OM DENNE EPISODE
Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about his conduct during COVID. The irony is difficult to overstate. While he had power, he suppressed free speech, shut down churches, banned public assembly, and pressured media to silence dissenting voices. Every right protected by the First Amendment was violated under his direction. When called to account, he used the Fifth Amendment to protect himself. The Constitution that shielded millions of Americans from exactly this kind of government overreach became his personal defense while offering nothing to the people he harmed.
His diary, kept on a government computer for a planned memoir, revealed what he said publicly and what he believed privately were often different things. He acknowledged the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in private while dismissing it in public. He wrote about dining with Jake Tapper and his wife during the same period he told Americans not to gather for Thanksgiving. He noted meeting Kim Kardashian and becoming the most recognized person in the United States. The celebrity mattered more to him than the crisis he was supposed to manage.
Every Democrat on the committee used their time to praise his 50 years of public service. Not one asked a question about the evidence. The pattern is consistent: as long as a bureaucrat expands government power, the party of government will protect them regardless of the damage done.
The Federal Register, the book containing all federal regulations, was under a thousand pages in 1974. Under Obama it exceeded 100,000. Trump brought it to 70,000 in his first term. Biden pushed it back over 106,000. Trump has it under 70,000 again. The growth of bureaucratic power is measurable, and its reduction is the reason Trump is despised by the institutional left in a way no other Republican has been.
Government grocery stores are coming to New York. Mamdani announced city-owned stores will sell staple items at 30% below market price. A well-run grocery store makes 3% profit. Selling at 30% below market means losing 27% on every transaction before accounting for the operational incompetence that government enterprises reliably deliver. Chicago already ran this experiment. Walmart closed five stores on the south and west sides after the city refused to address shoplifting. The replacement, Save A Lot, received $26 million in subsidies, burned through half of it in two years, and closed all seven locations on the same weekend. Each store lost roughly a million dollars a year just trying to operate at market prices. Mamdani is taking that failed model and adding a 30% discount.
The midterm bellwethers remain Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If swing states elect DSA-aligned candidates over moderates and well-known Republicans, that is not a polling fluctuation. It is a structural shift in what American voters are willing to accept.
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