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From this point forward, you’ll have to pay more than a penny for your thoughts. The U.S. Mint made the final penny on Wednesday, ending the coin’s 232-year run. The U.S. Mint said in a release that the final penny was struck in Philadelphia by United States Treasurer Brandon Beach. “While general production concludes today, the penny’s legacy lives on,” Kristie McNally, Acting Mint Director, said. “As its usage in commerce continues to evolve, its significance in America’s story will endure.” If you want the Mint’s two cents on the issue, production costs are to blame for the penny’s extinction. U.S. Mint’s release stated that over the past decade, the cost of making each penny has risen from 1.42 cents to 3.69 cents. Business Insider reported that the government will save roughly $50 million annually by ceasing penny production. There are still about 300 billion pennies in circulation. The Mint stated that because the supply exceeds the amount needed for commerce, pennies can still be used. Stores can still price items in one-cent increments — so don’t throw your piggy bank away just yet. President Trump ordered the penny to be canceled back in February of this year. He said on Truth Social: “For far too long, the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than two cents.” In the 2024 annual report, the U.S. Mint recorded that the cost of producing pennies increased by 20.2% in that year alone. “This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies,” Trump declared. So, nine months later, it did, at the Mint where the country’s lowest-value coins have been made since 1793. The penny entered circulation after the Coinage Act was passed in 1792. President Abraham Lincoln has been the face of the one-cent coin since 1909. Lincoln was the first president featured on a coin in honor of his 100th birthday. The tails side of the most recent coin represents Lincoln’s preservation of the United States as a single country. Over the 232-year lifespan of the penny, the design has evolved. The first penny showed a woman with her hair flowing, which the U.S. Mint said symbolized liberty. In its original form, the penny was larger and completely made out of copper. Today’s design is a mix of copper and zinc, featuring smaller elements. More fun facts — back in 1943, the majority of pennies were made of zinc-coated steel in order to conserve copper needed for munitions during World War II. Close-up view of United States One Cent Pieces, original World War II dates, placed on the American Flag Fast forward to 2017, when pennies made in Philadelphia had a “P” marking on them for the first time to celebrate the Mint’s 225th anniversary. With billions of pennies still around, who knows what history you’ll find in your coin purse, your change jar, or in between your couch cushions.

CNN anchor Abby Phillip claimed on Wednesday that part of her job is to explain facts to conservatives, saying that they often do not have access to the truth because they live in a “completely different information world.” Phillip, host of CNN’s “NewsNight,” made the comment while speaking with ousted MSNBC host Joy Reid on her new eponymous show. The CNN anchor said that conservatives were so often deprived of facts that it was difficult for them to know they were wrong. WATCH: Abby Phillip describes how her job at CNN is to explain “the facts” to conservatives who live in “a completely different information world.” “Because when you don’t ever even hear the facts, it’s hard to even know that you’re wrong.” “Half my job sometimes is knowing what the… pic.twitter.com/jZAHPAsxFI — Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 12, 2025 “Conservatives are living in a completely different information world than liberals,” she said, and Reid agreed. “And breaking that down needs to be done. Because when you don’t ever even hear the facts, it’s hard to even know that you’re wrong. And that happens a lot.” “Half my job sometimes is knowing what the latest conspiracy is so that if it comes up, I’m ready to address it,” she continued, as Reid continued to nod along with her. “Because it happens a lot where people don’t even know that what they’re saying or what they’ve seen and believe is not true.” Phillip went on to argue that was why she felt like her job was so important, saying that she felt as though she needed to be the one to “debunk” their claims in case that was the first time they ever heard the “facts.” “It could be the very first time that someone out there has heard an alternative point of view,” she said. But as some critics quickly pointed out, Phillip was making those claims to Reid, who argued repeatedly that President Donald Trump’s attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, had been staged for a photo op. She also argued that then-President Joe Biden “surviving COVID” was just as impressive as Trump rallying the crowd immediately after being shot in the ear. “I love the Jane Goodall treatment of conservatives. What specimens. They’re so ignorant in the fog over there. Let’s enlighten them!” another posted. I love the Jane Goodall treatment of conservatives. What specimens. They’re so ignorant in the fog over there. Let’s enlighten them! https://t.co/f6HsbPN98P — Melissa Mackenzie (@MelissaTweets) November 12, 2025 “Amazing. Absolutely amazing. She hosts a show where Scott Jennings repeatedly has to explain basic facts to her and her other left wing guests to demonstrate why they’re wrong and she thinks she’s correcting others. So delusional,” another added. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. She hosts a show where Scott Jennings repeatedly has to explain basic facts to her and her other left wing guests to demonstrate why they’re wrong and she thinks she’s correcting others. So delusional. https://t.co/2xIW78uFr2 — Ian Miller (@ianmSC) November 12, 2025 “Either This is the most textbook definition of projection I’ve ever seen, or the greatest lack of self awareness. I can’t decide which,” another posted. Either This is the most textbook definition of projection I’ve ever seen, or the greatest lack of self awareness. I can’t decide which. https://t.co/JL02LpIo3A — Jim Verdi (@jjverdi) November 12, 2025

Even if your name isn’t Joe Biden, it’s still very easy to forget pretty much everything the Biden administration attempted to do during their four years in office. It’s one of those administrations that everyone, regardless of party affiliation, wants to wipe from memory as soon as possible. Biden was obviously a historic failure, whose only legacy — if you can even call it that — is employing operatives who hunted down and jailed the political opponents of the Democratic Party. But especially if you’re a young person right now, and you’re trying to buy your first home and take part in a foundational component of the American dream, it’s important to take a step back and consider very carefully what the Biden administration attempted to do. At every turn, the Biden White House took pains to make home ownership more challenging and more expensive for American citizens. In retrospect, you can make the case that this was, in fact, the primary goal of the Biden administration. Every major policy proposal, every executive action — regardless of how it was advertised — was, in reality, geared towards raising the cost of home ownership. It’s not an academic exercise to make this point now, even though the Biden administration is out of power. It’s actually extremely important because, first of all, we have to reverse what the Biden administration did. And secondly, when conservatives are crafting their own rules to make it easier to own a home, they can’t emulate the Biden administration’s proposals in any way. And at the moment, that appears to be what’s happening. The Trump administration is going down the same road as the Biden administration, whether they realize it or not. And they need to reverse course immediately, unless we want to see everyone under the age of 40 vote for Democrats in next year’s midterms. We’ll start with this headline from the Biden era, which sounds like it can’t possibly be real. This is a direct quote from ABC News: Why having good credit could cost you more on a home mortgage: In some cases, people with better credit scores may pay more in fees, while those with lower credit scores will pay less. … The [Biden] administration’s stated purpose behind making these changes is to help make it easier for borrowers who have historically been disadvantaged and have had a hard time accessing credit. In practical terms, the proposal would penalize anyone with a credit score over 680, with an additional fee of roughly $40 a month. And if you put down a large down payment — between 15% and 20% — then you’d pay an even larger fee. The goal, according to the government, was to “redistribute funds to reduce the interest rate paid by less qualified buyers.” At the time, the story was covered as an effort by the Biden administration to buy votes, which it clearly was. But the other effect of this proposal, of course, was to make it more difficult for Americans to buy homes. This is a zero-sum proposal we’re talking about. People were being punished for doing the right thing and saving up to buy a home, in the form of additional fees. They deliberately made housing more difficult to obtain. And indeed, this was nothing new for Democrats. The Obama administration famously filed lawsuits against various suburbs, including Westchester County, New York, for failing to construct low-income, high-density housing complexes inside their suburbs. They wanted to tear down suburban homes and replace them with apartments, essentially. And they went to court to do it. Coincidentally enough, all of these policies — and many more like them — were extraordinarily beneficial for America’s rapidly growing population of illegal aliens. If you live in a suburb that’s suddenly been overtaken by rapid demographic change, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. At precisely the same time that Americans are struggling more than ever to own their own homes, it’s never been easier for illegal aliens to buy property without putting anything down. The solution is not to double down on these Biden-era proposals and make it even easier to put people inside houses that they can’t actually afford. Democrats pushed those policies because they needed a place to put all of their new voters, and in doing so, they raised prices for everyone else. Republicans, however, have no reason to emulate this strategy. We elected them to make housing more affordable for Americans. As we briefly discussed the other day, the Trump administration’s current policy proposals will not succeed in accomplishing that objective. Instead, in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, the president seemed extremely cavalier about the introduction of new 50-year mortgages, which would be a catastrophically bad idea in about a million different ways.  According to Politico, what happened is that the federal housing director, Bill Pulte (who also serves as the chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), showed up at Palm Beach Golf Club with a 3-by-5 poster board in his hands.  Credit: @realdonaldtrump/TruthSocial Credit: @realDonaldTrump/TruthSocial.com And the poster board, as you can see here, showed “a graphic of former president Franklin Roosevelt” below the words “30-year-mortgage,” along with a picture of Trump below the words “50-year-mortgage.” And the headline on the poster board was “Great American presidents.” And then 10 minutes later, Trump posted the image on Truth Social.  So that’s how you lobby the president, apparently. But in speaking to Laura Ingraham, it didn’t appear that the president fully understood the implications of this proposal. He also seemed to be under the impression that people are currently getting 40-year mortgages, which obviously isn’t true. Watch: Ingraham: Is a 50 year mortgage really a good idea? Trump: It’s not even a big deal. You go from 40 years to 50 Ingraham: 30 pic.twitter.com/W07mMUjz97 — Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025 Credit: @Acyn/X.com This is one of those clips that, even if you’re mostly a very strong supporter of what this administration is doing — and I am — you simply cannot allow it to stand. And as we’ll see in a second, there was at least one more clip from this interview, along these lines. This was a very strange interview, and no one on the Right voted for any of it. But before we address that, let’s talk about the reality of a 50-year mortgage, because contrary to what you just heard, it is indeed a very big deal. And it’s also a very, very bad deal. If you take out a $400,000 mortgage, and you choose a 50-year mortgage, the difference in your monthly payment is probably going to be around $150 a month. That’s it. Meanwhile, over the extra 20 years, you’re going to spend roughly $500,000 — yes, half a million dollars — in extra interest payments. You’re going to spend two decades doing nothing but paying off the bank. And if you don’t make it that far — which you probably won’t — then the bank gets your house back. Miss a couple of payments, and everything is gone. All to save $150 a month. And if you want to sell your home at any point, the 50-year-mortgage is going to cause problems there, as well. After 10 years of making payments, you’ll have less than $20,000 in equity in the home. Just to say that again, in case you missed it: after 10 years of making every payment, you will only have 20 thousand dollars in equity. You might even be underwater on the loan. Meanwhile, with a normal 30-year mortgage, you’d have nearly $60,000 in equity. These are massive, massive differences, for very small monthly savings. You’re basically renting the property, instead of owning it. So why are we hearing something like this from the Trump administration? It’s indistinguishable from a proposal the Biden administration might suggest, as a way of getting more illegal aliens in more homes. What we should be hearing from the president is very different. He should acknowledge that any American adult who works a full-time job and fulfills their basic adult responsibilities should be able to own a home. It’s not that anyone has a “right” to home ownership per se. Home ownership — unlike, say, free speech rights — is a thing you have to work to achieve. But you should be able to achieve it. Home ownership should be achievable for most competent, working adults in a healthy and thriving country. And if our country is failing to provide that opportunity, then the solution is not to turn more Americans into de facto renters.  A much better idea — one that will actually lower the price of homes — is to deport all of the tens of millions of foreigners who are here illegally and taking up housing that should go to Americans. Give America back to Americans. How about 50 million deportations instead of 50-year mortgages? Better yet, how about a 50-year immigration moratorium? How about we hear a single sentence — just one single sentence — from this administration about the fact that Somalis are now so entrenched in this country that they’re playing out tribal feuds in municipal elections? What do you think 100,000 Somalis have done for housing prices in Minneapolis?  That’s not a rhetorical question. Someone needs to answer it. But as far as I know, no one in the White House has done it. So here’s my best guess. Minneapolis has 430,000 people. Let’s say 5% are Somali, which is a lowball estimate. And let’s assume that these 20,000 Somalis occupy around 5,000 rental units and 700 homes, and the rest are homeless — which, again, is a very lowball estimate. I’m just using these numbers for the sake of argument here. Getting rid of all the Somalis, even given these very generous assumptions, would double the rental vacancy rate in Minneapolis, from 7% to 15% city-wide. Lease prices would plummet, allowing young adults to save a lot more money, much faster, to buy a home of their own. Median rents would drop like a rock. Meanwhile, for homeowners, the median price of a home would drop by around $30,000. And this is just from deporting one group of third-worlders in one city.  This is an actual, tangible result that the administration could get to work on right away. They could end Somalia’s temporary protected status and denaturalize and deport as many Somalis as possible. And then they could get to work on every other large population of foreign nationals in this country. It’s obviously worth a try, at a minimum. But as far as I can tell, this administration hasn’t done anything on this front. The president has joked about deporting Ilhan Omar. The administration has gone out of its way to limit its immigration enforcement to illegal aliens who also have extensive criminal records. And that’s about all we get. In the meantime, the housing market isn’t just dire. It’s historically bad. Source: NAR SMBC Nikko In 2000, the median homebuyer was around 40 years old. Now he’s 61 years old. And the number of first-time homebuyers is now down to 21% of all home sales, when it was double that number back in 2005. Private equity firms and institutional real estate investors are buying something like 33% of all single-family homes, as of the second quarter of this year. That’s the highest percentage in the last five years. If you look at this data, from the National Association of Realtors, you’ll see where the problem for first-time home buyers began in earnest. Source: National Association of Realtors As you can see, the median age of first-time home buyers, which is indicated by the yellow line, began spiking very sharply in 2020. And you probably remember what was going on at that time. We had the COVID lockdowns and massive government stimulus spending to keep the economy afloat. The money was flowing like a firehose — there wasn’t any sober, rational analysis going on. People were getting thousands of dollars in the mail. Tens of thousands of fraudulent businesses were established to collect on emergency loans. And at the same time, the Fed also cut interest rates to near-zero.  So the government directly contributed to the high price of homes that we’re seeing right now. It stands to reason that the government can take action to reduce the price of homes. Lower interest rates are part of the solution. Cutting any kind of discretionary spending is another. But Republicans aren’t doing that. They’ve just voted to fully fund the SNAP program, which, as we’ve discussed previously, is an even bigger fraud than the COVID “paycheck protection program.” Whenever they have an opportunity to actually lower prices on housing, Republicans aren’t doing it. And the president, in this interview, didn’t seem interested in helping to address the problem either. At one point, he stated that we need foreign migration because Americans don’t have the skills to perform jobs that are necessary. Watch: INGRAHAM: “If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with foreign workers.” POTUS: “I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.” INGRAHAM: “We have plenty of talented people here.” POTUS: “No, you don’t.” pic.twitter.com/PNT7w069o9 — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 12, 2025 Credit: @Breaking911/FoxNews/X.com Now, I think we have plenty of highly skilled and talented people in this country. I also think that it’s undeniable that we don’t have as many as we should, given that the public school system has been an abject, disastrous failure for decades now. But the solution is not to flood the market with foreigners. If Trump is right about American workers not having the skills, that would be all the more reason to cut off the H1-B program and train up actual Americans. Because America is for Americans, as provocative as that idea may be.  At the very least — the absolute minimum — the president should be explaining, in detail, what he’s doing to stop the abuse of the H1-B system and the rampant fraud that’s involved, which is so flagrant that everyone in the technology industry talks about it all the time. He should tell us how he’s drastically scaling back the number of H1-Bs, the vast majority of whom are not, in fact, working in highly technical or specialized fields. Again, this is the bare minimum. Personally, I’d like to see the program abolished entirely. Right now, there are accounts on X that are exclusively devoted to exposing how various large companies, including Nextdoor, are defrauding the H-1B system by posting job advertisements on random, no-name online job boards. Here’s just one example of what these ads look like: Source: JobsNowPR/X.com Basically, to hire H1-Bs, a company needs to show that they made a “good faith” effort to hire Americans first. So they post an ad on one of these job boards, get no responses, and then claim that Americans weren’t interested. Keep in mind, Nextdoor could’ve listed this job on their official job openings website, but they didn’t.  This is a practice that’s obviously worth a few criminal investigations. But as of now, only a few X accounts seem interested in stopping it. That needs to change. All of those steps, in the end, would reduce the competition for housing in this country, especially in high-demand areas like Northern California and parts of Texas. And they’re actual, useful steps — not band-aids that will actually make the problem worse, like a 50-year mortgage. It’s basic supply and demand.  Also, not to jump on my anti-AI soapbox again, but we should probably put some regulations in place before AI wipes out millions of jobs and makes home ownership (or owning anything else) impossible for millions more Americans. Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT how many jobs will be eliminated by AI in the next ten years, and it estimated up to 15%, which is about 25 million jobs lost. That strikes me as quite conservative, but even “just” 15% would be catastrophic. I’m not sure how our society can absorb those losses without causing a full-scale collapse.  Entire industries — from transportation to consulting — are going to be decimated. What are the millions of truckers and secretaries and customer support representatives and accountants and lawyers, and consultants going to do when AI can easily replace them? Two decades ago, a book was published entitled “Who Owns the Future?” And it’s one of the few serious explorations of this question that I’ve seen, even though it didn’t deal with AI explicitly. And it’s worth a read for that reason alone. The author, Jaron Lanier, proposes that people should be compensated for contributing to various online economies and “free” services, like Facebook and Google, and helping to train their various algorithms. So if an AI uses your posts on Reddit for training data, or your Facebook arguments, or whatever, then you get royalties. If AI is truly going to generate trillions in revenues, then these payouts would be trivial for the companies, and potentially lifesaving for everyone else. There are other solutions, too. Elon Musk has proposed that, when his robotaxis go live — with no one in the driver’s seat — Uber drivers will be able to manage entire fleets of taxis, and make money that way. Although again, that is a bare minimum kind of solution, as far as I’m concerned. Personally, I think we should pass laws banning companies from wiping out entire categories of jobs in favor of AI. That’s the sort of thing that makes free market conservatives — like me — very uncomfortable. But we are at a moment in history when we have to choose between doing things that make us uncomfortable, or allowing millions of people — millions at a time — to lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and any chance of owning a home or experiencing anything like the American dream. We have to do something. We cannot just sit back and let this happen. The bottom line is that the Trump administration needs to be talking about solutions like this. It’s not enough to minimize the problem or make it worse. Politically, there’s simply no other option. The conservative movement must seriously address these kinds of problems. The entire movement will be left in the dust if we don’t work on ways to actually improve Americans’ lives and address the real challenges they face daily. The only point of any of this — the only point of politics or economics or anything else — is or should be to see to the well-being of American citizens. All of our systems should serve exactly one purpose and one purpose only, which is to help our citizens live good lives. Anything that does not serve that purpose is bad or useless. Anything that does serve that purpose is good. It’s pretty simple. This is not socialism. Socialism, in fact, is bad precisely because it does not enhance the well-being of the citizenry, but instead makes their lives worse by every metric. And this is the metric. This is the thing we should be focused on. It’s why the home ownership issue is crucially important. So much of the conversation on the right is about foreign policy and global affairs. Meanwhile, the average American is wondering if he’ll ever be able to buy a house, and if the industry he works in will still exist five years from now. Those are very real concerns. They’re some of the most important concerns that a country can face. And if Republicans don’t want to address them, then another party — the party that openly seeks to destroy civilization itself — will do it for them, and do it in the worst ways, with the worst answers. But one thing we’ve learned is this: people with bad answers always beat the people with no answers.

Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) drew a shocked response from CNN anchor Dana Bash when he told her that the most vicious attacks aimed at him have not come from conservatives, but rather from those on the Left. Fetterman sat down with Bash to discuss his new memoir, “Unfettered,” and she explained that she’d been struck by a claim he made in the book — namely that Democrats were consistently more cruel in their attacks than Republicans were. WATCH: ?NEW: John Fetterman *STUNS* CNN’s Dana Bash by telling her how Left crueler than Right? FETTERMAN: “The Right would say really rough things and names … but on the Left, it was like they want me to die or that ‘We’re cheering for your next stroke’ … they even have a gif… pic.twitter.com/iMRyVTssgs — Jason Cohen ?? (@JasonJournoDC) November 12, 2025 “You said, quote, ‘I’ve drunk deeply of the venom of both the Left and the Right. And as a connoisseur, I can confirm that the most poisonous, the bitterest, is from the far Left,'” Bash read from the book. “That is pretty remarkable to hear you say that as an elected Democrat. Why?” “It’s just been my personal experience on this thing,” said Fetterman, who has repeatedly bucked the far Left in his party on major issues such as the war between Israel and Gaza and the recent battle to reopen the federal government. “I asked my digital team, I said, ‘We’re on all the platforms, you know, what’s kind of the harshest? What’s kind of the most personal?” Fetterman asked. “And the answer was immediate. They said, ‘Oh, Bluesky. It’s Bluesky.” “And the difference is the Right would say really rough things and names, some names I won’t repeat on TV,” he continued. “But on the Left, it was like, they want me to die, or that ‘We’re cheering for your next stroke’ or that’s terrible that depression — ‘Why couldn’t the depression won?’ And ‘I hope your kids find you.’ And they even have a graphic, like a gif where they have a stroke in your head —” “Oh my gosh!” Bash exclaimed, clearly shocked. “And they said that — I remember one that they claimed, ‘oh, the doctor let us down,’ and ‘why did they have to save his life?'” Fetterman added. “I mean, just really — I just can’t imagine people are wishing, ‘I wish he dies,’ or ‘I want him to die,’ you know, literally cheering for a stroke. And I don’t know what the kind of a place where that comes from.” “That’s much different from calling me a name,” he explained. “And that’s really been consistent in that community online.” Just a few days earlier, HBO host and comedian Bill Maher was commenting on the exact same issue with Cheryl Hines, wife of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. WATCH: ?NEW: Bill Maher, Cheryl Hines *RAIL AGAINST* Democrats over “HOW MEAN” they are? HINES: “The Republicans have been very kind to me from the beginning. Even … when Bobby was running as a Democrat, they weren’t mean. And they never have been. And I can’t say that for the… pic.twitter.com/9DiWjCh8rN — Jason Cohen ?? (@JasonJournoDC) November 10, 2025 “The Republicans have been very kind to me from the beginning,” Hines remarked, saying that even when her husband had run as a Democrat, Republicans had not been “mean” to them. “They never have been. And I can’t say that for the Democrats.” “I agree. And it’s sad because it’s not the Democrats we grew up with,” Maher replied, adding, “I’m not going to pretend I don’t notice how different they are. How mean they’ve become.” The Daily Wire Sits Down With John Fetterman, Who Doesn’t Hear From Democrats Anymore

'Protect America's energy security'

'Extensive nationwide search'

'Demonstrating deliberate indifference to harassment'

Kazakhstan is joining the Abraham Accords, making it the first nation in five years to do so. The move, according to pro-Israel advocates and politicians, signals an opportunity.   With more land than any other Muslim country in the world, Kazakhstan has huge potential for increased cooperation with Israel in agricultural development, sustainability, and much more,” David Aaronson, a visiting fellow at the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal   Aaronson, who is also the former senior adviser to Israel’s Minister of Regional Cooperation, predicts that Kazakhstan “has restarted the domino effect” of countries joining the Abraham Accords.   The Abraham Accords were established under President Donald Trump’s first term. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all view Abraham as a significant figure in the history of their respective faiths, making Abraham an apt name for an agreement intended to normalize relations between Israel and Muslim nations.   No additional counties joined the agreement during the Biden administration, but since returning to office, Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to see more nations join the agreement and normalize relations with Israel.   The announcement that Kazakhstan will join the Abraham Accords comes a little more than four months after the U.S. bombed three major nuclear sites in Iran, weakening the threat Iran poses to the region, and about a month after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement after two years of war.   Google Maps Kazakhstan will join four counties that signed onto the according in 2020: Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan, although the agreement with Sudan has been affected by the Sudanese civil war.   “Under the leadership of President Trump and Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, we are likely to see more countries joining the circle of peace in the very near future,” Aaronson says.   Foreign policy experts, such as Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C., and Asher Fredman, the former director for Israel at the Abraham Accords Peace Institute and a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, have previous speculated Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia may consider joining the Abraham Accords.   Even though Israel and Kazakhstan have had diplomatic relations since the earl 1990s, leaders of the Abraham Accords Caucus in the Israeli Knesset are still celebrating the news as an important step toward the expansion of the accords.   “Israel and Kazakhstan have relations and cooperation in the areas of security, economy, energy, agriculture, technology, and more,” Knesset Members Dan Illouz and MK Michael Biton, co-chairs of the Abraham Accords Caucus, said in a joint statement.   “With Kazakhstan’s accession to the Abraham Accords, we will work to strengthen these ties even further,” Illouz and Biton said. “We call on all like-minded countries in the region and beyond to join the Abraham Accords and to benefit from the fruits of peace. Together, we will lead to prosperity and a better future for all the descendants of Abraham.”   The post Latest Nation to Join Abraham Accords Could Create ‘Domino Effect,’ Expert Predicts   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Socialism is in the news. Zohran Mamdani did the unthinkable. He was elected to be mayor of New York City, the financial capital, not just of the United States, but of the world at large. And he’s a devout socialist. But he has admitted—he likes to deny it—that he’s really a communist because he’s advocated “seizing the means of production.” And almost every day, a quote from his past comes out that suggests that he’s not just a socialist who wants the government to control utilities or housing, but he wants to “seize the means of production.” That means the industrial base and private property itself. Why is that scary? Because we have a whole generation who have gone through K-12 and higher education and heard about the glories of statism, socialism, communism in the universities and our school system, but not the merits of capitalism. It’s not really socialism versus capitalism. It is socialism has nothing to offer. And we know that for two reasons. If we look at the contemporary world, in the recent past and in the present, everywhere a socialist paradigm has been implemented, it has done two things: It has destroyed the economy and made people poor, and two, it has deprived people of their civil liberties. I should add, it also has created greater inequality, at least in terms of the ruling elite, who feel they’re not subject to the ramifications of their socialist ideology, and they live a very refined and affluent lifestyle. Take a look, for example, at the Soviet Union when it collapsed. Mao’s China collapsed. Cuba is in free fall since the Castro brothers took over in 1959. Venezuela was, at one time, the wealthiest country in Latin America. It’s collapsed. You can ditto the other countries that are collapsing, to a lesser extent, Peru, Colombia. Anybody who adopts it, it has not done well. China is doing well—better than it did—because it has an odd mixture of a communist authoritarian government, but it allows free market principles to save the economy from itself. The same thing is true of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It achieved levels of gross domestic product, oil production that were superior to the communist past, just simply because it had elements of a market economy. Some market economy is better than none. Why, then secondly, does socialism fail? It is contrary to human nature. All of us want to be rewarded for our own efforts. We’re unique individuals. We don’t wanna be like a tessera in just one large mosaic. There’s a famous anecdote—I have no idea if it’s true or not—that when Karl Marx had people, and Friedrich Engels, over to their parlor to discuss the principles of socialism in mid-19th-century Europe, he had the idea that he’d have a tray of money. And these poor intellectuals would come in—and of course, as you remember from “Das Kapital”—each, according to their own need, would be rewarded for their labor. So, he said, if you’re poor, just take what you need. Well, you know how that would work out. Humans, being what they are, one person or two people or three people would take it all and say that they had greater need than somebody else, even if they didn’t, given that there would be no deterrence from being dishonest as long as you cloaked your selfishness in a larger ideological veneer. And that’s what socialism does. It tries to say that we’re all brothers and we all love each other, and we all want the same thing. That’s what Mamdani is saying. But look at Mamdani himself. He comes from one of the more affluent families in New York. His father is an endowed professor. He’s very well compensated. Hardcore Marxist. Pro-Hamas. His mother is a multimillion-dollar filmmaker. He grew up in affluence. He lives in a rent-controlled apartment, even though, by any standard, he would be qualified as a wealthy person and doesn’t need a state subsidy and could do better to give that apartment to someone with less means. So, my point is that socialism destroys private initiative. If you think the harder you work, the better ideas you have, the more efficiency you can create in your business or in your own life but you’re not going to be compensated more than someone who does not either show those traits or doesn’t want to show those traits or just simply says, “Live and let live. I just wanna stay in my house, watch TV, and get pizza,” and he will get the same amount as you do, in terms of cars or housing or federal supplements—it doesn’t work. We have one last, more controversial proof that it doesn’t work. Since the Obama age, the rate of socialist practices, policies, agendas in the United States have vastly accelerated. And after the Obama presidency, the rather esoteric political term “red state,” “blue state” became commonplace. And it basically denotes those states who are more socialist and those states that are more free market. California is a socialist state, in the sense that we’re talking, like New York, a 13%+ income tax rate at the highest rates. We have the highest gas and oil prices—natural gas and oil. We have the highest energy prices. We have some of the highest housing prices. The same is true of New York. The same is true of Minnesota, Michigan, all of these states. Why? Because the central government, first of all, it goes after the opposition. And most of these states are one-party state, without a viable opposition to keep it in check. No. 2, the people who have created this socialist system are not subject to it themselves. If you look at the California, it’s the Nancy Pelosis, the Barbara Boxers, the late Dianne Feinsteins, the Jerry Browns, the Gavin Newsoms. They all have one thing in common. They were very, very wealthy. They live lives completely distinct, separate from the masses, whom they said would benefit from their socialist policy. And the result is they took a paradise, like California, and turned it into purgatory. So, there’s no empirical evidence whether, within the United States or abroad, that there’s a socialist cure for what socialism has done. Mamdani has, basically, taken a New York under Bill de Blasio and prior mayors that was a socialist paradigm and is in dire straits, and he thinks more socialism will cure it. One final observation. In the Western world, we say that the Europeans are more advanced. Some people, naively, think that. They were socialists. They had the VAT tax. They had higher inheritance taxes and income taxes, at one time, than we did. I’m not sure that’s still true. But they governed every aspect of the economy. And of course, if you object to socialism or communism—and who wouldn’t—the state then has to come in and restrict free speech. So, what we’re seeing in Europe today is disastrous policies, importing poor illegal aliens with antithetical political, religious, cultural, social views than the Europeans themselves, and then suggesting that if anybody complains, they’re guilty of racism and suppressing their free speech. And meanwhile, the idea is everybody is going to get a flat and a high-rise, take mass transit, and be about the same. Are people happy? No. As we speak, there are right-wing—if I could use that term—conservative, free market governments in places like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Italy and growing in places like Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, in France itself. The opposition, who opposes socialism, is gaining and the people are behind it. Why? Is it because they don’t know socialism? No. It’s because they know it all too well. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Mayor Mamdani’s Socialist Vision Is Setting NYC Up for Failure appeared first on The Daily Signal.