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Saturday, October 31, 2026

The Morning Briefing: Modern Democrats Really Should Swap Out the Donkey for a Swastika — *David Guralnick/Detroit News via AP, Pool*

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing fans. Deszbuügwythh was quite open about his unease around people who deviated from traditional deviled egg presentations.

The Democrats have a long, ignoble history of taking reliable voting blocs for granted and never really doing anything for them. For reasons that remain a mystery to those of us who have never traveled over to that side to vote, these blocs have largely remained loyal to them.

OK, it's not all a mystery, but that's a lengthy and different column.

Jewish-Americans make up one of those groups. They have been voting for Democrats in large numbers for years. One would hope that this year might change that. I think a lot of us are long past hoping for common sense to frequently prevail in American politics, though.

All American leftists have been on a raging antisemitism jag ever since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. The ugliness began almost immediately after, when indoctrinated Brown Shirts on college campuses began protesting to "Free Palestine" and insisting that the terrorists were the real victims.

Leaders in the Democratic Party were rather weak in responding to the disgusting displays. Flash forward three years, and they've got a terrorist-supporting communist running for Senate in Michigan. As the kids are fond of saying, that escalated quickly.

This is still about the Democrats in general, but it's Abdul El-Sayed who is at the center of this tawdry tale. This is from Catherine:

A vile new ad for the Michigan Senate race leans into Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s antisemitism and blames Israel and Republicans for the price of U.S. groceries. Which side has the crazed conspiracy theorists and racists again?
Israel only strikes Palestinian terrorists if they strike first, and the only attempted genocide was the one Hamas attempted on October 7 and is trying to finish now. Furthermore, America spends far more on welfare fraud and illegal aliens than it does on Israel, and Democrats are the ones who deliberately fuel inflation and fraud. All of that is information that Jew-hating Muslims and lefties in Michigan hope voters don’t know.

The ad is in the post, and it's yet another low in an election cycle full of lows for the Democrats. It's more of the garbage about Israel being the root of all evil in the world and caterwauling about its alliance with the United States.

There are only two ways to look at this. Either the paste-eating idiots on the left have never pondered the real consequences of the U.S. not having any friends of democracy in the Middle East, or they have.

At this point, I am leaning towards the latter. Western leftists seem to be all-in on a Muslim takeover of all of the countries that Jihadis have been talking about taking over for decades. It's not hard to get there when you're self-loathing and have been badmouthing your own country forever.

The Dem establishment may still harbor fantasies about pitching the idea that moderates still exist in the party and El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and their Democratic Socialists of America ilk are outliers. That's a lot tougher to do now that El-Sayed spent the weekend chilling with Barack Obama. I'm not privy to the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee, but I'm pretty sure that they're not going to dismiss Obama as an extremist.

Because they're all extremists. Even the centrists in the party are somewhere left of Fidel Castro's corpse.

And they're not friends of the Jews. Virulent hatred for Israel is fueled by antisemitism. The anti-Israel rhetoric leads to things like a crazed Manhattan woman attacking two Jewish men with a syringe, which my HotAir friend and colleague John Sexton wrote about.

Maybe my headline today was a bit over the top.

They could just put a swastika on the donkey.

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2026/10/27/the-morning-briefing-modern-democrats-really-should-swap-out-the-donkey-for-a-swastika-n4958712/?utm_campaign=nl_pm&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pjmediambvip

The Anti-Trump Left Has Descended Into A Persistent Hallucinatory State

The Anti-Trump Left Has Descended Into A Persistent Hallucinatory State

By: Chris Bray

A wild-eyed man with crazy hair has steam coming out of his ears. Screenshot from the movie, the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Chris Bray

The relentless handwringing and panic-mongering is literally unreal: It invents an American past that never existed, then laments its fake loss.

You’re arguing with psychosis. They’re screaming about things that aren’t there.

The first task of defeating political opponents is to understand who they are. What is it that Democrats think they’re doing? And what they think they’re doing in 2026 amounts to a relentless ritual hallucination in the service of an institutional status quo. They’re making up a fake world in their heads to protect their paychecks: in media, in academia, in government, in the results-not-required world of the nonprofit organization.

If you doubt that, go read the opinion pages of The New York Times, the agenda-setting newsletter of the government and nonprofit class. You couldn’t possibly do better than to start with Nicholas Kristof’s Oct. 24 column about Mean Orange Man, the journalistic equivalent of a street crazy babbling to himself on a bus bench. The theme of the essay is American norms. Trump is a deviation; Kristof is fighting for things that are normal.

To borrow from Mary McCarthy: Every word is a lie, including “and” and “the.” Pick any paragraph. Here’s one: “Norms of self-restraint historically made the system work. Presidents did not try to crush law firms or universities, nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people. Presidents quarreled with allies but didn’t threaten to invade Greenland.”

Every word is insane and overwrought, but “nor did their administrations mislead federal courts or send armed officers into cities, where they shot people” is very special. There have never been armed federal officers in American cities before? Federal agents never shot anyone until Mean Orange Trump?

Carlos Boles was shot and killed by a deputy U.S, marshal in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. That same year, during the same presidency, an ICE agent shot at Daniel Noriega in Anaheim, California, but missed. Adrian Ricketts was shot by an FBI agent in New York City in 2012, when Barack Obama was president. Fernando Llanez was shot and killed by an HSI/ICE agent in June of 2016, in a suburb of San Diego, same president. Jamarion Robinson was shot by deputy U.S. marshals, dozens of times, in August of 2016, when Barack Obama was president.

This is only a partial list, but you get the point: Kristof says that things have gotten so bad under this monster Trump that federal agents are in our cities, shooting people, and this is a terrifying deviation from American political norms. What?

Or take, “Presidents quarreled with allies but didn’t threaten to invade Greenland.” If there’s one thing we know about American history for sure, it’s that no American president has ever threatened to invade anything before. Even if you just limit the argument to presidents threatening allies, Kristof’s case is still insane. Manuel Noriega was a longtime American ally until George H.W. Bush decided to invade Panama and capture him. Here’s a 2017 AP headline about his death: “Noriega, US ally turned target, dies after decades in jail.”

Henry Kissinger responded to the oil crisis by hinting broadly at the American willingness to use military force against the major oil-producing nations, and President Gerald Ford backed him up. No American president ever threatened to invade anything before? Again, what on Earth is this person talking about?

If no American president has ever dared to quarrel with our European allies, by the way, what was Eisenhower doing during the Suez Crisis?

The relentless handwringing and panic-mongering is literally unreal: It invents an American past that never existed, then laments its fake loss.

Kristof: “Other presidents redecorated; Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House, is building a ballroom and aims to construct a so-called Arc de Trump.”

Trump is so unspeakably evil that he’s … building a ballroom. What on Earth? President Harry Truman gutted the White House so completely that he spent three years of his presidency living at Blair House, which wasn’t a crisis at all. Neither is building a ballroom, an absolutely bizarre thing to depict as a devastating assault on American political norms.

Go through Kristof’s column and pick out something he identifies as shockingly unprecedented and a terrifying assault on American political norms, and see how many seconds it takes you to identify examples that disprove his argument. Don’t make it a drinking game, because you’ll be unconscious before you make the halfway mark.

If you dig under Kristof’s fantasy world claims, you begin to see what he’s doing. Sample claim: “Trump has worked to undermine the entire international system the United States created after World War II — for our benefit and the world’s — to promote peace, trade, prosperity and health. Ebola, poverty and Vladimir Putin are beneficiaries.”

The international system he’s describing is money trading hands. A system to “promote peace, trade, prosperity, and health,” like USAID and the State Department before Mean Orange Man laid off a bunch of employees, paid more people. It’s money: When Kristof wails about the loss of the international system founded on the strength of American political norms, he’s speaking for friends who lost grants and paychecks.

This fake-terror caterwauling is about cash, cash, and cash. Kristof describes “three pillars that explain the rise, strength and resilience of our nation,” and it’s all funding. The United States, he writes, “operates great universities and research institutions that are among the nation’s crown jewels,” but Trump “has variously attempted to defund them, cancel their tax-exempt status and make it harder for foreign students to enroll.”

Harvard’s endowment has grown to $68 billion, but Mean Hitler Trump is threatening their tax-exempt status. You begin to understand what norms Nicholas Kristof is trying to protect, and why he’s so worked up about it.

We head into an election talking about nothing – actually nothing: For the first time in American history, shattering our long-established norms, federal agents have guns and there’s construction at the White House, oh no. The wholesale manufacture of narrative distraction is the thing the legacy media are currently calling politics, and it’s fake from top to bottom. Treat it with the contempt it merits.

https://thefederalist.com/2026/10/26/the-anti-trump-left-has-descended-into-a-persistent-hallucinatory-state/

We Can't Believe The Economist Admitted This About Sex Crimes in Britain

We Can't Believe The Economist Admitted This About Sex Crimes in Britain

Amy Curtis Follow @RantyAmyCurtis

The U.K. has seen an astronomical rise in rapes and sexual assaults. In 2012-2013, there were about 16,000 reported rapes and sexual assaults. By 2024-2025, there were more than 70,000. And those were the ones that were reported outside of the grooming gang report, which alleges 250,000 British girls — most of them white and lower class — were raped, assaulted, groomed, and trafficked by mostly Muslim men.

It's so bad that British authorities are handing out pamphlets to migrant men telling them that a) women are human beings, b) they have the right to leave the house and get a job or an education without a man's permission, and c) don't rape them.

But if you pointed out the ethnic or religious make up of the perpetrators, you were likely to be visited by police or arrested for thought crimes.

And despite publishing it, The Economist made a point of trying to minimize the race and background of the offenders.

Here's more:

In Bristol last November three men and a 17-year-old boy, all Afghans, gang-raped a 17-year-old girl over several hours. Beforehand they had groomed her on Snapchat and plied her with alcohol; afterwards they fled to France in a lorry. The French authorities returned them to Britain, where they were convicted and, on October 6th, sentenced to long jail terms. In court the girl described how “listening to it all again from the lawyers kept me reliving everything that happened to me”.
Such horrors fuel suspicion of migrants. So did a recent state-issued booklet about Britain for asylum-seekers. Page five clarified that the legal age of consent is 16 and that rape is a serious crime. “I’ve never heard of someone who decided not to rape because they received a leaflet,” said Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader. The clumsy campaign fed the idea that some immigrants—notably men seeking asylum—are responsible for a disproportionate share of sex offences. Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, claims that "Afghans are over TWENTY times more likely to commit sex crimes than Brits."
...
The Economist’s analysis suggests that the “20 times” claim is a wild exaggeration. But our numbers are hardly reassuring.
The Migration Observatory, a think-tank based at Oxford University, obtained figures through freedom-of-information requests to the Ministry of Justice. These count cautions and convictions in England and Wales, split by offenders’ nationality, between 2010 and 2024. The data detail 8m crimes, of which 106,000 are sex offences ranging from rape to consensual sex in public. The police’s recording of offenders’ nationality is messy, but we found that four-fifths of sex crimes were committed by British people. Just 0.39%—409 offences over the 15-year period—were committed by people who said they were Afghan.

After the Dunblane school shooting in 1996, the U.K. summarily banned most guns to save lives. Such mass shootings were exceedingly rare, too, but it didn't prevent the authorities from stripping citizens of their right to self-defense (and we see where that's led).

But instead of stopping immigration from Third World nations were livestock has more inherent value than women and girls, the U.K. decided a pamphlet and giving migrant women hijabs was the solution.

Failing to demand assimilation and being selective in immigration has created a mess that Britain may never be able to clean up.

This is also an excellent quesito, but we all know the answer to it.

They're trying to gloss over the sex crimes. This sort of thing always follows the same process.

First, they'll say it's not happening. Then they'll say it's happening, but it's rare. (this is where we are with The Economist). Last, they'll admit it's happening, widespread, and you're a racist for noticing.

https://townhall.com/news/amy-curtis/2026/10/27/economist-breakdown-of-england-wales-sexual-offense-convictions-n2685363?utm_source=twdailyamvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Friday, October 30, 2026

How the Baseball World Series Justifies the Electoral College

How the Baseball World Series Justifies the Electoral College

Jeff Davidson

The end of the baseball season draws near as the last two teams – the Rays and the Brewers – compete for the World Series crown.

Meanwhile, the midterm elections are less than two weeks away, and the 2028 elections are two years and two weeks away. If the so-called “blue wave” prevails in the upcoming midterms, our nation will be in peril for all future presidential elections. Why? Democrats have long been advocating the abo lition of the Electoral College. Worse, DSA candidates drool at the prospect and are not shy about their intentions if elected.

Even among those who have no beef against the Electoral College, the process is widely misunderstood. Volumes have been written, but an easy way to understand the justification for the Electoral College is by reviewing the results of baseball's 1960 World Series – yes, you read that correctly.

Power Unlimited

In the 1960 World Series, the New York Yankees boasted sluggers like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Héctor López, Elston Howard, Tony Kubek, and Bill Skowron. That year, they set an American League home run record at the time with 193. The Yankees also had a phenomenal pitching staff, led by future Hall-of-Famer Whitey Ford.

Their opponent was the Pittsburgh Pirates, a worthy National League challenger but nowhere near the reputation and raw power of the Yankees. The Pirates were heavy underdogs against the legendary Yankees, who had captured 16 World Series titles up to that point.

In Game 1, the Pirates won a close match, 6-4. The next day, the Yankees trounced them 16-3. In Game 3, the Yankees continued their offensive onslaught, pounding the Pirates 10-0. Fortunately for the Pirates, Game 4 was not a slugfest and they won 3-2. They also won Game 5 by a score of 5-2. However, the Yankees weren't to be held down, and in Game 6, they pulverized the Pirates 12-0.

Tied 3-3, the World Series championship came down to a final Game 7. At that point, the Yankees had outscored the Pirates 46-17, an incredible gap. If total runs, rather than wins, determined the World Series champion, the Pirates would have to outscore the Yankees by 29 runs in the Game 7, which had never been done.

Shock and Awe

In the last game, Bill Mazeroski, a second baseman not known for power at the plate, led off in the bottom of the ninth inning and hit a home run to give the Pirates a 10-9 victory over the Yankees.

Sports writers consider this World Series one of the wildest in baseball history. Counting all seven games, the Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27, more than double the runs.

Why bother reviewing the scores of these games? What does this have to do with presidential elections? Good questions. Should the Yankees have been crowned 1960 World Series champions because they massively outscored the Pirates? Or were the Pirates the rightful victors because they won four of the seven games? You know the answer: it was the Pirates.

It would be a travesty in baseball if the team which scored the most runs was declared the winner, regardless of how many games they actually won. So it is with the Electoral College.

Individual Contests

Each state represents an individual contest. Whoever wins the popular vote in 48 states wins all the electoral votes in that state. Nebraska and Maine are exceptions, allowing for proportional Electoral College voting.

Critics of the Electoral College ask, "Why not switch to a nationwide popular vote election?" The answer is that California, Illinois, New York, and other large population states would dominate elections indefinitely. People in small population states such as Alaska, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Alabama, Delaware, Maine, West Virginia, and others would be disenfranchised. Their votes simply wouldn't matter.

Abandoning the Electoral College would be analogous to telling people in small states, "You might as well not vote. Your vote won’t have any consequences." This outcome wouldn't be true for just one election. It would likely be so for future election after election.

Each Legal Vote Should Matter

By maintaining the Electoral College, as the Founding Fathers intended, everyone's vote (ideally) counts. People across the U.S. have a vested interest in casting their ballots.

So, the Electoral College yesterday, the Electoral College today, and the Electoral College forevermore.

https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffdavidson/2026/10/24/how-the-baseball-world-series-justifies-the-electoral-college-n2685171