For an idea of how far Democrats will take leftist authoritarianism, turn to single-party New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul continues to make even Andrew Cuomo look less alarming by comparison.

We knew she would be among the first of the vultures to flock to Buffalo. But did anyone think she would exploit the event to this extent?

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Hochul said that she would sign several executive orders to restrict access to firearms and monitor “online extremism.”

The Founding Fathers had good reason to put the first two amendments before the others. They defend the fundamental rights that tyrants are most eager to deny us: free speech and self-defense.

These include a measure authorizing the New York State Police to seize weapons from any gun owner “whenever they have probable cause to believe that an individual is a threat to themselves or others.”

That would almost sound reasonable, if authorities could be trusted to apply it reasonably. However, they take orders from people like Kathy Hochul.

That’s why fundamental rights are absolute. Exceptions will be exploited to render the rights null and void. Without due process, everyone whose politics conflict with Hochul’s may be regarded as “a threat to themselves or others.”

Hochul also announced that a new ‘Office of Counterterrorism’ would be created within the State Police with an exclusive focus on “domestic terrorism,” which would be required to monitor social media for evidence of violent tendencies and extremist ideology.

Any Stalinists who were disheartened when blowback caused Democrats to back off for now from their Ministry of Truth will be relieved to see Hochul step forward to solve the problem of free speech at the state level.

Associating “extremist ideology” with terrorism is even more alarming than suppressing it as “misinformation.” The terminology justifies government violence.

In case anyone thinks they are talking about actual terrorism:

She added that she would formally refer social media companies to the New York Attorney General [Letitia] James’s office for investigation for failing to stop “radicalization” of users towards “white supremacy.”

“White supremacy” is a blanket term for anything leftists regard as obstructing their ambitions. According to Democrat demagogues, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are white supremacists. If either had ever said anything racist, we would know about it.

At least chasing down “white supremacists” will give Letitia James something to do, now that she has effectively legalized many actual crimes.

Hochul further said that she would propose legislation requiring all semi-automatic handguns made or sold in New York to “micro-stamp” ammunition after it is fired, making weapons easier to trace by police.

You can see why Kimber got the hell out of Yonkers.

The point of microstamping is to make guns and ammo too expensive for regular Americans to afford. The strategy is similar to the $1,000 per bullet tax schemes that are sometimes floated.

Leave it to leftists to wring every drop of tyranny out of a psycho killing some people because he is crazy.

A phrase from Hemingway comes to mind: “gradually and then suddenly.” That is the Democrat plan for snuffing out liberty. Hochul isn’t alone among them in wanting to jump to the “suddenly” phase.

Watch her declare open war on the First Amendment, after absurdly claiming to defend it:

On tips from Varla, MrRightWingDave, and ABC of the ANC.

Rule by Democrats isn’t cheap. Green New Deal lunacy will cost New Yorkers hundreds of $billions:

New Yorkers will have to pay “hundreds of billions of dollars” in higher utility bills due to the state’s “Green New Deal”-inspired plan, according to a top energy regulatory official — who accused lawmakers of hiding the true cost of the bill.

John Howard, former chairman and current member of the state Public Service Commission, claimed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic-run legislature never leveled with the public on the costs associated with the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act approved in 2019.

Why would they level with voters? Nothing having to do with the global warming hoax is on the level.

Since it was politically inconvenient to raise taxes enough to pay for this, it will be financed through utility rate increases. That will have the benefit of allowing Democrats to demonize the power company.

The law, which Cuomo signed in a ceremony with Al Gore at his side, requires New York to slash greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030 and no less than 85% by 2050 by transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, such as hydropower, solar and wind. The state Climate Action Council, meanwhile, is charged with developing a plan to put the state on a path toward zero carbon emissions.

Zero carbon emissions would literally mean zero human activity.

For an idea of what it would mean for America as a whole to let Democrats consolidate power nationally the way they have in New York, refer to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Left unchecked, their ambitions will utterly destroy the economy, leading to the death by starvation of a large percentage of the population. Already Biden et al. have turned what should have been a post-Covid boom into a lurch toward recession.

There is zero chance that Democrats’ extravagantly expensive climate posturing will have a perceptible effect on global temperature.

On a tip from Wiggins.

The smoke has begun to clear. We can look back on the Covid crisis and determine who addressed it the right way and who did not. As usual, freedom worked. Tyranny did not work.

The results are in:

New York, New Jersey and California failed in their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic because of stringent lockdowns and policies, while Florida was among the best-performing states in the country, a new study has found.

The study, published by the Committee To Unleash Prosperity, graded states by comparing COVID-19 outcomes based on the number of deaths, the economy and impact on education.

By a remarkable coincidence, the best-performing states all had Republican governors.

The study found that the states that locked down businesses, churches, schools and restaurants for lengthy periods did not have lower death rates than those that largely remained open.

But they did manage to inflict more economic damage.

Keeping schools closed had no impact on the number of deaths in children or adults, according to the study.

That was more about placating teachers unions than public health.

Ultraliberal New York came in 49th out of 50; only New Jersey was worse. Yet the liberal establishment assured us that the lethally incompetent, tyrannical, but formerly beloved New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was doing a wonderful job:

On tips from Jack D.

Eric Adams has two big advantages that helped him become mayor of the nation’s largest city: (1) he is black and (2) he has no shame about playing the race card. Watch how it is done to deflect even the slightest criticism from an obsequious media establishment that worships his skin color:

Meanwhile, Adams refers to people not blessed with his politically advantageous pigmentation as “crackers.” We all know what racists crackers can be.

In other Eric Adams news, he just fired over 1,400 city workers for not submitting to an increasingly superfluous Covid vaccine, even as the pandemic peters out.

It is doubtful that New York City will ever have a worse mayor than Bill de Blasio. But then, who would have thought that New York State would have a worse governor than Andrew Cuomo — until Kathy Hochul came along?

On tips from THOUGHTCRIMINAL2084 and Wiggins.

The Blaze offers hope with two stories on ratings.

Biden’s ratings are in freefall:

Biden’s approval rating among Americans polled in the newest Quinnipiac poll cratered to a new low as high inflation continued to hamper the economy.

Only a third of Americans, or 33%, said that they approve of the job Biden is doing as president.

It would be amazing that even that many approve of the incompetent, obnoxious, corrupt, senile, and creepy figurehead for the radical left who has driven inflation into the stratosphere with wasteful spending and his malicious War on Energy — until you consider that he still has the support of the media that placed him in power. Speaking of which,

For the week of Jan. 3, CNN saw an average daily viewer count of only 548,000 viewers. That represents an 81% drop from the network’s average viewer count in the same week from last year, when it garnered 2.7 million viewers.

Last year, CNN and the Democrats had January 6 going for them. But as increasingly desperate attempts to exploit it make clear, January 6 hysteria has petered out among the general public.

Worse still for CNN was the network’s ratings among prime-time viewers, where it lost 89% in a key demographic year over year. Among viewers ages 18 to 49 years old, CNN lost 91% year over year.

CNN’s scandals have not helped, including top anchor Chris Cuomo using underhanded tactics to defend former liberal heartthrob Andrew Cuomo, and producer John Griffin allegedly grooming children for sexual assault.

CNN can survive these scandals, but it might not survive being viewed as the American Pravda — a propaganda organ for a rotten and dysfunctional establishment.

Moonbattery may have hit its high water mark a year ago. Biden’s first constructive accomplishment has been to demonstrate so that few could fail to notice that the deranged and degenerate Democrat Party will destroy the country if not pried loose from power. The media that props it up has never been less trusted.

Our rulers have learned from the ongoing Covid overreaction that any extreme of tyranny — no matter how outrageously intrusive and repressive — can be excused if it is inflicted in the name of public health. They cannot maintain Covid hysteria indefinitely, especially not with Omicron appearing to indicate that it is petering out into the common cold. No worries; any problem real or imaginary can become a health crisis by waving the magic wand of postmodernism, according to which reality is determined by the words used to describe it.

Some thought no one could top the Covid tyranny of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who earned the adoration of the liberal establishment by crushing small business in the name of the virus, meanwhile killing thousands of seniors by forcing nursing homes to take in Covid patients. His replacement Kathy Hochul proved otherwise, declaring a state of emergency over the mild Omicron variant.

Soon even Hochul will have to admit that Omicron is no crisis. So now the health crisis is racism. This is official, Hochul having signed legislation:

“For far too long, communities of color in New York have been held back by systemic racism and inequitable treatment,” Hochul said. “I am proud to sign legislation that addresses this crisis head-on, addressing racism, expanding equity, and improving access for all.”

As the existence of this legislation indicates, the notion that there is significant racism against anyone other than whites in the USA is a preposterous lie. Imagine any governor signing a law explicitly intended to benefit Caucasians. It could not happen in this country.

Hochul signed a package of legislation on December 23 containing six bills that declare the public health crisis and implement ways to address it. Legislation S.70-A/A.2230 enacted the hate crimes analysis and review act, which gives law enforcement guidelines for the collection and reporting of demographic data for hate crime victims and alleged perpetrators.

You can see why people have been escaping New York in droves. Unfortunately, leftist lunacy has taken root at the federal level.

Hochul is likely following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) lead. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared racism a “serious public health threat” in April.

The CDC already has the power to suspend rent payments, effectively seizing the property of all landlords without due process — and that started with a Republican in the White House. Imagine what steps it might take to cure us of our allegedly racist attitudes.

“What we know is this: racism is a serious public health threat that directly affects the well-being of millions of Americans,” Walensky said. “As a result, it affects the health of our entire nation.”

The CDC has also identified the firearms and the imaginary climate crisis as threats to public health.

Multiple cities have already taken the absurd yet terrifying step of declaring “racism” — i.e., political incorrectness— to be a public health crisis, including Chicago, Boston, Louisville, and of course, New York City. Like Covid in a ChiCom laboratory, radical moonbattery is engineered in the petri dishes of dying cities before it is unleashed on the rest of us.

Fascism no longer looks like rock-jawed Benito Mussolini in jackboots. Now it looks like Tony Fauci in a lab coat.

On tips from Anonymous and Wiggins.

According to the dogma of the globalist ruling class, we must centralize authority over the economy and drastically reduce our standard of living because if we do not, carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will exacerbate the constant fluctuation of the climate, threatening the existence of the human race and even all life on earth.

Not even the conspicuously slow Joe Biden actually believes this hysterical nonsense. We know our rulers are lying not only by the arrogant hypocrisy they display by flying private jets to climate summits, but by their attitude toward nuclear power.

The electric vehicles they spend so much of our money to impose do not run on woke thoughts. No informed person thinks we can create enough power with unreliable and inefficient wind turbines and solar panels to keep transportation moving, much less the rest of the economy. If fossil fuels really are as harmful as we are asked to believe, that leaves zero-emission nuclear power — which leftists are in the process of abolishing.

Via UPI:

Belgium officials reached an agreement Thursday to close all seven of the country’s nuclear reactors by 2025, but they will be open to new, smaller nuclear plants under the compromise.

Considering how progressive politics works, the smaller plants will keep getting smaller until they shrink away to nothing. Possibly, they will be stalled and never get built at all.

It isn’t just Belgium:

As part of the agreement, Belgium will invest 100 million euros in research into new, smaller modular nuclear power plants. France and the Netherlands have invested in similar research.

Good thing taxpayers have plenty of money.

France gets half its electricity from nuclear energy. Symbolic windmills will not make up the shortfall. More fossil fuels will be required from Russia, Europe’s main supplier. Russia has been exploiting its leverage to jack up gas prices. Putin continues to grin like the cat who ate the canary.

The nuclear power phaseout has been codified in Belgian law since 2003.

Why? Because moonbattery.

Similarly, the leftists running New York shut down Indian Point this year. It produced over 565 terawatt-hours of electricity (1 terawatt-hour = 1 trillion watts for 1 hour), and was supplying 25% of NYC’s power. Andrew Cuomo also put a stranglehold on pipelines, before being replaced by a maniac from even further to the left.

Unless progressives are motivated by sheer malice (which is a supportable hypothesis), they must figure we will be easier to rule over when we are shivering in the dark and cold, unemployed and unable to travel after the supply of energy has been deliberately reduced below the level required to sustain a modern economy.

On a tip from Bluto.

Our leftist ruling class can always find someone still more awful to impose on us. You thought no one could be worse than Andrew Cuomo? Meet New York’s new Governor, Kathy Hochul. You thought no one could be worse than Jack Dorsey? Meet Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, who is just as left-wing and even more hostile to free speech than the guy under whom Twitter banned the President of the USA for having the wrong politics.

Hot Air breaks the bad news:

The first major initiative by Twitter in the Agrawal era is not to make speech freer, but to give Twitter’s apparatchiks and activists even more power and less clarity on what will bring the ban hammer.

This is accomplished by banning media of private individuals without the permission of those depicted. Twitter makes its leftist motivations clear in this statement:

Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm. The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.

By “activists” and “dissidents,” they refer mainly to Black Lives Matter and Antifa thugs, whose sociopathic activities are covered up by the fellow-traveling mainstream media and left to private citizens to report on. The wokesters running Twitter are hardly likely to apply the ambiguous new rule even-handedly. As Hot Air notes,

Consider that their explanation assures users that they will “always try to assess the context” of the picture to see whether it is posted “in the public interest,” or whether it will “add value to public discourse” or “relevant to the community.” Nothing arbitrary, capricious, or subjective about that, right? Right?

Yet under Democrat rule, Twitter will continue to enjoy the legal protections of a neutral service provider rather than a publisher with an editorial viewpoint. Under a corrupt government, it pays to have a seat at the table.

Mark Dice has more:

Where political issues are concerned, Twitter will soon serve exclusively as a megaphone to promote antiwhite race hate and other left-wing causes. This may actually be good news, if it serves as the catalyst to get a critical mass of users behind an alternate platform like Gab. That’s where people will have to go to see great pages like Libs of TikTok.

The only reason to use Twitter is that everyone else does. Once enough bail out for alternatives, Twitter will become just another boring, irrelevant moonbat echo chamber, like public broadcasting.

On tips from TCS III, ABC of the ANC, and KirklesWorth.

Here’s an interesting fact those residing within the liberal establishment media’s bubble of propaganda may never know. Free Florida — the subject of pearl-clutching by the media because Governor Ron DeSantis does not engage in Covid tyranny — has the lowest Covid cases per capita in the nation. Blue Michigan — under the heel of Covid tyrant Gretchen Whitmer — has the highest.

Via ABC/NBC/CBS/PBS/CNN? Not likely. Via Fox News:

DeSantis has been slammed by critics in the media since the start of the pandemic over his opposition to government-imposed mask and vaccine mandates. In 2020, DeSantis was accused by a Democratic politician of going on a “killing spree” for opposing mask mandates and a Vanity Fair headline from September of this year referred to the governor as an “angel of death.”

At the same time Florida reported the lowest amount of new cases in the country per capita, coronavirus cases are surging in many states where strict lockdown orders were issued by Democratic governors.

Michigan, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imposed some of the most controversial restrictions in the nation during the height of the pandemic, leads the nation in daily coronavirus cases per capita.

Gretchen “DAISNAID” Whitmer infamously forbade Michiganders from buying garden seeds because Covid. Like Andrew Cuomo and former Pennsylvania Health Secretary (currently the historic first female four-star admiral despite being male) Richard I mean “Rachel” Levine, she killed people who were mostly done paying taxes anyway by forcing nursing homes to accept Covid patients.

Freedom works. Tyranny does not work, except for the tyrants. Freedom is the exception and tyranny the rule because it is the natural state of affairs for those in charge to seize ever more power at the expense of everyone else. Society is only healthy when that power is limited. It is only limited when the population cherishes freedom enough to limit it. We will only cherish freedom sufficiently when we stop listening to tyrants’ lackeys — that is, to the liberal establishment media.

Hat tip: Not the Bee.

It would be hard to have a more awful response to Covid than erstwhile liberal heartthrob Andrew Cuomo, who won lavish praise from the media while driving businesses into bankruptcy with gratuitous tyranny and killing thousands of elderly people by forcing nursing homes to accept Covid patients. However, his replacement Kathy Hochul perseveres in her campaign to prove there is nothing Cuomo could do she can’t do worse.

The Nu variant is already yesterday’s news. We skipped the Xi variant because it would be politically incorrect to associate a virus engineered in a ChiCom laboratory with the Chinese communist dictator. Here’s how Kathy Hochul is exploiting the Omicron variant to make her mark on the everyday lives of New Yorkers:

Hochul has declared a state of emergency ahead of potential COVID-19 spikes this winter due to the already-circulating Delta and newly-identified Omicron variants of coronavirus.

Emergency is the ideal state for Big Government. Any amount of the next generation’s money can be wasted, because there is no future, only the current crisis. Any power grab can be excused.

Tough luck if you need a medical procedure:

Hochul signed an executive order Friday to postpone elective hospital surgeries — something that hasn’t been done since the worst of the initial coronavirus outbreak last year.

Drastic measures need to be taken, due to all the Omicron cases in New York. Oh wait, there hasn’t been a single one — in New York or anywhere else in the USA.

The new protocols will take effect on Friday, Dec. 3, and will be re-evaluated based on the latest COVID-19 data on Jan. 15.

By then our rulers will have declared martial law due to the Pi variant.

On tips from Wiggins, Occam’s Stubble, and Anonymous.

If you live in New York and are wondering why you received an incomprehensible letter from the power company asking about your pronouns, the answer is that moonbattery is a totalitarian ideology, so where it prevails, all human activity must be subordinated to it. Consequently, utility companies have been coercively enlisted in the campaign to impose obeisance to LGBT militants on every facet of private life.

You thought no one could be worse than Andrew Cuomo? The latest lunacy from his replacement:

Kathy Hochul signed a bill Monday that will require utility corporations, municipalities, water-works corporations, and telephone service providers to utilize each customer’s desired name and pronouns in communications.

Here’s how Hochul spends her time instead of dealing with the Empire State’s growing economic and societal problems:

By “correct” she means “politically correct.” She most definitely does not mean “biologically correct.”

This may seem like a frivolous waste of time, but it actually serves a purpose. Hochul and her fellow Democrats are establishing that the government has the power to compel speech, regardless of the First Amendment. It has the power to force people to overtly reject objective reality in favor of official ideology, just like in Orwell’s 1984.

In case legislation requires anyone to ask for my preferred pronouns, I’ll put them on the record in advance. They are “Let’s go Brandon/Let’s go Brandon.”

Speaking of New York, if your kids are “Been there, done that” about Disneyland, you might consider bringing them to the Big Apple. Democrat rule has transformed it into a theme park that offers a preview of our dystopian future if liberalism prevails. Be sure to take a ride on the subway; it is much more of a thrill than any of the rides in a traditional amusement park:

Maniacs run wild while bureaucrats micromanage pronouns. The term for this is “anarchotyranny.”

On tips from Wiggins.

It seemed impossible that anyone could miss Andrew Cuomo — until Kathy Hochul came along.

She has attacked property rights. She has attacked transportation and free speech. She has pointlessly forced toddlers to wear Covid obedience muzzles. Now she claims to speak for God:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) said at a Sunday mass in the Bronx that Christians who are not vaccinated against COVID “aren’t listening to God,” adding that God wants them vaccinated.

The Democrat notably made the comments one day before her vaccine mandate for health care workers takes effect. The controversial order has already sparked health care worker shortages around the state.

No worries about the healthcare worker shortage. Progressives always have solutions for the problems they cause. Here’s Hochul’s:

[Hochul] is considering deploying the medically trained members of the National Guard ahead of an anticipated shortage of health care workers.

Hochul released a comprehensive plan to address staff shortages in New York facilities Saturday, amid concerns that a large number of health care employees will not meet Monday’s vaccine deadline.

Looks like no worker is really essential. We might all be replaced with soldiers unless we obey. Soldiers make better workers than civilians because they have to follow orders.

Workers terminated because they refuse to be vaccinated are also not eligible for unemployment insurance unless they provide a medical accommodation from a doctor, the statement noted.

For someone who speaks for God, Hochul does not seem to hold religion in high regard. Her order bans religious exemptions. This ban has thankfully been blocked for now, after the Thomas More Society took her to court on behalf of healthcare workers:

“What New York is attempting to do is slam shut an escape hatch from an unconstitutional vaccine mandate,” [Thomas More Society Special Counsel Christopher] Ferrara argued. “And they are doing this while, knowing that many people have sincere religious objections to vaccines that were tested, developed, or produced with cell lines derived from aborted children.”

“These plaintiffs are not – I repeat – not anti-vaxxers, as the fake news media calls them,” stressed Ferrara. “They are in fact in favor of voluntary vaccination with informed consent, but they oppose jack-booted coercion by the state to take a vaccine their religion forbids them to take. This is America, not Red China.”

Not yet, anyway. But Kathy Hochul is working to minimize the difference.

On tips from Wiggins and MAS.

Two of the most infamously demented leftists aboard the ship of fools that is the Biden Administration have a connection going back to high school.

If Bob Woodward’s reporting is accurate, the absurdly overdecorated Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley committed straightforward treason during the Trump Administration in collusion with our communist Chinese adversaries. He has publicly espoused antiwhite race hate, and openly regards tens of millions of American citizens as enemies of the government.

Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Richard Levine, currently known as Rachel Levine, is a grotesque female impersonator who killed elderly nursing home residents in Pennsylvania by the same means used by Andrew Cuomo, while rescuing his own mother from the fate he callously inflicted on others. He evidently favors using drugs and even surgery to permanently deform children in the name of radical transgender ideology — without parental consent.

If ever two moonbats were made for each other, it is Mark Milley and Rachel Levine, so the revelation that they played football alongside each other at Belmont Hill School in Belmont, Massachusetts came as no surprise.

As noted at BizPac Review,

This bizarre revelation comes as the administration is facing increasing criticism that it’s “wokeness” has become a debilitating impediment. …

Dinesh D’Souza … argued that “woke” Biden administration officials had been “having fantasies of … putting troops in high heels, maybe transgender surgeries, transgender bathrooms,” instead of focusing on what mattered.

“We have our eye off the ball. The Taliban has its eye on the ball,” he added.

Afghanistan provided a graphic example of what happens when you put woke kooks in charge of the military. Putting people like Milley’s teammate in charge of healthcare policy isn’t working out any better.

On a tip from Jack D.

It seemed no replacement could be worse than the arrogantly tyrannical Andrew Cuomo. But progressives always manage to progress still further into dysfunctional authoritarian madness. Kathy Hochul tops even Cuomo by banning normal vehicles and calling on Facebook to censor opponents of abortion.

Via Newsmax:

Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., last week signed legislation banning the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2035.

Mandating the use of economically inefficient electric vehicles in the name of the climate allows Democrats to adopt the posture that they control even the weather. The policy also has a real world application: to make vehicles unaffordable to many Americans, denying them independent transportation. All things independent are anathema to Democrats.

By 2035, the last sane Americans will have escaped the People’s Republic of New York anyway. But Hochul et al. would like to see authoritarian ecolunacy imposed nationwide:

New York, California, and 10 other states asked President Joe Biden in April to set standards to ensure that all new passenger cars and light-duty trucks are zero-emissions by 2035.

Censorship is something else Hochul would like to impose beyond the borders of the Empire State. Via The Blaze:

In a letter to Facebook founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the governor requested “information on any and all existing efforts to combat misinformation regarding abortion laws, procedures, and their availability.” She also pressed for Zuckerberg to, “Take additional action to curb the spread of this misinformation, as Facebook has with information related to COVID-19, vaccines, and voting rights.”

If information regarding Covid and election integrity that Democrats want suppressed constitutes “misinformation,” so does anything that might dissuade expectant mothers from aborting their children.

New York’s next governor will likely be even worse than Hochul, difficult as that might be to imagine.

On tips from Wiggins and Mr. Freemarket.