Britain's Flag Wars

The UK has crashed and needs a reboot ASAP. In the most bizarre cultural fight you can imagine, some UK governments are racing to tear down English flags as soon as Britons put them up. Apparently, displaying the flag of England is considered hate speech.  European Conservative: Union Jacks and St. George’s flags have been cropping up across the country over the last few weeks, being hung on lampposts by groups of patriots. The movement appears to have begun in Birmingham, organised online, before spreading to Norwich, Bradford, Newcastle, Swindon, and even London. As you might expect, the flags are being swiftly removed by local councils. Birmingham’s Labour-run city council started pulling them down last week, citing health-and-safety concerns. The flags, fixed to lampposts 25 ft in the air, apparently put the lives of motorists and pedestrians “at risk.” This might have been a believable, if idiotic, excuse had the same council not allowed Palestinian flags to fly across the city—which is almost 30% Muslim—unhindered since October 7th, 2023. This is also the same council that, just last week, lit the city’s library up in green and white to celebrate Pakistan’s independence day. Birmingham City Council officials were even caught admitting in leaked emails earlier this year that they were too scared to take down the Palestinian flags without police assistance. (European Conservative)

No Murders in DC Since Trump Sent in the Troops

You can’t expect this trend to last forever. After all, Hillary Clinton knows a lot of people in D.C., and that isn’t good for their health. But so far, Trump’s takeover of the District of Columbia’s public safety apparatus has yielded good results. JUST THE NEWS: There haven’t been any reported murders in Washington, D.C. for more than one week under President Trump’s federal crime crackdown. Both property crime and violent crime are down, according to CNN. The last murder took place shortly after Trump beefed up security in the nation’s capital with National Guard troops on August 12. CrimeResearch.org said the odds of the murder rate coming down to that level in Washington, D.C., prior to the increased federal security presence, was 0.35% based on 2024 data, and 0.58% based on the first seven months of 2025. (Just the News)

San Francisco in Trump’s Crosshairs

Who doesn’t have a soft spot for San Francisco? For all its many flaws, the city is breathtakingly beautiful. And, as The New York Times notes, President Trump has been soft of the city despite its liberal reputation. Until now. The New York Times: President Trump had largely left San Francisco alone this year as he targeted Democratic-led cities and insisted federal troops were needed to restore order. San Francisco, long the subject of attacks from conservatives over its problems with drug use and homelessness, seemed to be turning a corner in the national consciousness. Crime was falling, and a moderate new mayor was celebrating progress toward a downtown recovery. That changed on Friday, when Mr. Trump added the city to the list of places where he might send in the National Guard, which he had already done in Washington and Los Angeles. “You look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco — they’ve destroyed it,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We can clean that up, too — we’ll clean that one up, too.” (New York Times)

Trump Taking Aim at Mail-In Ballots

That thing that never happens—voter fraud—keeps happening at an alarming rate. Minnesota Democrats just voided the endorsement of Omar Fateh for Mayor of Minneapolis due to widespread voter fraud. President Trump is having none of it and wants to end mail-in balloting. The usual suspects are unhappy. The New York Times: And yet something quite shocking did emerge from a second journey through the mangled syntax of Mr. Trump’s diatribe against “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.” Buried in the long harangue was an announcement: The president had a plan to “get rid of” election procedures that he alleged were scams. He intended to dictate, apparently by executive order, how states should count and tabulate the votes. This was stunning. The only modern president who had refused to concede a certified election defeat now proclaimed his authority over election rules nationwide. Mr. Trump vowed that he wanted nothing more than to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” Having tried his best once to undermine our constitutional system, Mr. Trump is the last American — literally or near enough — who should be entrusted to supervise the integrity of the vote. (New York Times)

Is Trump Getting Ready for War with Venezuela?

Trump is hardly a warmonger, but it’s not just the rhetoric that is heating up in D.C. when it comes to Venezuela. Trump’s DOJ has increased the bounty for Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, and US Navy destroyers are deployed off the coast of the Latin American country. New York Post: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro condemned the deployment of three US warships off his nation’s coast, calling it an “illegal” regime change attempt — though his own presidency is considered illegitimate. The US is deploying three Aegis guided-missile destroyers to the waters off Venezuela, as President Trump ramps up efforts to combat threats from Latin American drug cartels, US officials said this week. Trump — who this month issued a $50 million bounty for Maduro’s capture — recently authorized the use of military capabilities for countering former drug cartels, and this is one of the first major shows of force in Latin America since that decision was announced this month. “What they’re threatening to do against Venezuela — regime change, a military terrorist attack — is immoral, criminal and illegal,” Maduro told lawmakers this week. (New York Post)

Teachers Unions Buy Democrats With $50 Million

What does $50 million buy you? A lot of Democratic Party politicians, apparently. During the COVID pandemic the unions actually set public health policies, and you only get that kind of power with a lot of money. Fox News: Amid a trend of declining membership since the Supreme Court struck down mandatory union dues, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions have poured tens of millions into left-wing causes, a new report from a conservative watchdog group finds. The national nonprofit group, Defending Ed, released a report this week after combing through the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers’ contributions to left-wing and far-left groups. The nonprofit found that the two unions spent a combined $43.5 million since 2022 to help fund state and federal political action committees and other ideologically left-wing entities, such as D.C. think tanks.  “It is clear that the teachers unions’ priorities are advancing far-left politics and radical social justice issues, not the education of children,” Defending Ed researcher Rhyen Staley told Fox News Digital. “This is a slap in the face to families and teachers who want to focus on helping students improve their reading and math skills. It is time that Congress acts to stop this obscene redistribution of public monies to advance left-wing identity politics.” (Fox News)

Democrats: Crime Is a Figment of Your Imagination

Democrats have always been soft on crime. They invented “Defund the Police,” declared riots were vital to promote public health, and basically decriminalized theft in California. But now that President Trump has said that crime is a problem, every Democrat in the country has declared that crime is a myth. New York Times: Democrats pushed back on Sunday against President Trump’s characterization of blue-state cities as crime-ridden and lawless, which the White House has used to justify calling up National Guard troops and sending federal law enforcement agents to Washington streets. Mr. Trump said on Friday that he was considering using the same playbook in other major American cities, and that Chicago could be next. The administration has not indicated when the National Guard could be sent to Chicago, New York or any of the other cities the president has mentioned.  Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, said on CNN on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s threat was more a reflection of the president’s animus toward Chicago’s Democratic leadership and desire to crack down on immigration than a considered strategy to take on crime. “When you look at what he did in D.C., he’s not going to actually deal with crime,” Mr. Emanuel said. “This is an attempt to deal with cities that are welcoming cities, known as sanctuary cities, and deal with immigration.” Violent crime in Chicago, Washington and other major cities has fallen in recent years. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said in a statement on Saturday, “There is no emergency that warrants the president of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard” or sending in federal agents. The governor said he had not received any communication from the White House about such a deployment and added that the president was “attempting to manufacture a crisis.” (New York Times)

Chuck Todd: Lawfare Should Be a Democratic Party Monopoly

Chuck Todd is big mad that Donald Trump has taken the mantra “Nobody is above the law” seriously. In response to the search warrant for classified documents served on John Bolton, Todd issued a moralistic tweet about lawfare. Chuck Todd: The virus killing democracy right now is this “two wrongs make a right” mindset.   Revenge over principles. (X) On a positive note, Todd seems to be admitting that there was something wrong with all the lawfare aimed at Donald Trump and many of his aides. Daybreak doubts that he would acknowledge that fact, though.

Cracker Barrel Self-Immolates

I suspect that when Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino decided to rebrand, she didn’t anticipate that it would end her career. However, if things continue as they have been, she will likely be seeking another job within a few weeks—if anybody would have her. New York Post: If the Cracker Barrel market puke has anything to teach Wall Street, it’s that investors who are deciding where to put their money must add corporate “wokeness” to their menu of risks to ­digest. In fact, making “woke” an investing risk factor — in some cases as important as the direction of interest rates and inflation — seems so obvious that I hesitated to write this column. Recall Bud Light’s ­Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, or Target CEO Brian Cornell’s recent exit following his ill-fated ­obsession with DEI. Wokeness is generally defined as subjecting the culture and business to left-wing dogma involving race, sex and viewing all things Americana as anathema. It simply doesn’t sell to mass audiences. And yet companies keep going there. Corporate managers, it turns out, are a politically and socially tone-deaf bunch. They are lousy at reading the current mood of the country and its hatred of progressive indoctrination — whether in the classroom or when they simply want to enjoy a beer. Their advisers may be even worse. (New York Post)

Abrego Garcia Headed to Uganda?

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been released from jail, but his troubles are far from over. It looks like the Trump administration has offered him a deal in which he agrees to plead guilty to human trafficking charges in exchange for no prison time and a free trip to Costa Rica. He reportedly turned them down, and the alternative sounds much worse: a free trip to Uganda. POLITICO: Attorneys for Abrego said in a Saturday court filing the Justice Department is pressuring him to accept a guilty plea to two felony counts, promising to deport him to Costa Rica — where he would be free from incarceration — after the completion of any criminal sentence. “In conjunction with that proposal, the government produced a letter to Mr. Abrego’s counsel confirming that he could live freely in that country, which would accept him as a refugee or grant him residency status, and promise not to refoul him to El Salvador,” Abrego’s lawyers indicated in court papers. But after Abrego resisted that proposal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told his lawyers that they had decided instead to deport him to Uganda. Government officials informed Abrego’s lawyers that the Costa Rica option would remain on the table if he pleads guilty by Monday, his attorneys wrote. (POLITICO) Abrego Garcia is complaining that he doesn’t speak the language in Uganda and thus should not be deported there. Unfortunately for him, the official language in Uganda is…English.