Montana was admitted into the United States federal union as the 41st state on November 8, 1889. On the same date in 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century, becoming the 35th president of the United States.
Answers: Unshackle the housing market? Slash regulations and taxes? Make it easier to catch and punish bad guys? No. Prevent builders from supplying more and cheaper housing. Further hobble the police. Etc. Pro-Hamas socialist Zohran Mamdani has a slew of such pseudo-solutions.
And has a large following.
In New York’s mayoral race, decided Tuesday, the Republican candidate was excluded by the city’s heavily Democratic tilt. The incumbent mayor was also nonviable. Scandal-plagued former Governor Cuomo was the main alternative to a reputedly charming Mamdani now claiming a mandate to rob the rich.
Song Ying is a 72-year-old New Yorker who escaped the Chinese communists in 1976. She “swam for eight hours from Shenzhen, then a small fishing village, to Hong Kong,” explains The New York Times in a report on the growing generational divide among Chinese immigrants regarding the prospect of a socialist city. Song is dismayed by the strong support among young New Yorkers for Mamdani. She says — and knows — that socialism doesn’t work.
The Times belittles her concerns, stressing that Mao’s China is not the vision that Mamdani is selling. Yet upon winning, the mayor-elect asserted that his administration would prove that “no problem [is] too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.” Sounds like a government without limits.
Mamdani will not fix things. He offers as solutions more of the policies that caused current problems: more regulations; more taxes; more spending; more government in power and scope.
If a boulder is tumbling right toward you, demanding more and heavier boulders won’t stop you from being crushed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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We’d all like t’vote fer th’best man, but he’s never a candidate.
Kin Hubbard, as quoted in The Best of Kin Hubbard (1984).
1492: The oldest meteorite with a known date of impact struck a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France.
1504: Christopher Columbus returned from his fourth and final voyage.
1775: John Murray, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, started the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by offering freedom to slaves who abandoned their colonial masters to fight on the British side during the Revolution.
1940: The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in a windstorm a mere four months after completion.
Sure, socialist/communist Zohran Mamdani is now Mayor Elect of New York, but Omar Fateh lost to the incumbent mayor of Minneapolis on a second counting of the city’s ranked choice vote system. The latter is a victory for old-fashioned city politics, but what is the former?
Mamdani obviously wants to take from the rich and give to the poor, with a lot of government workers shuffling the money in between rich benefactors and poor dependents. Running grocery stores, of all things: Mamdani seeks to bring the efficiency of the DMV to the food industry.
But just how much harm can he do?
He still has to balance city budgets, and if he wants to spend billions, he has to “raise” billions in revenue. He cannot simply spend money he’s created — Mamdani doesn’t control the money supply. After all, socialism doesn’t create wealth ex nihilo.
Further, he will face opposition on his many pipe dreams. Since he has almost no work experience, and none managing anything, he may also prove to be way over his head.
Worst case? If he pushes his dream earnestly and effectually in the Big Apple, the rich and industrious will flee. (A possibility so likely that it is worth stating multiple times: when fools vote socialist, the wise vote with their feet.) Mamdani may usher in Atlas Shrugged faster than any pro-capitalist political party ever could.
Which, though disastrous for the poor, might prove educational.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Diversity is Sauron’s strength — and that’s very much the theme of The Lord of the Rings.
Carl Benjamin, @SargonofAkkad, responding (November 3, 2025) to a tweet by Don McGowan of the previous day.
On November 6, 1913, Mohandes K. Gandhi was arrested for participating in a march of Indian miners in South Africa.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor, agreeing that courts may properly consider evidence that an arrest is retaliatory.
According to Gonzalez’s lawsuit, in 2019 city leaders had lashed out against the councilwoman for her support of a nonbinding petition to remove a city manager. The city’s weapon? A rarely used law that it wielded against her for “briefly and inadvertently having the petition among her papers” during a heated council meeting; she allegedly tried to “steal” her own petition.
Gonzalez was arrested and spent a day in jail — the real reason, according to her lawsuit, being her criticism of local leaders.
The settlement means that statewide training on “First Amendment retaliation” (presumably, how to avoid engaging in it) will be offered throughout Texas and, for Castle Hill officials, will be mandatory.
The city must also pay $500,000 in damages to Gonzalez.
Anya Bidwell, an attorney for the Institute of Justice, which represented Gonzalez in the suit, observes that the First Amendment “doesn’t come with handcuffs. This outcome sends a message to officials everywhere: if you retaliate against critics, you can be held to account.”
Let’s hope that not a whole lot of training is needed to safeguard local freedom of speech. The issue is not that complicated.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On the Fifth of November, 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, where he had planted gunpowder in an attempt to blow up the building and kill King James I of England. Now known as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, originally called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, the conspiracy was an unsuccessful attempted regicide against by a group of English Catholics, led by Robert Catesby.
Guy Fawkes himself had been assigned to light the fuse. He was tortured, tried, and finally executed on the last day of the first month of the next year. Parliament declared a memorial day of November Fifth, and the event has been celebrated in one form or other ever since, echoed in literature, with poems by John Milton (1626), a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth (1841), and a comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982-1989) contributing to the memorials. The latter was turned into a movie, V for Vendetta (2006), in which the hero wears a Guy Fawkes mask (designed by Lloyd) and recites a famous nursery rhyme on the subject:
Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Currently, consider David Merritt Johns’s article “MAHA’s Blinkered War on ‘Groupthink’” — and when I shift to reader mode, a second title appears: “In Defense of ‘Groupthink.’”
Of course The Atlantic defends groupthink! It’s been working mightily to shore up totalitarian mob-think, woke half-think, for years!
“More than 1,300 academic papers and dozens of books have been published on” the target concept, groupthink, Mr. Johns explains. “Even after all of this time and effort, the evidence is wanting. In fact, most experts now believe that the old story of groupthink being a prime cause of bad decision making is wrong. Some don’t think that the phenomenon is even real.”
All this is to attack the Make America Healthy Again movement — without ever addressing any (yes, any) actual argument Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has actually made about “the jab” (various innovative coronavirus treatments from Pfizer, Moderna, etc.) in particular or the full panoply of vaccines in the various government-stamped vaccine schedules more generally (much less the disturbing rise, in America, of autism, auto-immune disorders, and obesity).
The entire essay is an elaborate evasion . . . to defend the thinking of a very large group of tax-paid/regulator-defended professionals.
“Our nation’s thinking isn’t broken,” Johns concludes, “and this administration shouldn’t try to fix it.”
The opposite is true: American political and bureaucratic culture has been corrupt and delusional for decades, at the very least.
And we should all be trying to fix it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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