Last month, Britain made a dangerous swing to the left.

Private education has been attacked, more public housing, the promotion of environmental Marxism, and much more.

But that isn’t to say there wasn’t an unspoken gospel among the main parties concerning the deliberate impoverishment of the British Isles.

Merely aesthetic differences separate them.

A distinguished associate of mine told me about his grievances, the attacks against people earning lower wages and the political weaponization used by both major parties to score points from the electorate.

He also mentioned the infuriating behavior of leftist Samaritans preaching love, but when people vote contrary to their intentions, spew irascible diatribes.

Disappointing as it is, I am not terribly surprised. It would be a mistake to label the conservatives as oriented by free-market liberalism. Some permitted the organization of market forces; others such as Robert Peel, Margaret Thatcher and John Major were proponents of individual liberty.

With the Democrat convention having begun today, the DNC released its platform, a 91-page mess of ideas and stances that is, as Lewis Carroll would say, a combination of “ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.”

Aside from insisting that Biden is the candidate, the document is a mess of communism, lies about Trump, economic ignorance, race-baiting, and, surprisingly, pro-Israel language that will enrage the pro-Hamas base.

At the end of the day, few will like it. I’ve attempted to put the highlights into this post.

The first section in the document covers economics. It is framed in terms of class warfare between Trump, the country club candidate fighting for billionaires, and scrappy Scranton Joe Biden, who isn’t a candidate.

The actual DNC candidate is the elitist Kamala, the child of two Berkeley professors, who then grew up in affluence in Montreal, Canada.

The document insists that Biden has the best economic record ever and offers multiple promises for the future. Here are just a few:

There’s a funny internet meme that uses a still frame from a British sketch comedy show in which two naïve Nazis wonder aloud, “Are we the baddies?”

The conservative humor site Twitchy is fond of referencing that joke whenever the U.K. government treats George Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual instead of a warning.

These days, the joke is everywhere because the world is watching Britain nosedive into abject tyranny.

U.K. officials do not like dissent. They do not like free speech. And they certainly do not like it when ordinary citizens criticize the government. For these reasons, the authoritarians across the pond caution their domestic serfs: “Think before you post.”

Included in that ominous threat is the promise that the Crown will come after anyone for “inciting hatred” online. What is “hatred”? Why, that’s for government functionaries to decide and for lowly commoners to find out! In a bit of cowardly arm-twisting meant both to encourage community snitching and to terrify concerned family members, Big Brother underscores its warning with this doozy: “Remind those close to you to share responsibly or face the consequences.” The government’s thought police would hate for something bad to happen to someone you love. So don’t force them to be the baddies, okay?

Iran’s strategy of Middle East conquest by proxy has proven remarkably effective.  Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen have all turned into pawns in the Persian power’s quest for regional dominance.

The latest iteration of that playbook, Gaza, shows what happens to an Arab territory that subordinates its own interests to Iran’s hegemonic and anti-Israel aims.

Iran’s cynical strategy of “fighting Israel until the last Arab” is about to repeat itself in Lebanon, after Hezb’allah’s July 27 rocket attack murdered a dozen children playing soccer on the Golan Heights of Israel.

Iran’s strategy has been successful partly thanks to anti-Israel bias by the global media, the U.N., International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other actors that effectively abet Iran’s jihadi war on Western civilization.

Not only has Vladimir Putin, the putative emperor of Russia, been proven to have no clothes, but as evidenced daily in Kursk, the Russian Army militarily speaking has been caught stark naked as well by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Ukraine’s stunning counteroffensive in Kursk that began on Aug. 6 is proving to be a major personal embarrassment to Putin and his regime – and it is continuing to gain steam capturing Russian territory at a faster rate than what Moscow has been able to achieve in the Donbas after months of bloody fighting and 500,000+ casualties.

Sometimes, as Col. Joshua Chamberlain did while defending Little Round Top at Gettysburg during the American Civil War, you have to “fix bayonets’” and attack.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the AFU Commander-in-Chief, has done just that and boldly aimed them at the underside of Putin’s corrupt and decaying Russia.

In doing so, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals have proven the Russian Army to be one-dimensional. Putin’s army can lay siege – and it can inch forward bleeding bodies. However, it cannot maneuver.

This sad sack static Russian army is not their father’s Soviet Army. Rather, they are their great-great grandfather’s meatgrinder of an army that fled the battlefields of WWI

In a landmark legal decision, a federal judge ruled that Google violated antitrust laws by maintaining its monopoly power in the markets for general search services and general search text advertisements.

The ruling, issued on Aug. 5 by Judge Amit Mehta, concludes a lengthy legal battle initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reached the following conclusion:  Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act,” Mehta’s decision stated.

Republicans are just waking up to the horror that they’ve been had.

The Trump campaign seems blindsided by Kamala Harris. Having avoided the ordeal of a primary, Harris dances onto the national scene appearing well-rested and unscathed.

In polls, she is already tied with Trump—erasing his sizable lead in just one week.

Scrambling to make sense of what just happened, J.D. Vance has called her extra-democratic appointment a “coup.” He has suggested it cheated voters out of the chance to pick their own nominee.

But a “coup” involves regime change. This switcheroo involved none. That’s why you don’t see members of the Biden administration objecting.

The maneuver didn’t damage Biden’s party, which tested a losing candidate, looked at his polls, and swapped him out for something better.

A more accurate description is this: the Republicans have once again been outfoxed. So has the electorate, which could wind up with a far more left-wing president than it even knows.

The question is: What are Republicans going to do about it?

Just a fraction of the Brits murdered by foreigners recently. And they expect zero pushback from that?

It's a story we've seen before. In the US and Europe during the pandemic lockdowns, far-left rioting and looting in the name of BLM was widely celebrated by the corporate media and protected by government officials.  The lockdown mandates were not enforced when it came to progressive unrest.

Conservative anti-mandate protesters, on the other hand, were treated as terrorists and governments were quick to censor, suppress and intimidate.  A two tier policing system and legal system bubbled to the surface.

Wherever conservative, nationalist or "right wing" protests arise in the west the full force of government power is applied to frighten the public into compliance. It might be to enforce covid mandates or it might be to prevent the populace from questioning open border policies. In the UK, the mask has truly come off. The message? You will accept mass immigration from the third world, or else...

Imagine you are 80 years old and the unexpected knock on your door turns out to be an eager young journalist who wants to know how on earth you found the time, money, and energy to make all those small political donations to Democratic candidates and progressive activist groups.

"What are you talking about, young man? I think I gave Bill Clinton $10 a long time ago, but I haven't given anybody in either party a penny since that contribution," you exclaim.

Turns out, the young journalist excitedly explains, that Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show you made more than 20,000 donations in recent months with a total value in excess of $800,000!

And oh by the way, according to those same FEC records, you are still living at an address in Virginia, not the New Jersey home where this increasingly tense interview is taking place.

Something clearly isn't right. Either the FEC records represent some sort of computer glitch or you are a victim of Smurfing.

Dozens of Wagner mercenaries were killed and a Russian helicopter was destroyed in an ambush by al-Qaeda-allied rebels in Mali.

Nikita Fedyanin, the editor and owner of the Grey Zone Wagner Telegram channel and a leading Kremlin propagandist, was also killed in the attack in the Sahara Desert.

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-linked group, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Wagner convoy near the desert town of Tinzawatene on the border with Algeria.

In one video, an Arab man, who appears to be a commander, can be seen inspecting a captured vehicle as Tuareg fighters, wearing flowing robes, turbans and sunglasses, celebrate.

The amount of gaslighting that the Leftmedia is doing to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris in her new status as the likely presidential nominee of the Democrat Party is insane.

The legacy media’s latest attempt at memory-holing is to assert that conservatives were the ones inaccurately labeling Harris the “border czar.”

It was the Leftmedia itself that first hailed her as such.

Before that, though, in March of 2021, President Joe Biden said, “I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that … are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”

Kamala Harris was tapped to be in charge of overseeing the border and “stemming the migration to our southern border.”

It was a job she completely failed at (though it’s obvious that the influx of illegals was the goal of this administration).

Much to the chagrin of the Democrats and their media allies, immigration is the top issue for the majority of Americans this election.

I have attended about a half-dozen national conventions, Republican and Democratic, and watched at least a dozen more.

And I can say two things: 1) They have all generally bored me. 2) The 2024 Republican National Convention didn't.

The RNC not only held my interest, it often moved me emotionally.

But both Trump and the Republican Party made one big mistake — a mistake I noted on my radio show during the convention and have pointed out for decades.

Virtually all the convention speakers focused their attention on President Joe Biden. The audience did the same, as when it would chant, "Joe must go."

For decades, I have pleaded with Republican office seekers to focus their attacks at least as much on the Democratic Party and the Left as on their opponent.

Not doing so at the convention has come back to bite them — just three days later. Now, "Joe did go." So, all the time and effort devoted to attacking Biden was utterly wasted.

I have never understood why Republicans always concentrate their fire on their Democratic opponent while ignoring virtually any mention of the threat posed by the Democratic Party and the Left.

Cyberattacks have truly become the digital equivalent of natural disasters -- sudden, catastrophic, and terrifyingly inevitable.

The recent CrowdStrike update debacle, which triggered a global meltdown affecting multiple critical sectors, was a glaring example of this modern reality.

Imagine hospitals unable to access patient records, emergency services offline, airports grounded, and banks in utter disarray.

This isn't the plot of a dystopian novel, but the grim reality faced by the world over the weekend following the compromised CrowdStrike update.

Reports on the ground detailed a scene of unprecedented chaos that unfolded as critical sectors went dark.

Experts suggest that this catastrophe likely stemmed from skipped checks during the update process -- a simple oversight with disastrous consequences.

It's a scenario eerily reminiscent of the infamous SolarWinds hack, where the attackers exploited the software update mechanism to infiltrate numerous high-profile organizations, including U.S. federal agencies.

Who has most peddled conspiracy allegations in the last nine years—all of them false and nearly all of them influencing national elections and public policies?

Once a target is constructed as Hitlerian, almost any means necessary to quash that perceived existential threat become justified. And we have seen a lot of them in the last nine years.

Russian collusion did not work.

Christopher Steele was a fraud.

Robert Mueller came up empty.

The Alfa Bank ping caper was a myth.

The Russian laptop disinformation was a lie and ruined the reputations of the “51 former intelligence authorities” who sanctioned it.

The first Trump impeachment was a strictly partisan vote, activated when Trump lost the House and Mueller had come up empty.

Only ten Republicans impeached Trump a second time; the Senate again acquitted then-private citizen Trump.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has declared that the “decolonization of the Russian Federation is a necessary condition for sustainable peace” and that Russia is pursuing a “policy of genocide” in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not begin “suddenly” but was the logical result of the neo-imperial evolution of post-Soviet Russia’s politics and a lack of action from the West against this expansionism.

The decolonization of Russia will be a long process and should not be reduced to an ethnic conflict of “non-Russians against Russians,” which could lead to war throughout Eurasia.

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

That quotation comes from Macbeth.

The Thane of Cawdor had just been executed for treason, and the king’s son described his virtuous repentance on the block.

That phrase popped into my mind when I thought of all the Democrats sincerely praising Biden for pulling (or being pushed) out of the presidential race in the same way they’re now sincerely praising his presidency.

They’re not being hypocrites. Biden was great for the Democrat party and is now, by leaving, continuing to be great.

A prominent topic that economics students anywhere cannot avoid is market failure.

Students everywhere are taught that the free market is inherently unstable and causes problems that can only be fixed through legislation and regulation.

As a result, most of those who take an economics class come out of it believing that the state helps counter the shortcomings of the free market.

However, the concept of market failure is fallacious as it is based upon faulty economic reasoning.

Belief in market failure is often complementary with seeking to promote politically desirable goals rather than to promote economic growth.

First, a free market operates on freedom of association and property rights. Therefore, for any transaction or exchange to be conducted on a free market, it must be voluntary.

Further, if both parties agree on an exchange, then both parties must assume that the exchange is beneficial to themselves.

Whenever consumers buy a product, they value the product more than the money they pay for it. Similarly, the store sells them the product since it values the money earned more than the loss of the product that they sell to consumers.

It may be the case that one party is mistaken and ends up not preferring the exchange retroactively, but this is not a determining factor in the choice to transact.

Through this process, value is created through free markets. As people are free to interact and exchange, they make mutually beneficial trades that benefit both parties.

In early World War II, on Nov. 30, 1939, a Soviet-Russian army invaded Finland in a surprise massive attack.

The Finns were eventually outnumbered nearly 3 to 1. The population of the Soviet Union in 1940 was 50 times larger than that of Finland.

Finland’s former anti-Soviet ally, Nazi Germany, had sold it out under the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which made Germany and Russia de facto allies.

Finland’s other allies, particularly France and Britain, were slow in giving aid. Both were unsure whether Finland had any chance of survival.

And they were further confused as to whether their archenemy Germany was friendly or hostile to Finland.

Yet for nearly the next four months, the Finns fought ferociously. They were led brilliantly by their iconic general and commander-in-chief, Carl Mannerheim.

By March 1940, however, the brave but exhausted Finns were being slowly ground down.

Soon they were facing abject defeat—even after courageously inflicting nearly 500,000 Russian casualties, 10 times the number of their own dead, wounded, and missing.

Finnish ferocity shocked Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

“It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Those are the ill-timed words Joe Biden used in a political call to action days before the attempted assassination of  Donald Trump, which our team covered in real time.

There is no direct association between those words and the attempt on Trump’s life other than they characterize Biden’s caustic campaign rhetoric asserting that Trump is a grave existential threat to “democracy.”

Biden, whose administrative record is littered with a plethora of domestic and foreign policy failures, has centered his whole campaign on the diversionary theme of saving our nation from the Trump threat, and his low-information voters are sucking it up.

As I have noted, the proliferation of Biden’s faux “democracy” rhetoric is very deliberate in its obfuscation about the founding tenets of American Liberty.

When he autocratically demands that you “support democracy,” he means the statist authoritarian rule of democratic socialism, now the foundational platform of his Democrat Party.

That reveals Biden and his leftist Demo cadres are the real threats to our Republic and Liberty.

Given that Biden’s notion of “democracy” is the antithesis of our nation’s founding tenets, in that context, in fact, Trump is an enormous threat to Biden’s statist authoritarian “democracy.”

What follows is a mix of observations and analysis regarding the attack on Trump by Biden, his leftists, and a radicalized assassin.

[TTP:  The news is out that President Trump’s VP pick is J.D. Vance (see Monica Showalter’s article in American Thinker) but this writer has some very important points to make about the Veep position regarding the future.]

President Trump will be announcing his running mate within the next few days, and opinions are flying about the qualities he should seek in his next vice president.

Experience, state of origin, race, sex, loyalty, and past comments regarding President Trump are all factors voters are focusing on when deciding their preferred candidate to round out the Republican ticket.

The common goal is to draw turnout from as many typically non-Republican voting demographics as possible. However, the most consistent theme is that many seem to believe that Trump needs to pick someone who can be his successor.

This belief may be based in ignorance.

Executive Summary:

• Moscow’s forces in Ukraine face increasing problems with the military, both at the front and at home. These issues are bound to affect Russia’s ability to fight in the coming months.
• At the front, Russian commanders are dealing with fragging, desertions, and corruption. At home, Moscow has been compelled to offer larger bonuses to recruit more men and has even asked Russians to turn in their privately owned guns.
• Public hostility is growing toward veterans of the war, who are committing violent crimes upon their return. These are precisely the people Putin says will become Russia’s new elite.

For quite a considerable amount of time, the topics of job creation and unemployment have been central to every political campaign in almost every country.

It hasn’t been without good reason, either, since job security is one of the most important factors in a person’s career. Therefore, a candidate who can promise to create more jobs and sustain job growth would appear on paper to be the better candidate.

However, there are few policies that promote greater havoc than job-creation programs. This should not be a surprise since the state is ultimately not responsible for financing jobs, so it need not worry about profit or loss.

Politicians are inclined to include job-creation programs in their promises because they are often popular with voters.

After all, if there are more jobs in the economy, unemployment will be lower, and there is a greater likelihood that workers in the country will not fall on hard times.

Since nearly every household has a member of their family who works, job-creation programs have nearly universal appeal.

If a politician can position themselves as a job creator, they garner a massive boost toward their odds of being elected.

Thus, they all aim to one-up each other with what they promise to voters. Unfortunately, in this case, competition does not lead to better results.

Is Great Britain once again going in the opposite direction of the European Union?

Right-wing parties swept EU elections last month, but the British Tories are out.

After 14 years at the helm, Britain’s Conservative Party lost in a landslide as the left-wing Labour Party cleaned up, seizing at least 410 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

It was a bruising defeat for the Tories, as their former majority has been reduced to just 121 seats. But it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Furthermore, Labour’s victory wasn’t so much a mandate as it was a repudiation of the Tories and their recent lackluster leadership amid a slowing economy still trying to recover from the COVID pandemic.

Now, Labour will take up the reins, with its leader, Keir Starmer, becoming the country’s new prime minister.

Chief among their challenges will be turning around a struggling economy without further ballooning an already high national debt.

Furthermore, Labour’s win is not as big as it appears.

Many people who know anything about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE, or ATF for short) will know they started off as a “harmless” tax collecting agency that eventually turned into a law enforcement agency in its own right.

In other words, they evolved from a bunch of glorified robbers with mechanical calculators and spreadsheets into a gang of violent thugs with guns and badges.

This transformation became obvious to the world in the famous Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993) incidents, both having had heavy ATF involvement and with the latter event culminating in an open massacre of the Branch Davidians that included women and children.

Later as they have cooled their trigger fingers, the ATF’s side gig of deliberately allowing guns to flow into Mexico for “tracking purposes” was exposed in the Fast and Furious scandal after two of these guns turned up near the scene of the killing of Brian Terry, a border patrol officer, in 2010 (a whole of lot of good this “tracking” did).

In more recent years, ATF’s favorite pastime has been to send several car-loads worth of thugs LARPing with full tactical gear to raid and intimidate American licensed gun dealers for supposed infractions of federal firearms laws and confiscate their property.

People of a certain age will remember the name “Donald Segretti.”

In the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon, this youthful campaign aide made the phrase “dirty tricks” part of the American political lexicon.

Segretti’s mischief included sending embarrassing letters under the names of Nixon’s political rivals.

Although his dirty tricks had little or no effect on the election’s outcome, Segretti served four and a half months in prison.

With Segretti’s four and a half months as a baseline, the 51-plus dirty tricksters who conspired successfully to get Joe Biden elected president in 2020 would seem to deserve no less.

Confident to a fault about the Democrat control of the media, 51 intel officials signed on to the most flagrant disinformation campaign in anyone’s memory.

A very interesting study appeared last week by two researchers looking into the pandemic policy response around the world. They are Drs. Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel of Stanford and Harvard, respectively.

Their ambition was quite straightforward. They wanted to examine the effects of government policy on the virus.

In this ambition, after all, researchers have access to an unprecedented amount of information. We have global data on strategies and stringencies. We have global data on infections and mortality.

We can look at it all according to the timeline. We have precise dating of stay-at-home orders, business closures, meeting bans, masking, and every other physical intervention you can imagine.

The researchers merely wanted to track what worked and what did not, as a way of informing future responses to viral outbreaks so that public health can learn lessons and do better next time.

They presumed from the outset they would discover that at least some mitigation tactics achieved the aim.

Technology is about to accelerate because Chevron deference is over and regulators can't just make up laws anymore. So, countless new startups just became feasible. This is often spoken about in the abstract, so let's do three examples and two visuals.

THREE EXAMPLES:

1) Genomics. Did Congress explicitly give FDA authority to regulate genetic tests in a bill like Kefauver-Harris (1962) or PDUFA (1992)? No, it did not.

But in the early 2010s, FDA attacked 23andMe and forced them to take personal genomic tests offline.

Implicitly, this was under Chevron.

2) Nuclear power. Did Congress explicitly give EPA and NRC the authority to implement ALARA? No, it did not.

But these agencies came up with this "as low as reasonably achievable" standard, forcing nuclear energy to become as expensive as other energy sources by spending all the cost-savings on "safety."

Implicitly, this was under Chevron, too.

3) Cryptocurrency. You guessed it. Did Congress explicitly give the SEC authority to regulate crypto? No, it did not.

Cryptocurrencies didn't exist when the 1933 and 1934 acts were written. However, the SEC says it has regulatory authority over crypto, even when Congress is deliberating on bills to the contrary.

Implicitly, that claim of SEC authority too was under Chevron.

In other words: if a regulator can't point to the law that gives them the power, they may not have the power. And you might be able to win in a court of law.

The U.S. State Department said that recent remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting he would supply North Korea with weapons are “incredibly concerning.”

Earlier this week, in a visit to North Korea, Mr. Putin suggested that weapons supplies to the isolated, communist country would be a similar response to the West arming Ukraine in the midst of the two-year-long war with Russia.

The Russian leader also warned South Korea against supplying arms to Ukraine.

In comments at a news briefing on Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about the Russian president’s comments about possible arms supplies to Pyongyang. “It’s incredibly concerning,” he said in response.

“It would destabilize the Korean Peninsula, of course, and potentially ... depending on the type of weapons they provide, might violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia itself has supported,” he added.

The spokesman said the United States “will continue to work with our allies in the region” such as “South Korea, Japan, others ... to respond to the threat posed by North Korea.”

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus — gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

For as long as I can remember, the Left has been sneering at anyone who points out that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.

They find the notion almost as unsophisticated and fascistic as flying a revolutionary-era flag. Others dismiss the democracy/republic debate as pedantic or a semantic distraction. They shouldn't.

The other day, CNN's Donie O'Sullivan tried to make Trump fans who repeat this factual contention look like a bunch of dumb, lockstepping authoritarians.

To explain the problem, CNN even recruited "democracy" expert Anne Applebaum, who noted that, "America is a democracy. It was founded as a democracy ... the word 'democracy' and the word 'republic' have often been used interchangeably. There isn't a meaningful difference between them ..."

Sure there is.