During today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc talk about leading New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posing with a controversial imam named an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing. They also discuss why the self-proclaimed socialist is likely to win.   This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity  Sami Winc: Victor, [Zohran] Mamdani has had some bad press recently this week for taking pictures with Siraj Wahhaj, who is an imam …   Victor Davis Hanson: Imam. Unindicted co-conspirator.   Winc: Unindicted co-conspirator. Yeah. That’s what the FBI called him.   Hanson: That means that you have enough evidence, in a non-legal sense, to know the person’s probably guilty, but you don’t have enough actionable proof to actually indict him. So, you try to mention that he’s associated with the other indicted people.   Winc: Before you go on, and I just want to add that his son was the guy that took a bunch of teenagers to New Mexico and was teaching him to be jihadis.   Hanson: Jihadis, terrorists. Yeah, he was.   Winc: And then he got arrested, I think.   Hanson: And remember, this guy Mamdani was attacking [Andrew] Cuomo and saying, “How many mosques have you gone to?” And, “I’ve gone to all these mosques.” Is Mamdani going to be bad on religion? Yes. He’s a Islamic chauvinist and he has shady associates, to say the least. He’s gonna be bad economically because he is a socialist, although those who call him a communist are not smearing him because he, in his own words, has said that he believes in seizing the means of production, which is a definition of communism, by Friedrich Engels, I suppose.  Politically, as I said, he is gonna be left-wing. Economically, he’s going to, if he starts bringing in food co-ops and free this and free that, the city that—basically is free anyway because nobody follows the rules. They jump turnstiles and stuff—it’s gonna be a disaster. And you’re gonna see a lot of people go to Miami or Palm Beach.  It’s going to be sad because New York’s the greatest city in the world. It’s located near Washington, D.C. It’s on the East Coast. It’s a window to Europe, and it’s the traditional financial hub of the United States. But if he does what he says he is going to do, there’s going to be a lot of people who leave.  Winc: Have you seen the argument over whether Cuomo or [Curtis] Sliwa should drop out? They say Sliwa should drop out because he doesn’t have a chance, and Cuomo is better. But then there are all those commentators who say, “Well, Cuomo’s got the bad numbers of dead from his earlier administration.”  Hanson: There’s two arguments if you’re in New York, and you’re scared to death of this—whatever he is, communist, socialist—Mamdani. Then you are presented with two arguments: Argument one, number one: You can’t vote for Cuomo. He’s not only a real Democrat, even though he is saying he is independent, but he’s obnoxious. He told everybody, “If you don’t want to be for abortion, then get out of New York.”  He said that when he was governor. He deliberately directed COVID people into rest homes where people were vulnerable and somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 people died. And it wasn’t just one sexual harassment allegation, it was serial. So, he’s not a good guy, and he’s not only not a good guy, but he looks tired, weak, anemic.  He’s not the Andrew Cuomo who battled [President Donald] Trump in the first term, like 2017. He was on TV. He was fiery, quick on his feet. He looks tired. He looks like he’s confused, baffled, like, “Well, I woke up. I’m Rip Van Winkle. What world is this? This guy’s a communist socialist. I’m Mario Cuomo’s son. I’m Chris Cuomo’s brother. Don’t you know who I am?”  No, we don’t. I’m sorry. The world passed you by. I think he took 10 days off the campaign on vacation. So, that’s the argument. Don’t vote for him. But the Sliva argument is, “Well, I’m a conservative. I’m kind of crazy. I have a lot of things in my past I’m not happy about. They’re digging out a lot of this stuff.”  I mean, you don’t want to vote for this guy. You want vote for Sliwa because he’s the true conservative and only one candidate can make it. So, it has to be one. So, you might as well vote for the person who reflects your view.  The problem is this, that the guy who is more conservative has less of a chance to win. The guy that is abominable is not as bad as Mamdani, and if you take the actual numbers of both of them—not that everybody who would vote for Sliwa would vote for Cuomo—but if that were to be true, he has a four- or five-point advantage over Mamdani.  I’ve never seen anything like it. If they had just said to themselves, all the conservative Democrats, all the moderate Democrats, all the Republicans all had just gone said, “Look, this guy is nihilistic. He’s Satanic. Can’t we get somebody like a [Rudy] Giuliani or maybe if you think he’s too conservative, [Michael] Bloomberg, just get one person, an independent, and nobody else run and we will back him.” I mean, that’s what the Democrats [did]. It’s kind of undemocratic, as I said about Joe Biden. They kind of selected him in 2020, but at least this candidate would actually have to get out of the basement and run. They could defeat him. So, it’s an off-year election. It’s a municipal election, and there’s no opposition, really, to Mamdani that’s credible.  So, there’s going to be a very, very, very low turnout. I bet you, of all the 9 million people, I doubt a million people show up. And out of that, the ones that show up are going to be energized people, mostly white and Asian, and they’re going to be upscale, you know, a hundred thousand dollars. Not that that’s upscale in New York, but middle class, upper-middle class.  And they’re going to say, “I’m educated. I went to Yale, I went to Brown, I’ve got degrees, but I work for The Washington Post,” or “I’m an intern at the hospital,” or “I’m a young lawyer at a prestigious [law firm], but I don’t make any money to buy a $3 million house up near Harlem. I’m sorry, and that’s not fair because I’m a genius, and I’ve got all the right letters after my name, and I’m a liberal, and I feel really bad about all the good things you should feel bad about, and yet my people don’t help me, so I’m going to vote commie.”  That’s basically what his support is.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: ‘So I’m Voting Commie’—Why Mamdani Is Likely to Win appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Ever cooked a bunch of pasta into mush? This is why.

Happens to the best of us.

Every once in a while, the “fact checkers” at PolitiFact publish reader comments, and this one stuck out. "Your site seems to be mostly about Trump all the time," came one comment in an email. "How about a little less Trump, and write more about any other falsehood subjects?" PolitiFact’s audience chief Ellen Hine acknowledged they’ve published over 1,000 “fact checks” on Trump, but then trotted out the false claim that their targeting is nonpartisan: “Without keeping count, we try to select facts to check from all sides of the political spectrum. At the same time, we more often fact-check the party that holds power or people who repeatedly make attention-getting or misleading statements.” That "without keeping count" is an obvious excuse. Anyone who attempts to count what they're doing will quickly realize they're very partisan in their targeting -- and in their ratings on truth and falsehood.  In the first five months of 2025, PolitiFact performed 68 “Truth-O-Meter” fact checks on Republicans to just 23 on Democrats. Even so, this website found the Republicans “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants On Fire” liars in 85 percent of those articles, while the Democrats landed on the false side only 39 percent. But let’s focus on presidents. From January 1 through October 22, Trump landed on the False side of the "Truth-O-Meter" 50 out of 54 times, or 92.5 percent of the time. The other four were "Half True" ratings, meaning he was rated "True" or "Mostly True" on zero occasions. It's been more than a year -- October 19, 2024 -- since Trump drew a "Mostly True." Instead, PolitiFact rated Trump as a "Pants On Fire" liar 13 times this year, 24 percent of the time. Since they began in 2007, PolitiFact has written up 217 "Pants on Fire" claims on Trump, to just seven on Joe Biden over those years. If you take the same time period in 2021, President Biden drew 34 checks, but they found him on the False side just 14 times, or 41 percent of the time. Biden was "True" or "Mostly True" ten times. In those first months of the Biden presidency, the liberal Democrats of PolitiFact were inflamed against Trump about election denial and the January 6 riot, so Trump drew nine "Pants on Fire" ratings in 24 checks during that time period -- and one "Half True," and nothing on the True side.  The tilt in targeting is so obviously partisan. In 2025, when the “Pants On Fire” tag has been applied to individuals and not social-media sites, every single target was on the right.  In addition to the pile of attacks on Trump, the flaming list was Pam Bondi (twice) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, Sen. Mike Lee, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, Kevin O’Leary of the TV show Shark Tank, and InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Let's stipulate that some of these fact checks are identifying unfactual statements. But the aggression is overwhelming. The right side is nearly always wrong and blatantly lying, while the left side supposedly stumbles into getting it wrong every once in a while. Trump is tagged as "False" when he calls New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a "communist," and Mamdani has never been fact-checked. Trump was "Pants On Fire" when he called Kamala Harris a "communist," but the Democrats can call him a "fascist" daily and there is no checking. This isn't "independent fact-checking." It's weaponized public relations.

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Are we alone? It’s probably one of the, if not the most basic questions of human existence. People have been trying to answer it for millennia in one form or another, but only recently have we gained the tools and knowledge to start tractably trying to estimate whether we are or not. Those efforts take the form of famous tools like the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation, but there’s always room for a more nuanced understanding. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Antal Veres of the Hungarian University of Agriculture introduces a new one - The Solitude Zone.

Driving on the Moon for the first time has got to be an exhilarating experience. But driving the same path on the Moon for the 500th time probably won’t be nearly as exciting to whatever poor astronaut got stuck with that duty for the day. With that in mind, a team of researchers led by PhD student Alec Krawciw and Professor Tim Barfoot of the University of Toronto are working on a way to automate the mundane task of driving goods back and forth from a lunar landing site to a nascent lunar exploration base.