DesertDreamer 🇺🇦

Background: Orbán is an entrenched but wildly unpopular oligarch and authoritarian. He is facing an election that he will decisively lose — unless he can manage some trick. This obvious false flag (which he will now blame on Ukraine) should not fool anyone. It should only remind us that other people in similar situations (I mean Trump) will have similar thoughts. See my essay from yesterday on "The Next Coup Attempt."

Mamdani won with the lowest share of the vote of any mayor in decades. He got 50.7% of the vote in an 85% Democratic city. He does not have a mandate to transform New York, and no amount of followers in the developing world is going to change that. Hochul, Menin and many other New York politicians are going to learn that they can build their platforms and their legacies by resisting the crazy agenda of this polarizing extremist mayor.

Trump endorsing Steve Hilton in the California Gov race might actually help Democrats avoid disaster. Before this, Hilton and another Republican, Chad Bianco, were polling high enough to finish in the top 2 spots, locking Dems out of the general election and guaranteeing a GOP flip. But if the GOP base consolidates, then a Democrat is much more likely to make it to the general election — where they would be heavily favored to win.

Sources: North Carolina intends to hire longtime NBA coach Michael Malone as the school’s next basketball coach. He’s an NBA Championship coach with the Denver Nuggets from the 2022-23 season and has won 510 games as an NBA head coach.

There's a bill advancing in the Florida Legislature titled "Ideologies Inconsistent w/ American Principles", which allows the state to compile a "domestic terrorism list", which is really an excuse to criminalize orgs of opposing political views. Bill #'s are HB 1471 & SB 1632.