My former normie now politically-engaged wife thought the bolded part from this quote this was a bunch of shit:
Six months after Gov. Kathy Hochul scolded New Yorkers for telling her to tax the rich, she joined New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do just that.
The two officials instituted a “pied-à-terre tax” on second homes worth over $5 million, a fee that would apply to the ultra-wealthy who “store their wealth in New York City real estate but who don’t actually live here,” Mamdani said in a video announcement of the new tax set to music that sounds like the theme song to Succession.
[…]
The new fee would bring in about $500 million annually, less than 10 percent of the city’s projected budget deficit of $5.4 billion. Nonetheless, it’s a crack in Hochul’s stone wall against the idea of applying any new tax against the rich, which she’s maintained for months. At a rally for the Mamdani mayoral campaign in October, New Yorkers chanted “Tax the rich” at Hochul when she took the stage. Initially, she pretended that she thought the audience was yelling “Let’s go, Bills,” in reference to the NFL team from Buffalo. Then she tried other ways to get out of the intensely popular demand, including repeating the lie that taxes on the ultra-wealthy prompt them to leave, which has repeatedly been proven untrue, and saying that having to listen to a repeat request from the constituents she serves is akin to her having to “put up with a lot of crap.”
“I hear you,” Hochul said a month later when some in the audience at a political conference in Puerto Rico told her to tax the rich. “But I’m the type of person, the more you push me, the more I’m not going to do what you want. So little lesson to all of our friends out there.” Later, she told reporters that Buffalo natives “don’t put up with a lot of crap,” adding, “You look at the history of people who’ve run multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to try and get me to change my position. I don’t change my position.”
Moving on, let’s look at a recent Senate vote:
Last night, Congress rejected a pair of Bernie Sanders-led resolutions that would have blocked the sale 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers to Israel, but Democrats supported both measures in record fashion
Sanders has introduced similar efforts on three other occasions. Last April, just 15 Senators voted for them. However, this time around 40 Democratic Senators backed the bulldozer resolution and 36 voted in favor of the one that blocked bombs.
[…]
Let’s get to the few that Williams mentions [the bombs resolution]. Here’s the seven Democrats who voted against the resolutions:
Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Chris Coons of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Chuck Schumer of New York.
Consider this:
Six in 10 voters (60 percent) oppose the United States sending more military aid to Israel for their efforts in the war with Hamas, while 32 percent support it.
[…]
In today's poll, Democrats (75 - 18 percent) and independents (66 - 27 percent) oppose sending more military aid to Israel for their efforts in the war with Hamas, while Republicans (56 - 37 percent) support it.
Moving on:
Funding from AI groups is becoming a flashpoint in the 2026 midterm elections, as a major political action committee that launched in 2025 with support from AI companies announced its latest fundraising haul.
Super PAC Leading the Future will announce Wednesday it has raised $15 million in the first quarter of 2026 across all of its entities, bringing the group’s total haul for the 2026 election season to $140 million. The group’s backers include venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and AI software company Perplexity.
The group has backed candidates of both parties in the midterms. It also recently endorsed five House Democrats: Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) and Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.).
Consider this:
When Americans were asked how much of the time they think they can trust the information generated by AI, 76 percent think they can trust AI either hardly ever (27 percent) or only some of the time (49 percent), while 21 percent think they can trust AI either most of the time (18 percent) or almost all of the time (3 percent). This is largely unchanged from Quinnipiac University's April 2025 poll.
[…]
Just over one-third of Americans (35 percent) are either very excited (6 percent) or somewhat excited (29 percent) about AI, while 62 percent are either not so excited (29 percent) or not excited at all (33 percent).
[…]
Fifty-five percent of Americans think AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, while 34 percent think AI will do more good than harm, with 11 percent not offering an opinion.
Democrats are announcing their quarterly fundraising totals, and they’ve raised a shit ton (technical term) of money:
Some Senate Democrats key to their hopes for flipping the chamber were practically printing money last quarter. They didn’t just outraise their Republican opponents, they doubled or tripled up on them, according to a POLITICO review of new Federal Election Commission filings submitted late on Wednesday.
I hope that money isn’t sucker money, paid to candidates who will turn around and vote for things their constituents don’t want, and against things they do.
The reason that Democrats have a problem motivating voters is because a good number of Democrats are against things that are remarkably popular, or they support things that are remarkably unpopular. The arrogance of politicians like Hochul is breathtaking: not only does she oppose something incredibly popular (taxing the rich), she can’t wait to tell everyone that nothing they say can change her mind. My only regret about moving to Colorado to New York is that I can’t vote for her primary opponent.
This is why party establishment only wants to run on “Trump Bad”. They want to do what satisfies their donors instead of doing what satisfies the vast majority of the party they purport to represent.
