggressive "roof to cellar" code enforcement by the Department of Buildings to identify and document chronic violations in unmaintained buildings. Properties with severe, long-term neglect can face legal action aimed at removing careless owners and reassigning the properties. [1, 2, 3]

How disappointing: A "Vomitorium" actually had nothing to do with vomiting between courses

/

I saw a comment on another blog that claimed the Romans had “vomitoriums” that they used during banquets to make room for more gluttony. That sounded a bit dubious to me, so I looked it up. There was such a word, but it had nothing to do with extra slices of pie.

Purging the Myth of the Vomitorium

Ancient Romans used the word, but pop culture has the concept all wrong 

As far as pop culture is concerned, a vomitorium is a room where ancient Romans went to throw up lavish meals so they could return to the table and feast some more. It's a striking illustration of gluttony and waste, and one that makes its way into modern texts. Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" series, for example, alludes to vomitoriums when the lavish inhabitants of the Capitol—all with Latin names like Flavia and Octavia—imbibe a drink to make them vomit at parties so they can gorge themselves on more calories than citizens in the surrounding districts would see in months.

But the real story behind vomitoriums is much less disgusting. Actual ancient Romans did love food and drink. But even the wealthiest did not have special rooms for purging. To Romans, vomitoriums were the entrances/exits in stadiums or theaters, so dubbed by a fifth-century writer because of the way they'd spew crowds out into the streets. [Who Were the Barbarians?]

"It's just kind of a trope," that ancient Romans were luxurious and vapid enough to engage in rituals of binging and purging, said Sarah Bond, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Iowa.

Vomit. Vomitus. Vomitorium.

The Roman writer Macrobius first referred to vomitoriums in his "Saturnalia." The adjective vomitus already existed in Latin, Bond told Live Science. Macrobius added the "orium" ending to turn it into a place, a common type of wordplay in ancient Latin. He was referring to the alcoves in amphitheaters and the way people seemed to erupt out of them to fill empty seats.

I’m sure Hunger Games fans — I’m not one, never read (saw?) them — will be disappointed, but, like “the rule of thumb” cited by feminists as limitation on the permissible thickness of a rod used to beat one’s wife, it ain’t so. Now ask me about “niggardly”.

Do you doubt that there are millions of Americans out there who wouldn't support this?

/

(unless you live in europe)

People in Europe and Great Britain are dying for (lack of) air conditioning in the current heat wave hitting the old world. The response of their governments?

In England, they’re forcing homeowners to rip out a/c units in the name of Mother Gaia.

The British Government Prefers Its Citizens Well Done

And in France, the communists have banned parent-supplied a/c units “because not every school’s parents can afford to supply them, and Marx knows we won’t.

Suffer the Little Children, France Insists

…. But it is the situation in Nîmes, a city of about 148,000 in a lovely part of the south of France. Actually, I've been in the south of France, and all the parts are lovely (except Marseille, of course), but I digress.

The region is suffering a record-breaking, early-summer heat wave with temperatures soaring as high as 40–44°C, the way the French reckon it, or 104–111°F in actual degrees. This is when Americans would set the thermostat to 68° (actual degrees) or maybe go see a movie at a theater where they keep it that temp all the time.

But at the École Primaire La Planette school in Nîmes, they have no air conditioning — naturellement — and according to Miss Jo on X and other sources, a child there "recently fainted because of the heat," even while "classes were being taught in corridors to get out of the heat."

Parents of the students there did what parents in America would almost certainly do in a similar situation, and they raised money to buy five portable air conditioning units for the school. The community got so involved that the parents needed just three days to raise the required €2,000.

So far, so good.

But Mayor Vincent Bouget is an actual member of the Parti communiste français (PCF), and if there's one thing Communists can't stand, it's the community doing stuff. Bouget ordered the school to remove the A/C because "it sets a precedent," and "in some neighborhoods, parents don’t have the means to act."

I mean, I guess those parents could hold a fundraiser like the other parents did. The community seemed pretty excited to jump in and help.

But no.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: France adopts the look and feel of our own major cities

/

The Great Replacement Chronicles: Le Camp Des Saints

Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.
—Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints

Benjamin Bartee, PJMedia

French music festival devolves into violence

If I hadn’t attended public school in Atlanta, I probably would’ve found the brutal depictions of jungle life in The Heart of Darkness a bit too outlandish to swallow as something akin to the reality of pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa.

But I did go to public school in Atlanta, so instead of dismissing the narrative, I mostly nodded along, recalling my own “lived experience,” as the Social Justice™ people say.

Related: Migrants Committed Almost 70% of Violent Crimes in France Last Year

Surely, though, I thought to myself, nothing like that could ever happen in post-Enlightenment Europe.

Surely.

Via Daily Mail (emphasis added):

Female tourists who attended a festival in Paris where women were injected with date-rape drugs have called the event an 'apocalypse', and described being attacked.

More than 240 people were arrested, on Sunday's Fête de la Musique – a nationwide 'street party' attended by thousands of British people.

Two people were stabbed, and others raped, as France's biggest open air music festival descended into intense violence.

Police also reported multiple other sexual assaults, muggings, and girls being stabbed with syringes, on a night of anarchy.

One female victim said she was 'beaten' by two 'North African women' during the chaos. 

In a video posted on X, she claimed the pair approached her and her friend, snatched her phone, hurled it to the ground and then assaulted her friend. 

'One of the two girls who had already thrown my phone to the ground and hit my friend then approached us. She pushed my friend to the ground and started hitting us and kicking us in the head,' she said.

'About three minutes later, some men arrived, followed by the police, but there was nothing we could do. The girls gave their version of events, while my friend and I were left in tears.'

And one Irish woman who attended the festival took to TikTok to warn others not to go.

 'There's no music, it's world war Z,' she said, adding: 'It's only sirens and mobs and pandemonium. It's like the apocalypse.' 

Fresh videos circulating on social media show groups of young men smashing up cars and brawling in the streets, while piles of litter line the pavements.

In one clip, a man appears to swing a barstool at a car and a group of men, while others nearby kick and stomp on another man as he lies in the street. 

Another shows festivalgoers jumping on the shattered windscreen of a separate vehicle as music blares and people dance around it. 

A 40-year-old man and woman, who have not been named, were attacked in the early hours of Monday.

Watching helplessly as migrants twerk on the hood of your car, knowing its windshield is inevitably bound to get smashed in at any moment as your neighbor gets beaten unconscious with a stolen barstool on the street by a Third World mob for being white, against the backdrop of countless miles of trash on the Champs-Élysées to the exotic rhythm of drum and bass — that’s a whole lot liberal and loving cultural enrichment for the natives to enjoy.

Benjamin Bartee

Chicago? New York? Paris? Take your pick.

Thought she was in California, did she?

/

Long Island school clerk caught tearing up ballots, trashing votes to help her candidate win: probe

A Long Island school clerk overseeing board of education elections tore up ballots and threw them in a dumpster to help her favorite candidate win, a newly revealed internal probe found.

Hempstead Union Free School District Clerk April Keys allegedly rigged the May 19 trustee election by smuggling official ballots out of her office and handing absentee ballots to favored candidate Victor Pratt so he could trash them, according to a 51-page petition filed by the district with the state Education Department.

….

Question marks were first raised by the district after it discovered major irregularities in its election.

Pratt won by just 81 votes — boosted by a suspiciously large number of absentee and early mail ballots that boosted him to the win even though he only came in third on machine voting, the probe found.

Pratt racked up 87% of absentee votes and 55% of early mail votes, compared to just 27% of in-person machine votes – while other trustee candidates received fewer than 100 absentee and early mail ballots combined, the probe found.

Fortunately, this kind of voter fraud is restricted to just one small, inconsequential school district; except for Hempstead Union, our voting system is 100% trustworthy, and universal absentee balloting and mail-in voting has only made it even more secure.

By the way, missing from the article is any mention of what, if anything, is being done to the candidate* who actually destroyed the ballots after the clerk gave them to him — arrested? Will he still be on the ballot if an election do-over is granted? Gotta love curious reporters.

*Victor Pratt, convicted of drunk driving and then arrested last year for reckless driving while his license was suspended, but no one’s perfect, eh?

North Street sale

/

The Greenwich GMLS has closed down at noon, again — the staff was undoubtedly exhausted from its four-day Juneteenth holiday, taken while still reeling from its Memorial Day closure, and needs time to prepare for its upcoming 4th of July vacation week. Still, a little real estate news is trickling in:

420 North Street, guide price $5.550 million, has sold for $5.801. The same house sold for $4.9 million in July 2024, so I guess the market’s slowing down; I would have expected this to have doubled by now.

To be fair, Mrs. Buttigieg had to stay home to care for the infants because his husband refused to help

/

And anyway, there’s really no comparison between a critical role like Press Secretary and the no-show job of Secretary of Transportation

June 23, 2026;

'Back on the road with President Trump': Leavitt returns to work after maternity leave

Meanwhile, back in South Bend, the kids are almost weaned, and Pee-wee’s getting ready for his next big adventure

Finally, FWIW readers' dieting yields results: our allies on the Freedom Flotilla have been released by their Muslim captors. What? You weren't part of that effort?

/

No Jews, No News: Gaza 'Flotilla' Activists Held Captive In Libya for Weeks, Nobody Cared

David Strom, HotAir:

Remember when Israel arrested, fed, and gave free transport to Greta Thunberg and her motley crew of virtue signalers who tried to break the blockade of Gaza?

World news. Accusations of abuse (Pallywood-style), world condemnation of Israel for being cruel, inhuman beasts for not allowing commie cosplayers to deliver 4 loaves of bread or so to the not-really-starving Gazans. 

It made for great propaganda. Because they made Israel a villain, which is everywhere and always the point for leftists and transnationalists. 

A funny thing happened to the latest flotilla, and almost nobody heard about it: the whole thing was stopped off the coast of Libya, its "activists" were "illegally detained," and a bunch of their companions who were convoying supplies for it were kidnapped and held for "about a month." 

Ah, Hillary Clinton's Libya. "We came, we saw, he's dead." Good times. 

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, gave a crap aside from the flotilla organizers, Amnesty International (sorta), and the poor diplomats who had to figure out how to get them away from the kidnappers. 

“Four pro-Palestinian campaigners detained in Libya for about a month have been released, the Global Sumud Flotilla group has said.

In a statement on Wednesday, the organisation said Achraf Khoja from Tunisia, Matias Rodriguez from Uruguay, and Domenico Centrone and Leonarda Alberizia, both from Italy, had all arrived in Tunis. Six others are expected to be released in the next 24 hours, it added.

In an earlier statement, Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani welcomed the news of the released Italians, saying the two, along with Rodriguez, who has Italian citizenship, were handed over to Italy’s consul in Benghazi. They will return to Italy on Wednesday, he said on X.

More than 400 activists were arrested last month in international waters on board dozens of vessels while sailing towards Gaza to break a siege imposed on the enclave by Israel.

The activists held in Libya were part of a separate group which tried to reach the strip by land. They had staged a hunger strike in protest at their detention, the Global Sumud Flotilla said.”

No Jews, no news. Almost literally, nobody cared.