OK.

Once we’re all done setting our hair on fire and wringing our hands about the latest crop of anti-American, Jew-hating, Communist revolutionaries who’ve just grabbed political power, let’s look at the upside.

Hardly anybody voted for them.

And they give Republicans a golden opportunity — if the party can get its act together, and if conservatives and sensible centrists can be persuaded to get off their couches and actually vote — and vote strategically.

No more sitting on the fence.

In the bid to save New York — and the nation — apathy is as much the enemy as the DSA, for Democrats and Republicans alike.

This is the chance for New Yorkers to get behind the underestimated gem running for governor, Bruce Blakeman.

He is the antidote to the anti-American poison emanating from Albany and City Hall.

But first to apathy.

The three Democratic Socialists of America candidates endorsed by Mayor Mamdani received a grand total of 125,000 votes, representing 3 percent of all registered Democrats in New York City.

Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13), a community organizer born in the Dominican Republic who wipes her ass with the American flag, will ride into Washington, DC, with fewer than 33,000 votes, representing less than 9 percent of eligible registered Democrats in that district.

That would barely fill Yankee Stadium.

Only 18 percent of Democrats in NY-13 even bothered to turn out to vote in the primaries Tuesday.

It’s a small sampling

It’s the same for Texas native Claire Valdez (NY-7), a union organizer who wants to grant citizenship and voting rights to illegal aliens.

She netted a measly 36,961 votes — or 10 percent of eligible votes.

Brad Lander (a longtime DSA member who nominally quit the faction but for all intents and purposes is DSA), the Missouri-born former progressive former NYC comptroller, Mamdani enabler and self-loathing “As a Jew” Jew, did the best of the three but still only eked out a paltry 55,000 votes to knock off Rep. Dan Goldman in the high-profile Manhattan and Brooklyn race.

That’s less than 16 percent of eligible registered Democrats.

The rest just stayed home.

The DSA victory is a triumph of community organizing, not of grassroots populism.

These people aren’t even from the communities they organize.

They’re not even from New York.

Two of them, including Chevalier and Uganda-born elitist Mamdani, weren’t born in this country.

No, this isn’t about “authenticity” or “conviction” or a “movement.”

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!

It was a sheer back-room numbers game in which the insurgent fringe easily toppled a complacent Democratic establishment that believed it had successfully gerrymandered and rigged its way to permanent rule and took New York for granted.

The commies got a handful of votes in a city of 8.5 million.

They are going to Washington as New York representatives, but they are as representative of New York as a pebble is of an avalanche.

Their momentum is driven in large part by delusion and hopeium, burnished brightly by the sorts of Ivy League millennials who populate elite newsrooms.

Take the NYT’s breathless description of Mamdani “hopscotching” among victory parties Tuesday night wearing a smile of “disbelief” like he was taken unawares by the manipulation of low voter turnout.
“His aura of invincibility . . .  buoyed by recent weeks of Knicks-related elation — transferred to the candidates he endorsed, helping catapult [them] to victory . . . The primary underscored the movement’s force, but also that of the man . . . This movement’s leader has a pretty obvious and singular charisma.”

How blue can you go?

Primary night festivities were “a celebration of how the mayor’s popularity has rippled outward [but] also a reminder of just how much the mayor himself commands a room . . . When he walked into Ms. Valdez’s party, some of his supporters looked so overcome they could barely speak.”

Oh, please.

Keep your hat on.

America doesn’t want the crazy policies Zohran and the commies are championing: Open borders. Medicare for all. Abolish ICE. Defund the police. Abolish prisons. Transgender surgery for all. DEI. Racial apartheid. Crime and disorder. Pond scum in the Reflecting Pool.

Americans are not into tearing down everything that made America great, and ultimately destroying Western civilization.

Even those of us who were not fans of Goldman, the Levi Strauss heir and once shining star of the Democrats who has just been ignominiously turfed out of Congress by Lander, will defend him against the vile bigotry of Poetica Coffee.

The filthy coffee shop in Brooklyn, which keeps being cited for hygiene issues, banned Goldman after he bought a cup of coffee there because he is deemed to be a supporter of Israel.

Good for Goldman.

He never seemed comfortable in the role of a wannabe Shifty Schiff, trying to defend Biden family lies in committee hearings.

But Goldman sold his soul to the Democratic Party, and its leaders used him up, spat him out and stomped on his political grave, because they were too lazy or gutless to fight against the DSA parasite colonizing them.

But low voter turnout is the tool the DSA uses to grab power, and it can just as easily be turned against them.

Their victory is as fragile as a puff of smoke, but only as long as the silent majority wakes up and takes the reins from the fringe riders.

Bruce a true leader

For starters, in New York, every conservative, moderate, and vaguely rational person needs to register strategically as a Democrat so they can vote for the non-commie candidates in Democratic primaries.

The primaries are the election in deep blue districts.

Of course, that requires you to get off your backside and vote.

You can vote for whoever you like in the general election.

Secondly, vote for Blakeman as governor.

He is a competent moderate who has transformed Nassau County into the best-run — and safest — region of the state, governing for four years without a tax hike, killing a $150 million tax hike that his predecessor, Democrat Laura Curran, had planned before leaving office.

He doesn’t waste time on ideological pursuits.

His mission is all about making New Yorkers “happy again” with affordable, safe, family-friendly policies.

Blakeman is New York’s best chance to clip the wings of Mamdani and his anti-American goons.

Make Kathy Hochul pay for aiding and abetting the Communist revolutionaries who have colonized her party.

She endorsed Mamdani.

She owns this result.

She and the rest of her spineless fellow establishment Democrats allowed their party to be invaded by the “Algae Democrats” — vandals who seek to spread out and destroy anything that is good and beautiful in this country — like the lunatics trying to destroy the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC by feeding the algae and ripping off the lining, just to spite Donald Trump.

They have handed a gift to Republicans.

It’s time to use it.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

PG&E continues its sacred duty of keeping the lights on (and the bills skyrocketing) for roughly 16 million hapless souls across 70,000 square miles of northern and central California. 

From foggy northern-most sleepy town Eureka down to Bakersfield, and from the Pacific ocean to the Sierra peaks, this utility behemoth serves the San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno, Sacramento and a patchwork of farms, suburbs and mountain towns. 

With about 5.5 million electric accounts and 4.5 million gas ones, PG&E serves homes, businesses, factories and orchards alike. Because who doesn’t love a monopoly that touches every part of daily life?

The company’s new 2027–2030 General Rate Case is a masterpiece of understatement: an 8% revenue grab in 2027 alone ($1.24 billion extra), followed by 6.1% annual hikes. 

PG&E, ever the optimist, promises your combined gas-and-electric bill will stay basically flat in 2027 thanks to some expiring temporary charges. 

The California Public Utility Commission’s Public Advocates Office, however, isn’t buying the corporate fairy tale. 

It projects average bills jumping 16% in 2027 and a wallet-crushing 30% by 2030. 

Translation: The typical household gets slapped with another $444 a year starting in 2027, climbing toward $840 extra annually by 2030. 

Ouch. This on top of monthly energy bills that already might be several hundred dollars –– and for some, significantly north of that? Because nothing says “customer-focused” like steadily climbing bills in one of the world’s most expensive states.

Enter California’s brilliant solution: Force everyone onto all-electric everything. 

Cities and the state are madly in love with heat pumps, induction stoves, and EV chargers, shoving them down throats via building codes, subsidies and pious ordinances. 

Natural gas, you see, is so last century. 

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As customers obediently switch, gas volumes drop, and PG&E’s fixed pipeline costs get spread across fewer customers –– hello, classic “death spiral” of ever-higher per-therm rates. 

PG&E itself cheerfully advertises that heat pumps could save you ~$714 a year. 

Reality, as usual, is less shiny. 

Retrofitting a home for full electrification can easily run $10,000 to $30,000+ –– new heat pumps, bigger electrical panels, wiring upgrades, the works, even after rebates that never cover everything. 

Renters? Low-income families? Owners of 1950s houses with sketchy wiring? They often get hammered hardest. 

Then there are the charming electric-rate realities: sky-high baseline prices and time-of-use pricing that punishes you for cooking dinner or charging your car when the sun’s down. 

Those promised savings? They have a funny way of evaporating when your actual electric bill is already among the nation’s highest. 

Meanwhile, the grid needs billions in upgrades in part because of all this glorious electrification. 

Customers end up subsidizing their own expensive conversion while natural-gas holdouts foot the bill for an increasingly empty pipeline network. Truly a policy triumph.

No wonder San Francisco –– ever the trendsetter –– is throwing a tantrum and demanding a divorce from PG&E. 

After a century of flirtation, the city dusted off its municipalization dreams.

Because clearly, the same city government that struggles with homelessness and crime will nail electricity pricing and wildfire hardening.

Of course, wildfire safety and grid modernization are real needs, not corporate greed. But California’s regulatory kabuki and breakneck decarbonization timeline have produced exactly the mess you’d expect: soaring monthly bills, painful upfront conversion costs that hammer regular families and escapist fantasies about municipal takeovers that would likely make things worse. 

The state’s electrification crusade might sound noble until you’re staring at a five-figure invoice and a summer bill spike. 

California desperately needs adult supervision and a pivot to sane energy policy.

Until then, PG&E ratepayers will keep enjoying the privilege of funding Democrats’ green dreams, one painful monthly bill at a time. 

Richie Greenberg is a political commentator based in San Francisco.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

If you’re looking for a reason to feel even a touch hopeful after seeing the most radical Democrat Socialists sweep New York’s Democratic primaries, consider the following number: Eight.

That, roughly, is the percentage of all residents in the 13^th congressional district that cast their votes this week, giving Darializa Avila Chevalier a commanding victory over the incumbent, Adriano Espaillat.

Remember that next time some breathless pundit tells you that the Big Apple is turning full Commie red: the people who voted for Chevalier last night are in the absolute minority.

And that is either very good or very bad news, depending on how you look at it.

The bad news first: the primaries show us, as if those of us who live here needed any more proof, that New Yorkers are very hard to impress.

Having the mayor call pro-Israel advocates “monsters” just this Sunday while saying nothing about Hamas apparently wasn’t enough to propel people to get out and vote against his hand-picked choices.

In part it’s because the candidates this year were, let’s be honest, nobody’s idea of exciting.

But in part it’s because so many of us New Yorkers, bless us, live in fantasy land.

We remember a time, not too long ago, when the streets were safe and clean, and you didn’t have to worry about getting stabbed on the subway by some maniac every time you took the train.

And we assume that New York is always going to be all right no matter who runs it, because hey, New York is magical and it’s somehow bigger than the sum of its politicians.

It’s not.

New York is a real city, and one that’s very complex to govern.

And if left to nutjobs who say things like “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag” (that would be Chevalier), it may soon crumble beyond repair.

This shouldn’t be too hard for normal New Yorkers to comprehend.

Which means we’ve got a massive silent majority on our hands still slumbering, still refusing to see the very real danger these hateful candidate pose.

Which brings us to another bit of bad news: No one seems ready, willing or able to organize this massive silent majority into a viable political force.

Not the Jewish community, the nation’s largest, which for years has pretended like it could still wield some political influence even as the only party they considered supporting, the Democrats, turned increasingly more hostile.

Not the Republicans, who have continuously failed to produce attractive, viable candidates that could at least give a voice to people’s frustrations the way Spencer Pratt did in Los Angeles before he was trampled by the Democratic Party machine.

And that, hallelujah, is very good news.

Why? Because it means we have a tremendous, generational opportunity to truly remake New York.

As this week’s primaries make clear, the winning strategy of the Democratic Party these days is singular and simple: We hate America. That’s it.

It’s no longer about pretending to care about the cost of housing, or immigration, or even dunking on Trump.

It’s about parading around like third-worldist would-be revolutionaries and saying vile and vicious things about the flag, the country and the American way of life.

Rampant Jew-hatred is part and parcel of this approach: Knowing full well America is not the kind of benighted hellhole where refusing a Jew service at a coffee shop — as a Brooklyn establishment did recently to Dan Goldman, the sitting congressman who just lost his reelection bid to Mamdani crony Brad Lander — is tolerable, the radicals push for more performative bigotry to test the limits.

They want to let us know that they’re in control now, and that they hate us and everything we stand for.

And a looney strategy like that should still be plenty easy to defeat in America.

Which means that the Republicans, if they wise up, should have plenty to work with.

If the GOP goes on the offense locally, investing, say, in minority groups who are beginning to realize the catastrophe that is Mamdanistan, it could win big.

Rally up Hispanics who believe in family values, not radical laws requiring we refer to mothers as “gestating parents.”

Rally up Chinese landlords being squeezed by insane rent policies that rob them of the fruits of their labor.

Rally up black New Yorkers who refuse to see themselves as perpetual victims.

Rally up Jews who are no longer willing to walk into a coffee shop and wonder if they’ll soon be kicked out just for being who they are.

There’s a great, diverse coalition of fed-up folks out there.

Whoever figures out how to mobilize it is going to make New York City great again. 

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Every week, The Post will bring you our picks of the best one-liners and stories from satirical site the Babylon Bee to take the edge off Hump Day. Want more of a chuckle? Be sure to click the links.

“This is the happiest day of my life! I’m going to buy so many missiles!” said Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as he moonwalked across the desert sand. “Super stoked to try again next year!” READ MORE

“Kamala was good, but I think the algae would do a better job leading the country,” Democratic voter Kelsey Waters said. READ MORE

“Welcome. I’ve been expecting you,” said Obama as people slowly entered the top floor. “You no longer need those,” he said, cutting off guests’ entry wristbands. READ MORE

At publishing time, Starmer had reportedly accepted a new position as an aide to the “probably gay” Ayatollah of Iran. READ MORE

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Ducking a heated debate can be extremely revealing about a politician.

Take the case of Mayor Mamdani’s outrageous hide-and-seek reaction after a Brooklyn coffee shop taunted Rep. Daniel Goldman over his support for Israel and banned him from its Park Slope location.

The owner of Poetica Coffee, Parviz Mukhamadkulov, took to Instagram to write “Hey Congressman Dan Goldman, we see that you stopped by our shop today for a coffee. Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice?” next to an image of the congressman at the shop’s register.

The owner is a Hamas sympathizer who has justified the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, while calling “Israel the Nazi Germany of current time.”

“See, here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between,” his taunt of Goldman continued.

“Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

He added that the shop had issued Goldman a refund, saying the money was “probably coming from AIPAC anyways.”

Goldman’s Democratic primary opponent, former city Comptroller Brad Lander, had the decency to condemn the shop’s action, saying, “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome.”

Double standard

Mamdani, who endorsed Lander, sat out the fracas, until he finally opened his mouth Tuesday, only to say as close to nothing as is humanly possible.

Asked by a reporter whether he approved of the owner’s conduct, the mayor said only, “I have many political disagreements with Congressman Goldman when it comes to his votes and his views on Israel. What we saw online goes beyond that.”

Huh, that’s it?

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Mamdani won’t condemn the owner’s behavior because it aligns with his own bigotry.

Despite getting an estimated one-third of Jewish votes last year, the mayor is seemingly on a quest to normalize Jew-hatred.

He says he will not visit Israel because he doesn’t believe it should exist as the Jewish homeland.

And last month he became the first mayor in six decades to skip the Israel Day Parade.

Moreover, he still refuses to condemn two chants often taken up by anti-Israel protestors.

One is a call to “globalize the intifada,” and another is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Both effectively call for the elimination of Israel.

As such, it should not be a heavy lift for the mayor of the city with the world’s largest Jewish population to rule them out of bounds.

But he won’t do that, and also says he would arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau if he set foot in the city.

He cites as justification an indictment of the UN International Criminal Court, even though the United States does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

Yet nothing reveals the mayor’s double standard as much as imagining his reaction if the coffee shop had banned a Muslim patron, or a black one, or an Asian, Latino or a transgender customer.

In all those cases, the mayor would have rushed to a press conference where he would have mounted his high horse and, surrounded by his socialist comrades, denounced hate and trotted out his “warmth of collectivism” gibberish.

But his silence in this case does not come in a vacuum.

His mayoralty has made it open season on Jews and Israel. In those cases alone, hate is acceptable because it fits his radical agenda.

What ‘AIPAC’ means

He’s comfortable in the antisemitic gutter, as when he called members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “monsters” last week and said they “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”

The remarks followed AIPAC donations to the opponents running against his cadre of Democratic Socialist candidates.

So only the funders of the opponents running against his cronies have malign motives.

His AIPAC smear sparked condemnation from some Jewish leaders and advocacy groups, who accused him of spewing centuries-old antisemitic bile.

Yet he defended himself by digging a deeper hole, as when he said: “When I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people, not just in Palestine, but frankly, through much of the region, and it is a status quo for immorality,” and pointed to Israeli operations in Gaza as an example.

“And when it comes to the way in which they defend the status quo, oftentimes they defend it through direct contributions, as we are seeing right now in New York.”

None of that makes a whit of sense, nor does it justify his prejudice.

Sadly, Mamdani has not been alone in ducking the Goldman case.

Gov. Hochul, who is desperate to keep Mamdani supporters in her corner, apparently including the antisemites, has gone missing in action, as have other city and state Democrats.

Attorney General Letitia James never misses the chance to grab a headline when she can blast a business or anyone with a conservative bent, but has been silent on this one.

Similarly, city public advocate Jumaane Williams, has been in hiding and has nothing to say.

They are all shamed by Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Department of Justice. She said she already opened a probe into the incident and will “bring an enforcement action” if warranted.

Similarly, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer spoke Sunday about his concerns.

“Swap ‘AIPAC’ for ‘Jews’ and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books,” he said in a post on X.

“That’s not criticizing a lobby. That’s laundering antisemitism from your podium as the Mayor of a city with more than a million Jews. This bulls–t is dangerous.”

Leadership lacking

Civic groups are also responding to the coffee shop’s blatant prejudice against Goldman, with a group calling itself EndJewHatred announcing that it will hold a rally outside the shop Wednesday morning to make sure the discrimination does not become a new normal.

The rise of antisemitism is primarily a feature of the far left, but not exclusively.

Whatever its source, its growth is a disgraceful aspect of our contentious era.

Although America is still a far more welcoming and safer home for Jews than Europe, New York is not alone in seeing dramatic spikes in hatred and targeted violence against Jews.

In such cases, we naturally look for political leaders to condemn the ancient hatred.

But Mamdani has forfeited that role, and revealed his own dark soul.

The stain was obvious before he was elected but incidents like this one dash any hope he would grow in office.

He shows not the slightest evidence that he’s willing or wants to change.

Shame on him.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Motherhood is hard; weed helps: That’s the toxic message from a new group of online influencers — “gardeners,” they like to call themselves — who advocate using cannabis to deal with the stress of parenting small children.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Sarah Levy tallied 76,000 videos on TikTok with the “#gardenmom” label.

There’s Taylor Mitchem (with 120,000 followers), who had a baby in 2020 and felt responsible for most of the child care because her husband was too nervous to help much.

She was a regular weed user before her baby was born to help with her anxiety and ADHD.

So she decided to resume her habit, and began smoking again daily when her kid was 2 ½.

“Life is hard,” she told Levy. “If you have something that takes the edge off a little bit, why not?”

Why not? Because parenting small children while high on drugs is a recipe for disaster.

Using marijuana during pregnancy has been linked to low birth weights and pre-term birth, as well as to abnormal neurological development and a higher likelihood that the child will develop ADHD.

After a baby is born, the risks of weed use only multiply.

First, as anyone who’s ever cared for an infant knows, they need a lot of attention.

It’s not just the feeding and burping and changing; it’s also being attuned to small changes — if they spike a fever, for instance — that can require immediate medical attention.

Then there are the unsafe sleep habits: Of the more than 5,000 child-maltreatment fatality cases my colleagues and I have collected in our database at Lives Cut Short, more than 700 involved unsafe sleep conditions and more than two-thirds involved parental substance use.

Most parents can safely co-sleep with their children, because they will naturally wake up when a child is in distress.

If impaired by drugs or alcohol, though, that awareness may not kick in.

Many of the “garden moms” decide to smoke pot first thing in the morning, though: “Coffee and coughy,” they like to call it.

For those who compare cannabis to alcohol — noting that the latter is legal and probably worse for your health — can you imagine the backlash against mothers doing shots of vodka every morning while their kid is eating Cheerios?

The mothers Levy talked to told her that they “were not putting weed first.”

Rather, they blamed a lack of “meaningful parenting help from other adults” for their stress — and claimed to be “prioritizing their family by using cannabis as a tool: to help them stay patient, to respond neutrally to their children, to be present without becoming overwhelmed—essentially, to be better moms.”

Despite a complete lack of medical evidence that marijuana helps to cure anxiety or depression — and evidence it can make low-level mental-health problems worse, and even turn them into bigger ones — these mothers claim they use cannabis as a form of “self-care.”

What a load of narcissistic hooey.

Children who are mobile, but don’t yet understand certain dangers, are at the most risk when they lack a sober adult supervising them.

A baby left in a crib for hours will be fine — responsible parents do it every night.

What you can’t do is leave toddlers wandering around the house while you indulge.

They are the ones who touch hot stoves, run out the door into traffic, drown in bathtubs and swallow small objects.

Sorry if this makes parenting sound like a drag: Sometimes it is exhausting.

You can use drugs to forget that, but using doesn’t make you a better mother.

The “garden moms” Levy interviewed reassured her that they wait some amount of time before getting into a vehicle and driving their children anywhere — but it’s not clear how much time is necessary for a cannabis high to sufficiently subside.

A report from Ohio last year found that almost half of car-crash fatality victims had cannabis in their systems when they died.

And the idea that you can use marijuana every morning but then wait several hours before having to take your kids anywhere seems, let’s just say, unrealistic.

The “garden mom” trend combines two of the worst cultural ideas of the past few decades: That modern motherhood is awful, and that drug use is a harmless individual choice.

Feeling overwhelmed? Maybe your husband or boyfriend needs to step up and pitch in.

Feeling lonely? Maybe spend more time with Mommy and Me groups and less time posting TikTok videos.

Children need close supervision for a relatively short amount of their lives — but during that time, they need it desperately.

Advertising drug use as good parenting isn’t fooling anyone.  

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and project lead at LivesCutShort.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

This story originally appeared on NYPost

It’s amazing to think Keir Starmer was sold to us Brits as Mr. Sensible.

He’ll be gloriously boring and that’s just what we need, said his media cheerleaders when he was elected prime minister in July 2024.

After the tumult of Brexit, the wacky Boris Johnson years and all that lockdown lunacy, we need a little calm, they said.

Enter Sir Keir.

He’s a “safe pair of hands,” said every talking head.

“The grown-ups are back in charge,” cried The Guardian.

Fast-forward 23 months and Starmer has thrown in the towel.

Far from steadying the good ship Britain, he’s left it in an unholy mess.

Starmer’s Britain is a nation scarred by riots, fractured by social division, overrun with illegal immigrants and full of fuming Brits demanding to know how it all went so wrong.

I’ll tell you how: Because while Starmer posed as a sensible centrist, he let himself be dragged ever more leftward.

He promised to put out the fires of the Culture Wars, but ended up taking the side of the crackpot left in their infernal battle with normalcy. He bowed to the progressive bigotry that treats patriotism as racism, criticism of radical Islam as a “phobia” and freedom of speech as a threat to the social fabric.

Starmerite socialism

There’s a lesson here for America’s Democratic Party: Fail to make a break with your lunatic wing, and you too could end up in the garbage pail of history alongside Sir Keir.

Starmer bowed out with tears in his eyes as he announced his resignation outside 10 Downing St. on Monday.

He says he’ll oversee an “orderly transfer” of power.

Britain could have a new prime minister as early as next month.

We know who it will be: Andy Burnham, the long-serving mayor of Manchester who won a seat in the House of Commons in a by-election last week.

Burnham has gone to Parliament with one aim: to push out Sir Keir and take his throne.

If it is an “orderly transfer,” it will be the only orderly thing Starmer has done.

Everything else lies in ruins.

The economy has been sacrificed to the cult of welfarism.

Under Sir Keir the UK reached the grim milestone of paying out more in welfare than it receives in income tax.

Our broken state now forks out $441 billion a year to the workless, while pulling in just $438 billion from people who work.

This isn’t an accident — it’s Starmerite socialism in action.

Earlier this month, a WhatsApp message sent by one of Starmer’s Cabinet ministers was leaked.

It moaned that the only thing they discuss in government these days is “Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?”

Decent Brits are fuming over this hiking of their tax bills to pay ever fatter salaries to the lanyard classes. And worse, to fund the four-star bed and board of the hundreds of unvetted men who land on our shores every week.

We are forced to pay for the upkeep of blokes from backward countries who commit heinous crimes against our women and girls — true madness.

Our energy infrastructure is decaying too, thanks to Starmer’s appointment of Net Zero nut Ed Miliband as his environment secretary.

Like a true “End is Nigh” cultist, Miliband thinks Earth will burn if we frack for gas or drill for oil in the North Sea.

‘Immigration & energy’

President Trump was bang on when he said Starmer “failed badly” on two big issues: “immigration and energy.” Our borders are broken and our abundant natural resources are stuck underground — all because of woke ideology.

Then there was Starmer’s disdain for everyday Brits.

When people hoisted up the England flag last summer, in defiance of the fashionably ashamed elites, he sneered.

One of his MPs said her “stomach churned” at the sight of these “tatty bits of cloth” — what a way to talk about the national banner.

Starmer tried to enforce a definition of “Islamophobia” to curb what us oiks can say about Islam.

His patrician impulse was always to tame public feeling.

Back in 2020, he took the knee for career criminal George Floyd; this year he flat out refused to take the knee for Henry Nowak, the sweet British student who was brutally murdered by a Sikh and then manhandled by police who falsely suspected him of racism.

It was Starmer summed up.

He genuflected to the BLM idiocy — but wagged his finger when Brits took the knee for white Henry Nowak.

Starmer shows where leftist nuttiness leads. His Labour Party, like the Dems, has turned its back on the working classes and thrown its lot in with the elitist drivel of graduate radicals. We end up with ever stiffer taxes, infinite “asylum-seekers,” woke censorship, an energy crisis and working-class anger.

Let Starmer’s downfall be a lesson to leftist parties everywhere.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

A new ban on Glock handguns takes effect in California, starting July 1. The law will, once again, remind Americans why California has become the ultimate legislative laboratory for aggressive gun control.

Firearms dealers across the state will no longer be permitted to sell new Glock handguns or similar models that state lawmakers have aggressively reclassified as a form of machine gun.

The justification behind this radical pivot is that these pistols can supposedly be modified easily with illegal, aftermarket conversion devices that fundamentally alter their rate of fire.

But rather than focusing energy and resources on the criminals who manufacture, distribute or use those illicit conversion switches, California has chosen a completely different route.

The state has decided to restrict future retail access to the Glock, the most popular handgun in America, punishing law-abiding citizens for the actions of criminals. It is the legislative equivalent of banning the Honda Civic because someone used one as a getaway car.

The sheer irony of this legislative maneuver is impossible to ignore.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, former Vice President Kamala Harris publicly boasted about owning a Glock herself for personal protection, even telling interviewers that anyone breaking into her house was going to be shot.

If she still owns it, she’s legally untouchable. Existing owners remain unaffected by the new regulations.

The restrictions apply primarily to future buyers, effectively creating a familiar, two-tiered reality in which political elites and grandfathered owners keep their firearms while the next generation faces increasingly limited choices.

It leaves the Second Amendment looking more like a limited-time retail promotion than an unalienable right.

But the handgun ban is only half of the summer rollout.

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Beginning July 1, firearm dealers will also be required to complete comprehensive, state-approved training designed to help them identify customers who might pose a danger to themselves or others.

On the surface, the measure sounds entirely reasonable, even noble. Nobody wants firearms falling into the wrong hands or arming someone who hears voices in the drywall.

The catch, as always, is the inevitable consequences of these supposedly well-meaning grand plans. Once private businesses are forcefully transformed into behavioral screening centers, subjective judgments hijack the purchasing process.

What actually constitutes suspicious behavior? Who decides the baseline for mental stability at a retail counter? What protections exist for ordinary individuals who are wrongly flagged based on an employee’s personal biases, political views or a simple misunderstanding?

Suddenly, a minimum-wage store clerk is acting as a state-mandated psychologist with the power to deny a constitutional right, transforming a retail transaction into an amateur interrogation.

Conservatives and civil liberties advocates nationwide should pay very close attention to this shift. California has a long documented history of exporting its political trends to the rest of the country. Policies that begin as Petri dish experiments in Sacramento almost always become the blueprint for progressive lawmakers elsewhere.

What happens in California rarely stays within its borders. Look at automotive emission standards; California set its own rigid rules, and because of its massive market share, automakers nationwide were forced to rewrite their entire manufacturing lines to comply.

Look at big tech and data privacy; the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) single-handedly forced the global tech industry to reshape how Internet data is handled for every single American user, regardless of whether they lived in San Diego or Syracuse.

Redefinition has effectively become the new prohibition. If Democrats take control of the White House or secure a unified Congress in 2028, California’s current legislative experiments will almost certainly serve as the federal framework.

Today’s “machine gun” reclassification is a local compliance headache for West Coast dealers; tomorrow, it could easily become mandatory national policy.

The bill’s underlying mechanics aggressively burden future buyers — mostly ordinary citizens trying to protect their families — while changing absolutely nothing for the criminal elements who already operate outside the law.

When standard consumer goods are redefined as military-grade weapons, the law stops targeting crime and starts targeting the innocent.

Ultimately, the debate is no longer just about firearms or ballistic design. It is a fundamental struggle over who is able to exercise basic constitutional rights.

California is just the warning shot; the rest of the country is squarely in the crosshairs.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist.

This story originally appeared on NYPost