Lot of news from the Wastelands -- the shithole cities and shithole states that are deliberately choosing to make themselves unfit for human habitation -- today.
Portland Trantifa thug arrested for kicking a child.
As Fourth of July revelers gathered in downtown Portland, Ore. on Friday, a hulking, heavyset person in fuchsia hotpants allegedly went on a violent rampage, punching and attacking people with a knife and stick. One victim was a minor. The attacker was so violent and out of control that a team of police officers had to use sedation to make the arrest.
The five feet ten inches tall, 260-pound suspect was booked into jail by Portland Police as an unidentified "Jane Doe" "female" after the suspect was released from hospital on July 5.
Ngo Comment can exclusively report that the suspect is a transgender Antifa member ("Trantifa") named Trever Eugene Osterhout, who has a history of alleged domestic violence. The 42-year-old satanist and LGBTQ+ activist uses the name "Trish Elizabeth Osterhout."
I hate to do this to you guys, but you need the visual to get a full sense of this story.
Philadelphia is a disgusting pit of a shithole city and is especially garbage-filled now that there's a garbage strike. There's a new hazard to worry about: Random trash-fires.
A large trash fire erupted in the 5000 block of Wyalusing Avenue in West Philadelphia just before 3 a.m. Sunday.
"They tried to set it on fire and I'm trying to figure out what is the point of that? You're going to set it on fire to do what? It's not going anywhere, it's going to still be here. They'll come dump it the next day," said Randall Pressley, who lives a few houses down from the site.
Pressley says people are taking advantage of the temporary city drop-off site. Instead of dumping trash bags, people and workers are dumping construction items, couches and other large materials.
Just a Mostly Peaceful night in Philadelphia.
The New York Times has investigated the Aurora, Colorado apartment-building-takeover and can now report that while Democrats denied any gang activity in the city, "The Truth is Complicated."
They don't actually mean the truth is complicated. The truth is simple: Conservatives were right, progressives were, as usual, either wrong just lying.
What the truth is is awkward, because the left conceives itself as highly intelligent and sophisticated diviners of truth, and yet they're constantly falling for hoaxes and the most absurd lies.
The Times acknowledges the awkward evidence of video showing the takeover, filmed by a resident of the apartment building, Cindy Romero.
Less than 10 minutes later, Romero and her husband heard shouting outside. "Shut your mouth!" someone yelled in Spanish. (Romero, an American citizen whose father was of Mexican descent, knew enough Spanish to make out the words.) Then came the sounds of a gunfight. "There were five to six different calibers of weapon," Romero said in one of several interviews she gave afterward to local and national news outlets. She and her husband would later find bullet holes in both of their cars; the windows of other tenants' cars were shattered.
A man was then found shot to death in the alley beside this gang-free building.
Jurinsky and other Republicans pointed to the Romeros' video as evidence that large numbers of Tren de Aragua members had come with the influx of migrants. Democratic politicians suggested they were crying wolf: "There is no gang takeover in any part of Aurora," Representative Jason Crow, of Colorado, posted on X...
Events in Aurora soon caught the attention of Donald Trump, who was then campaigning on a promise to "take America back" from undocumented immigrants.
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The more central Aurora became to Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, the greater the temptation among Democratic politicians and activists to wave away talk of gang activity in the city as a right-wing hallucination. But their refusal to acknowledge the violence that some residents were seeing with their own eyes came off not as reassurance but as erasure. At the rally, Romero described herself as a "former lifelong Democrat," explaining that the denials had turned her against the party. She thanked Trump first and foremost "for believing me." Mike Coffman, Aurora's Republican mayor, found himself caught between dueling narratives as the city became a flashpoint in national politics. "There's one side that said there's never been a problem," he said at a town hall in October. "There's another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun. And I think that the truth lies in the middle."
Literally no one ever said "the whole city is overrun." But Democrats did insist that there was no gang activity in Aurora.
So the truth is not "in the middle." It's all the way over on the right.
Donald Trump is coming for California's signature climate policies -- and so is California.
Stung by the party's sweeping losses in November and desperate to win back working-class voters, the Democratic Party is in retreat on climate change. Nowhere is that retrenchment more jarring than in the nation's most populous state, a longtime bastion of progressive politics on the environment.
In the past two weeks alone, California Democrats have retrenched on environmental reviews for construction projects, a cap on oil industry profits and clean fuel mandates. Elected officials are warning that ambitious laws and mandates are driving up the state's onerous cost of living, echoing longstanding Republican arguments and frustrating some allies who say Democrats are capitulating to political pressure.
"California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration," said Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air. "It's questionable whether or not that leadership is still there."
California leaders are still positioning themselves as the vanguard of the resistance to the president's environmental rollbacks, and polls still consistently find voters believe addressing climate change is worth the cost. Gov. Gavin Newsom has sued to block Trump's removal of California's permission to enforce its clean car standards and vowed to extend a landmark cap-and-trade program imperiled by Trump.
But they're in a far different position than during Trump's first term, when they were signing deals with automakers to keep the state's emissions rules afloat -- and even two years ago, when they were taking on oil companies by threatening to cap their profits. It's a reversal that is dismaying to climate activists, an outspoken part of the Democratic Party's base. And it's a trade-off -- freighted with significant and potentially long-lasting policy implications -- that party leaders are making in an effort to regain political strength.
"We've got some challenges, and so it just requires some new considerations," Newsom told reporters last week, after his administration proposed steering clear of the oil-profits cap as a way to keep refineries open. "It's not rolling back anything -- that's actually marching forward in a way that is thoughtful and considered."
Other parts of the country are pulling back on climate policies in the name of affordability, too. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is delaying plans for a carbon-trading system and slowing enforcement of the state's rules for clean cars and trucks, which follow California's. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is similarly pausing on carbon trading. And in Congress, some 36 Democrats -- including two from California -- signed on to the effort to overturn California's vehicle rules.
But California, as the state with the strongest suite of climate policies and a decadeslong reputation of stalwart environmentalism, is now becoming an unlikely leader in Democrats' pivot as they try to respond to cost-of-living concerns that they fret may have cost them the election.
Green Energy more like Gonna Cost-a-Lotta-Green Energy amirite
George W. Bush famously posed this question back in 2000: "Is our children learning?" In 2025, we can follow up Bush's earnest inquiry with one of our own: "Is our Democrats learning?" It's been half a year since their catastrophic loss to their arch-nemesis Trump, so it's a good time to assess whether Democrats are indeed moving up the learning curve.
I'd say progress has been quite spotty. The party's favorability rating is still dreadful, they have only a modest lead in the generic congressional vote for 2026 and their prospects for taking back the Senate are slim. To most voters, the 2025 Democrats seem awfully similar to the 2024 Democrats they didn't like much at all.
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Here are some reasons why the Democratic drive to reinvent the party seems to have stalled out--and may have a hard time restarting despite their political opening.
The "'tis but a scratch" problem. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight insists, against all evidence, that his wounds are not that serious--"'tis but a scratch." Democrats, in the aftermath of losing two of three elections to the widely-disliked Trump and seeing their coalition re-configured by massive losses among both white and nonwhite working-class voters, are still in denial about how serious their wounds are. They are not but a scratch and cannot be fixed by anything less than a full-scale overhaul of the party's approach and image. Tinkering around the edges, while easier, will not work.
The breaking point fallacy. Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump's actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats' thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats' reliably florid responses to Trump's outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let's Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.
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The "round up the usual suspects" problem. In the movie Casablanca, Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains) concludes the film by saying "round up the usual suspects." The Democrats have an establishment and establishments don't like change. Thus, there is a built-in tendency to blame messaging, narrative, lack of coalitional input, etc.--the "usual suspects"--rather than deeper problems of culture, economic policy, and class antagonism. Most recently this tendency was on display in the formation of a Project 2029 group drawn from various sectors of the Democratic establishment to craft a new, improved approach for the Democrats. As the Politico article on the group notes:
Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one."Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place," said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. "There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you're too afraid to do that, you don't have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction."
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These obstacles help clarify why, despite the depth of the Democrats' recent defeat and their fragmenting coalition, their response to adversity has seemed so perversely underpowered. What could shake them out of their torpor?
Don't worry, Democrats have all sorts of ideas. One of their favorites: When (if) they take Congress back, they'll use their new congressional power to defund ICE.
Finally, some sweet common sense!
House Democrats, incensed at being repeatedly denied access to ICE facilities, are warming to the idea of using the appropriations process to force policy changes at the agency if they retake Congress.
Why it matters: ICE-focused protests and pressure from their grassroots are forcing Democrats to inch away from their instinctively defensive crouch on immigration. But there is internal division on how far to go.
"You've got a situation where our base is demanding more and more of us every day," said one House Democrat, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The lawmaker added that "a number of us have been told by constituents that we have to be willing to get shot" while trying to conduct oversight at ICE facilities and "be able to make news out of it."
Many Democrats are still scarred by GOP attacks on the #AbolishICE movement and hesitant to take steps that appear to be aimed at dismantling or downsizing the agency.
State of play: Just over the weekend, House Democrats in California and New York were refused access to ICE facilities in their respective states to perform checks on detained migrants.
Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Norma Torres (D-Calif.) have alleged that ICE officials even sprayed "some type of irritant into the air to push us back."
Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) is being prosecuted by the Justice Department for allegedly assaulting law enforcement -- which she denies -- during a visit to an ICE facility in her state during which she was initially refused entry.
What they're saying: Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) said he believes Democrats should "reassess the funding possibilities. Absolutely."
He said of being denied access to an ICE facility this weekend: "They ask for money, right? And then ... I go there and they don't allow us to go and check out the facilities."
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), a member of Democratic leadership, told Axios, "Everybody's on board with the fact that what's going on right now is not right, and ... reform is needed."
"This administration is ... rounding people up by mistake -- they don't care," said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), chair of the center-left New Democrat Coalition. "We can't let that happen."