Hello, and welcome to Friday, May 29, 2026. Today is National Alligator Day. It’s also National Paperclip Day and Mount Everest Day, which celebrates the day in 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal were the first to reach the summit (the latter on his birthday).
1765: Patrick Henry’s historic speech against the Stamp Act, answering a cry of “Treason!” with, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” It was his birthday, by the way.
1790: Rhode Island becomes the last of the original 13 colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution
1886: American pharmacist John Pemberton begins advertising his patented medicine, Coca-Cola, in Atlanta.
1900: Trademark “Escalator” registered by Otis Elevator Co.
1919: Charles Strite files patent for the automatic pop-up toaster.
1942: Bing Crosby records Irving Berlin’s song “White Christmas” with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers in just 18 minutes; it becomes the world’s best-selling single, with an estimated 100 million copies sold so far.
1960: Everly Brothers single “Cathy’s Clown” hits #1.
1969: Atlantic Records releases the eponymous debut album Crosby, Stills & Nash; it contains hits ‘”Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
1989: Student pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, China, construct a replica of the Statue of Liberty, naming it the Goddess of Democracy.
Birthdays Today Include: Sylvester Magee, last living American slave and oldest person who ever lived; G.K. Chesterton, English writer (Father Brown, The Everlasting Man); Bob Hope, actor, comedian and entertainer; Stacy Keach, Sr., actor (Pretty Woman, Up In Smoke, The Long Riders); President John F. Kennedy; Clifton James, actor (Live and Let Die, Silver Streak); Fay Vincent, lawyer and sports executive (MLB Commissioner, 1989-92); Al Unser, auto racer (Indianapolis 500 1970-71, ’78, ’87); Bob Simon, TV correspondent (CBS, 60 Minutes); Gary Brooker, British rock keyboardist and singer (Procol Harum – “A Whiter Shade of Pale”); John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981; Annette Bening, actress (Grifters, Bugsy, American Beauty, The American President, Mars Attacks!); Mel Gaynor, British rock drummer (Simple Minds – “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”; and David Palmer, British drummer (ABC – “The Lexicon Of Love“).
If today’s your day, too, happy day to you.
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A few days ago, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box. Here’s part of that interview.
Let’s look closely at what the man says and break it down.
For the purpose of discussion, I’ve used an application to strip the text out from the You Tube video for posting here. Now understand, sometimes the translation isn’t 100%. There will be errors in the text, and as a result I’ve had to do some manual editing, but nothing that changes the meaning. With that understanding, let’s proceed. Bezos says:
I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies. So, you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling. So you would pay rent, groceries, and so what’s… happening here is politicians are using the kind of age-old technique. So there’s this tale of two economies and they’re using this age-old technique of, you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers. But the problem is, that doesn’t solve anything. And so, like, if you want to help the the group of people who are struggling, you have to figure out real root causes and solutions, and that takes skill.
Bezos, here, is firing back at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose entire political brand rests on a single premise: Billionaires like Bezos are why working-class New Yorkers can’t afford rent. Bezos called it exactly what it is — resentment politics.
Understand, this isn’t a new thing, but rather just a name for a trick that’s older than the very concept of government. Indeed, it’s the same reason Cain bopped Abel with a boulder. The same tactic. The same excuses. Blame someone else, and use violence to enforce your point. Politicians have been laundering their own failures by pointing fingers at convenient villains ever since.
Mamdani didn’t invent the playbook. He just found his nefarious villain and ran with it, in much the same way as Hitler found his target in the Jews.
Yeah, you read that correctly. I’m sure I’ll be accused of being inflammatory. I’m quite sure I’m opening up myself for such nonsense. So be it. I don’t much care. It goes with the territory of observing the world with anything resembling honesty, or worse, writing about it for publication.
Any honest student of history will notice the pattern: The ideological playbook driving Luigi Mangione’s admirers — or those of Tyler Robinson, who shot Charlie Kirk — is the same one that powered the movements of the 1930s. Different targets, same logic, same destination. The modern Democratic Party and the guy with the funny mustache are running the same program. The branding has changed. The method hasn’t.
It may even be an overstatement to suggest that the targets have changed. I’m sure you’ve noticed the antisemitism leaking out of the Democrat party of late. We’ve commented on it here often enough. I even mentioned it yesterday in commenting on two of the Democrat candidates for National Office — people who ventured WAY over the line, and yet drew no condemnation from the Democrat Party leadership. That’s a telling point that should repulse anyone with any kind of moral center. And just last night, news that Mamdani isn’t taking part in New York City’s Israel Day. Can’t imagine why…
Recommended: The Imminent Democrat Party Civil War
Our Tim O’Brien notices a similarity in another happening:
Last week, New York Giants QB Dart was asked to introduce the president of the United States at a New York event, and the left immediately seized on it as yet another opportunity to make something Trump touched radioactive.
Its methodology is simple. After Trump does the thing – in this case, speak – the left attacks anyone who shared the stage with the president. It’s an old-fashioned pressure campaign. Squeeze the people who, optically, appear not to hate Trump. If the left can “convict” you of not hating the president, it will smear you as someone who presumably supports everything the man has ever done, everything he’s ever said, and everything the left has made up about him. All of it.
You need to add Tim to your reading list, by the way.
And look, I’ve said for years that the American far left behaves far more like the NAZIs they claim to despise than they’ll ever admit — even to themselves. The evidence of that has become more obvious of late, and yet it still gets ignored.
Think about it. Any honest look at today’s Democrats shows what they’ve become over the last sixty years: the party of resentment. They don’t campaign on ideas so much as emotionally driven accusations. If you disagree with them, you instantly land in the penalty box. As Hillary Clinton phrased it, you’re a “deplorable,” a loser; and/or as Joe Biden framed it, a racist, a white supremacist, a sexist, a bigot, some flavor of “phobic.” Barry Obama called us “bitter clingers” (to which, even Hillary Clinton told us he was “out of touch.” Chuckles Schumer gets involved with his constant mantra of “Jim Crow 2.0.”
That’s the entire Democrat playbook now: Divide the country, sneer derisively at fully half the population, then masquerade moral arrogance as “leadership.” Democrats don’t persuade anymore. They smear. They demonize. They whip up resentment, feed outrage, and then act shocked when the mob they spent years cultivating turns ugly and violent.
Examples of this tactical pattern include Charlie Kirk’s vilification and assassination. What is it now, five times someone’s tried to kill the President? Then-House Majority Leader Steve Scalise? Rand Paul? Let’s not forget Kerry Sheron, a 69-year-old Army veteran from Escondido whose home became locally known as the “Trump House” because of its large pro-Trump and patriotic displays. He died after a brutal assault outside his home just a few days ago. Those are just a few examples off the top of my head.
Same excuses. Same emotional manipulation. Same moral decay. The tactics echo the kind of political machinery we’ve already seen in the former USSR and the Third Reich: Identify the enemy, isolate the enemy, dehumanize the enemy, then justify whatever comes next in the name of some supposedly higher cause. I don’t know about you, but I’m an American who is jolly well sick of it.
And yes, I know — I’m not supposed to notice the similarities out loud because somebody’s feelings might get bruised. My response is a simple one, and one I will not back down on: Tough cookies. History doesn’t stop being history just because modern activists find the comparison politically inconvenient.
Now, let’s consider this from the practical perspective. Does any of this actually help the people who are being manipulated by this tactic?
Well, no. As Bezos says, all the finger pointing doesn’t solve anything. Indeed, it makes things worse. I offer no counter to the argument that the Democrat playbook has been fairly successful in gathering people to vote for them. Every major city in America is basically Republican-free, so this act has been working at least that far, for many years. Most cities have been dominated by Democrats for decades. But have the lives of those voters been impacted in any positive way as a result of that dominance?
The answer of course, is that the average big city working class Democrat voter is still as bad off or worse than he or she was a couple generations ago. All Democrats have been successful at doing is creating a permanent underclass that can be depended upon to keep blindly voting the same way. In reality, it’s all they’ve ever cared about. It does wonders in helping Democrats keep their government job, but the helping the voters? Not so much. Remember Eric’s Axioms:
The worst thing you can do to a politician is actually solve a problem, because once you do, you’ve eliminated their ability to demagogue that problem. That’s why problems are never actually solved when government is involved.
So, really, problems don’t get solved because doing that doesn’t serve the interests of the party in power. The big-name Democrats have instead drilled into the heads of the sheep that it’s all because the rich aren’t paying “their fare share,” and we’re all greedy, racist, xenophobic homophobes.
Bezos says, and correctly:
…these people sometimes say that […] I don’t pay taxes. That’s untrue. I pay billions of dollars in taxes and […] if people want me to pay more billions, right, then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend you know that […] that’s going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you. You can’t connect those two things, not logically.
You know there […] are more examples. Why is rent expensive? I recently saw somebody blamed it on Airbnb. Okay, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. In fact, it’s already been outlawed […] in New York City and rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn’t causing high rents. What’s really causing high rent is government intervention.
Verdict: True. Unrestricted immigration and its associated surge in the need for housing also raises rent. I don’t want to dive too deeply there for the sake of brevity, but I can’t ignore the impact of it, either.
Consider this, as well: As part of the interview, Bezos argues that every working-class family, every teacher, truck driver, nurse, and tradesman should pay exactly zero in federal income tax. Zero. That’s a discussion I’d love to have, and I’d love to see Democrats argue against that one.
Thing is, to Bezos, and to myself as well, the real problem isn’t the tax code. The real problem is a government that burns through money like a drunken tourist in a casino. Doubling taxes — even doubling Bezos’ own gargantuan tax bill to the tune of billions — fixes nothing when Washington already treats taxpayer dollars like confetti at a parade.
The United States doesn’t suffer from a revenue problem. It suffers from a spending addiction wrapped in layers of incompetence thick enough to qualify as a federal agency.
Then there’s the fraud that we’ve only started uncovering. And of course, guess which party has been fighting against that fraud being revealed? You guessed it.
By some estimates, the waste and fraud, once removed, would alone erase annual deficits. No private company could survive operating the way Washington does. A business run this badly wouldn’t need a bailout. It would need a crime scene investigation. Investor meetings would be war zones.
Give you an example, the New York City school system, right? They spend $44,000 per student. Forty-four thousand! That’s 30% more per student than other big cities like Chicago, L.A., and Boston. And it’s three times more than Miami and Houston. And by the way, New York City doesn’t get better outcomes. But let me just say, if we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive, we’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee, and then, when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway.
This is spot on. There’s no private business in the world that could operate the way the government runs itself. Bezos’ comments, in fact, neatly describe why I’ve been calling for the removal of government from Education, healthcare, and many other functions it has usurped.
If I had a dollar for every time Democrats blamed capitalism for problems the government caused, I’d finally qualify as one of the rich they keep whining about.
VIP Members: Hit that heart on the lower left, just to let me know you were here, and let’s hear your comments.
Thought for the day: It takes a special kind of lunatic to believe that importing welfare recipients who want to kill us is a good idea.
Folks, a personal message: Thanks for being here today. It makes a real difference. Take care of yourselves. You’ve got a weekend in front of you. And since it’s National Alligator Day, see ya later… Oh, never mind.
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