Published Thu, May 28 20268:00 AM EDTUpdated 2 Hours Ago

Phil LeBeau@Lebeaucarnews

Published Thu, May 28 20268:00 A

Published Thu, May 28 20268:00 AM EDTUpdated 2 Hours Ago

Phil LeBeau

• Experian Automotive’s analysis of more than 5 million open auto loans and leases in the first quarter shows nearly 19% of new vehicle loans include a monthly payment of at least $1,000.
• Almost 74% of the auto loans requiring owners to pay $1,000 or more every month are for non-luxury models.
• The top five models for the $1,000-plus payments were popular pickup trucks including the Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Ram 1500, according to Experian.

country where big trucks are a big deal, those pickups and SUVs represent a big percentage of auto loans that come with a sizable monthly payment, more than $1,000 a month, according to new data.

Experian Automotive’s analysis of more than 5 million open auto loans and leases in the first quarter shows nearly 19% of new vehicle loans include a monthly payment of at least $1,000. That’s up from roughly 17.4% year over year.null

“The assumption is that it’s all luxury, it’s high-line, and that is not the case,” said Melinda Zabritski, head of automotive financial insights for Experian Automotive.

Almost 74% of the auto loans requiring owners to pay $1,000 or more every month are for non-luxury models, with the top five models being popular pickup trucks including the Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Ram 1500, according to Experian.

Just five years ago, auto loans with monthly payments over $1,000 accounted for just 5.4% of the market. Then the global chip shortage hit in 2021 and 2022, and automakers around the world prioritized production of higher-end, more profitable models. Vehicle prices soared, and so did the amount borrowed for auto loans.

Zabritski said those higher prices have changed how car and truck buyers look at what it takes to finance the purchase of a new vehicle.

“We haven’t seen a reduction in that MSRP, and in those high loan amounts,” she told CNBC. “I think as time goes on, I think more consumers are getting used to the $1,000 payment.” 

The average amount borrowed is now at an all-time high of $43,952, and the average monthly payment has also climbed to an all-time high of $770, according to Experian Automotive. Both are a reflection of a new auto market that is relatively strong.  

As for auto loan delinquencies, the percentage of loans that have payments more 30 days late has edged up to 2% of all new vehicle loans, with the 60-day delinquency rate also increasing.  

Still, Zabritski noted that delinquency rates remain below 2018 levels. 

“The driving force in the 60-day delinquency really does fall within the subprime market. Lower credit scores are going to have a higher likelihood of default,” she said.

In a country where big trucks are a big deal, those pickups and SUVs represent a big percentage of auto loans that come with a sizable monthly payment, more than $1,000 a month, according to new data.

Experian Automotive’s analysis of more than 5 million open auto loans and leases in the first quarter shows nearly 19% of new vehicle loans include a monthly payment of at least $1,000. That’s up from roughly 17.4% year over year.

“The assumption is that it’s all luxury, it’s high-line, and that is not the case,” said Melinda Zabritski, head of automotive financial insights for Experian Automotive.

Almost 74% of the auto loans requiring owners to pay $1,000 or more every month are for non-luxury models, with the top five models being popular pickup trucks including the Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Ram 1500, according to Experian.

Just five years ago, auto loans with monthly payments over $1,000 accounted for just 5.4% of the market. Then the global chip shortage hit in 2021 and 2022, and automakers around the world prioritized production of higher-end, more profitable models. Vehicle prices soared, and so did the amount borrowed for auto loans.

Zabritski said those higher prices have changed how car and truck buyers look at what it takes to finance the purchase of a new vehicle.

“We haven’t seen a reduction in that MSRP, and in those high loan amounts,” she told CNBC. “I think as time goes on, I think more consumers are getting used to the $1,000 payment.” 

The average amount borrowed is now at an all-time high of $43,952, and the average monthly payment has also climbed to an all-time high of $770, according to Experian Automotive. Both are a reflection of a new auto market that is relatively strong.  

As for auto loan delinquencies, the percentage of loans that have payments more 30 days late has edged up to 2% of all new vehicle loans, with the 60-day delinquency rate also increasing.  

Still, Zabritski noted that delinquency rates remain below 2018 levels. 

“The driving force in the 60-day delinquency really does fall within the subprime market. Lower credit scores are going to have a higher likelihood of default,” she said.

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A group of former federal probationary employees surveyed more than 300 of their fired colleagues to assess their job searches, mental health and several other topics.

Sean Michael Newhouse | 

May 27, 2026 12:56 PM ET

The Trump administration fired thousands of probationary employees in February 2025. Jackyenjoyphotography / Getty Images

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They were told they’d move on. A year later, many fired federal employees say they haven’t been able to

A group of former federal probationary employees surveyed more than 300 of their fired colleagues to assess their job searches, mental health and several other topics.

Sean Michael Newhouse | 

May 27, 2026 12:56 PM ET

• Firings

As part of its effort to downsize the federal workforce in February 2025, the Trump administration conducted a mass firing of thousands of agency employees in their probationary periods, which generally last for the first year after a worker has been hired by or promoted within the government. Such staffers have weaker civil service job protections. 

In September 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the removals were unlawful. He didn’t order agencies to reinstate affected employees, however, due to an earlier Supreme Court decision and because, as he put it, “The terminated probationary employees have moved on with their lives and found new jobs.”

So, a group of former probationary employees sought to find out if their colleagues had, in fact, “moved on.” Between February and March, they conducted a survey of more than 300 individuals impacted by the firings, representing 12 federal departments as well as 43 states and one territory.  

The results show that many fired probationers haven’t found new jobs, are experiencing poor mental health and remain concerned about their former agencies’ effectiveness with reduced workforces. 

Unemployment

The most frequent answer to a question in the survey asking how long it took to find a new job was “still unemployed.” Relatedly, around 80 participants reported that they have submitted more than 100 job applications. 

Jacob Saunders, a respondent who worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for five weeks before he was fired, said that he still hasn’t found a full-time job. In the meantime, he is a high school lacrosse coach, has taken on sporadic gig work and sells items on eBay. 

“It does annoy me when somebody thinks that it’s pretty simple. I’ve applied to 15 jobs in one week. I might apply for three jobs a day or two jobs a day,” he said. “I’ve applied to a lot of jobs.”

The president in January defended his cuts to the civil service by claiming that employees who were pushed out are now in the private sector making double or triple their government salaries. 

In contrast, the probationary survey found that, among respondents who found new roles, 49% reported that their salary is “significantly lower” than what they made in the federal government with another 19% saying their salary is “lower.” 

The survey data was published by 27 UNIHTED, an organization of former National Institutes of Health employees established in response to the second Trump administration. 

Mental health 

In the survey, 95% of participants responded that they experienced “new mental health symptoms that had negative impacts on personal wellbeing” after being terminated.

Liz Crandall, one of the respondents and a fired field ranger from the U.S. Forest Service, wasn’t surprised by that result. 

“I’m seeing it still from friends that were probationary employees that were fired. They’re still not doing well. I would almost argue they’re doing worse because it’s grief mixed with embarrassment and shame that they’re still not able to get through it,” she said. “A lot of people have had to go on new medications and take out loans. And our health insurance is obviously taken away since we were fired.” 

null

Crandall had been in her position for more than one year but had not yet received full civil service job protections because she was hired under Schedule A, a mechanism for agencies to bring on workers with disabilities that has a two-year probationary period. 

Many civil servants hired under Schedule A who had been in their jobs between one to two years have argued that they wouldn’t have been impacted by the probationary firings if they were recruited through another pathway. 

Nearly 85% of survey respondents said that their agencies were not transparent about their firings. Crandall, for example, thought she might have been spared from the removals because initially only probationary employees with less than one year in her division were terminated. But she was let go the next day. 

“Nothing made sense, no one had answers, HR had no idea what was happening. No one had any idea,” she said. “It was so bizarre and unprecedented and chaotic and even my conservative [coworkers] were crying.”

Likewise, Saunders said that his supervisor didn’t know he had been fired. He was the one who informed him. 

Effect on agency operations 

The two most common responses to a question in the survey asking about negative impacts to the public due to the probationary firings were: “larger (sometimes unmanageable) workload for remaining employees” and “loss of institutional knowledge.” 

Crandall is worried, in particular, about her former agency’s continued ability to combat wildfires. Like many other USFS employees who were fired or otherwise pushed out by the Trump administration, she held a “red card” — meaning she was certified for firefighting duties and could be deployed as needed. 

Government Executive previously reported that at least 1,400 USFS employees with “red cards” left the agency, but officials asked some of them to volunteer to return for the 2025 fire season.

Beyond personnel numbers, Crandall said that she possessed localized knowledge like locations of non-designated campsites and unofficial roads. 

“Instead of people having to risk their safety to go in and navigate this insane spider web of roads, they would look to people like me and say ‘Where are the sites so that we can just go in and evacuate those directly? So we don’t have to wander while a fire is creeping up on us,’” she said. “That was really important. That’s the mixture of institutional knowledge, on-the-ground knowledge, local/regional knowledge as well as personnel.”

Both Saunders and Crandall said that they were offered their positions back following court orders but declined due to fears that they would still lose their jobs through layoffs under reduction in force procedures, which is another method the Trump administration has used to reduce agency headcounts. 

“You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube,” Saunders said. “Once I had already gotten fired, what’s stopping it from happening again?”

Crandall now works for a conservation nonprofit. 

The Office of Personnel Management, which Judge Alsup determined illegally required the probationary firings, did not respond to a request for comment by press time. 

Additional findings

The former probationers who conducted the survey noted that respondents’ participation was based on self-selection rather than a random sample. 

A quarter of respondents reported that they were reinstated to their federal jobs. Another 15% said they got their positions back but were then terminated later. 

While probationary periods are associated with workers who are new to government, around 45% of survey respondents said they previously worked for a federal agency as a contractor.

The Trump administration recently launched several efforts to recruit early-career workers to serve in a federal agency.

If you have a tip that can contribute to our reporting, Sean Michael Newhouse can be reached securely at seanthenewsboy.45 on Signal.

Israel Gershoni’s Colonial Propaganda Masquerading as “Evidence.”

More on the push by Achcar (who, outrageously, compared genocidal Palestinian Oct 7 onslaught to the 1943 Warsaw Uprising) and Gershoni attempts to downplay widespread Nazi sympathies in Arab Palestine.

Gershoni’s use of Arabic newspapers from the Second World War period as reliable evidence is methodologically worthless. These newspapers, during the WWII, did not operate under conditions of press freedom, but under a strict British wartime censorship regime that monitored, edited, suppressed, and directed political reporting in Mandatory Palestine. As British records show, and as laid out by Mustafa Kabha and David Sharfman, the wartime press functioned under extensive colonial supervision, where publication was conditioned by political control and security considerations rather than independent journalism.

Sharfman demonstrates that wartime censorship formed an integral part of British propaganda and internal security policy, while Kabha’s work likewise highlights the pressures, restrictions, and interventions imposed upon the Arabic press during the Mandate period. Under such conditions, newspapers cannot seriously be treated as transparent reflections of public opinion or political reality. To rely on them uncritically, while ignoring the coercive framework under which they were produced, strips the argument of historical credibility altogether.

______

Sharfman, D. (2023). Jerusalem in the Second World War: Part 2. Living in wartime. 3. Civil defence, rationing, and press censorship. Taylor & Francis. https://books.google.com/books?id=B7_mEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT29

Censorship and the Jewish and Arab press – political issues.

The government’s censorship policy was severely criticised by Trevor in a book published by the end of the Mandate. She claimed that: ‘While the censorship thus accumulated the worst features of all the different systems known in other belligerent countries, it worked on certain principles peculiar to Palestine … For example, the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husseini was taboo. In June 1939, the papers had been informed that as he was officially excluded from Palestine ‘on account of his nefarious activities’, any publication concerning him or his movements was likely to endanger the public peace and might lead to suspension of the paper. The authorities also suppressed any criticism of the administration: ‘down to the slackness of post office clerks and the accents of radio announcers’. Another forbidden topic was Zionism, and any expression of sympathy for it in the outside world was to be kept from the knowledge of Arabs and Jews in Palestine: ‘However theoretically or moderately phrased the plea, however high the standing of the pleader – be it Dr. Weizmann or Mr. Churchill himself – the axe fell’.

The censors banned articles or excerpts from them in almost every field….

Kabahā, M., Caspi, D. (2011). The Palestinian Arab In/outsiders: Media and Conflict in Israel. United Kingdom: Vallentine Mitchell, pp. 58-59.

The Palestinian Press During the Second World War.

When the Palestinian revolt subsided and ended in the early months of the Second World War, which broke out in early September 1939, all activities of the Palestinian National Movement and its various Palestine branches were suspended. One reason was the absence of the senior leadership, whose members were either under arrest or in forced exile (by the British) or had joined Mufti Haj Amin in his wanderings among Baghdad , Rome and Berlin. Another reason was the developing economic reliance of the Palestinian bourgeoisie on the British market: the financial circumstances of significant parts of the bourgeoisie depended on their engagement in supplying the needs of the British army and its war efforts in the East, leading to compromising and conciliatory views towards Britain and its allies. Those who refused to compromise felt the wrath of the British censor: the authorities often used newsprint quotas and restrictions of other technical services in order to punish newspapers voicing criticism and to reward more compromising news-papers (interview with Fawzi al-Shanti, Jerusalem, 5 June 1995). During the Second World War eighteen new newspapers appeared, of them three dailies, six weeklies, six monthlies and three that appeared erratically (Mawsou’a 1994, Volume 4 , pp.448-9). Two of the most prominent, al-Muntada, ‘Discussion Forum’, and Huna al-Quds, ‘Here is Jerusalem’, were published by British authorities, with the aim of influencing Palestinian public opinion in favour of Britain and its allies. These two newspapers were virtually the only available sources of information on the fighting on the different fronts, even for other newspapers, although the news they presented was probably censored and edited at the discretion of the authorities. Two other newspapers, al-Ittihad and al-Ghad, ‘The Tomorrow’, were leftist-oriented and expressed the increasing influence of popular elements and labour unions which began to assemble at the time, challenging the senior political leadership, many of whose members were absent.

federal judge on Thursday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to implement his executive order tightening mail-in voting, slapping down Democrats’ arguments for now that federal efforts to police voter rolls with citizenship checks was illegal.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointed jurist, ruled that Democrats failed to show they have standing at present to challenge the order or have suffered any harm that would warrant a preliminary injunction.

“Given that the Executive Order does not command Plaintiffs to do anything, and that no agency has yet acted pursuant to the Order in a way that could harm Plaintiffs, they have not suffered any harm at present,” the judge wrote.

You can read the ruling here.

Nichols rejected several of the Democrats’ arguments that Trump’s executive order could disenfranchise millions of voters, including that creating state-by-state citizenship lists to check voter rolls would somehow be harmful, even if they were inaccurate.

“It remains speculative whether the State Citizenship Lists, if and when they are initially compiled, will contain inaccuracies,” he wrote. “Even if they contain initial inaccuracies, the Executive Order requires the adoption of procedures that will allow individuals to access and, if necessary, update or correct their information in the Lists.”

The judge also rejected the notion that the federal government sending information to the states about voters would somehow violate voters’ privacy.

“Plaintiffs fail to demonstrate that such action—that is, the sharing of name, age, and residence information between and among government agencies, if already known to the federal government—would cause a harm sufficient to establish Article III standing,” he ruled.

Just the News

Ocean “acidification” is a somewhat unique branch of the overarching climate scare. It differs from other branches of the big scare in that it does not depend on atmospheric heating as the driver of the supposed scary consequences. Instead, with ocean “acidification,” the idea is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere (from the burning of fossil fuels) leads to increased CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which leads to lower pH of ocean water, which then becomes the driver of the alleged scary consequences. Thus, ocean “acidification” can theoretically work as a scare even if the atmosphere fails to heat with increasing CO2 content to the extent predicted by advocates’ climate models.

But the ocean “acidification” claim has its own frailties. For advocates of apocalyse, it is a problem that the ocean is (somewhat) alkaline, rather than acidic, and that the change in ocean pH from even large increases in CO2 in the atmosphere is small. Some might even call the change in ocean pH “slight.” And the pH change, even in worst-case scenarios, is not nearly enough to bring it down to the level of neutrality, let alone acidity. The last point is the reason that I have been putting the term “acidification” in quotes.

So, how can advocates make ocean “acidification” into something sufficiently scary to motivate lots of people to hate or fear fossil fuels? Well, perhaps they could manufacture a claim that somewhat lower pH would kill all the tropical fish. OK, but the claim could not be that slightly lower pH will directly kill the fish — nobody would ever buy that. There would have to be a different mechanism.

Several years ago (May 2021) I had a post covering the work of a pair of researchers in Australia who had come up with a claim fitting just this description. The researchers in question were Philip Munday and Danielle Dixson of James Cook University in Queensland. Over the course of multiple years and some 22 peer-reviewed papers, those two (and co-authors) had put forth a claim that lower ocean pH would drive tropical fish crazy, or at least cause the fish to experience “profound behavioral and sensory impairments” that would imperil their survival. As should be obvious, this claim gave extraordinary support to the anti-fossil fuel narrative, independent of any claim of global warming, and as a result gave the papers a very high profile, and brought the authors great acclaim.

But it was too good to be true. The occasion for my May 2021 post was a paper that had appeared in Nature in 2020, by authors Timothy Clark, et al., reporting on the results of efforts to reproduce the Munday/Dixson results. Excerpt from the abstract:

Here, we comprehensively and transparently show that—in contrast to previous studies—end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes, such as the avoidance of chemical cues from predators, fish activity levels and behavioural lateralization (left–right turning preference). Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. Together, our findings indicate that the reported effects of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fishes are not reproducible, suggesting that behavioural perturbations will not be a major consequence for coral reef fishes in high CO2 oceans.

The abstract does not contain the word “fraud,” but the article contains strong suggestions of data manipulation. This was a very unusual piece for Nature to publish, given the harm it caused to a significant underpinning of the anti-fossil fuel narrative.

Here we are now, five years on. Does anything remain of the “ocean acidification” narrative as a reason to hate fossil fuels?

The past few months have seen pieces laying out the cases both for and against believing that “ocean acidification” is a significant environmental concern. On the side of “ocean acidification is really bad and scary,” I will highlight a piece by Dana Nuccitelli that appeared in something called The Invading Sea in March, title “Fossil fuel pollution’s effect on oceans comes with huge costs.” On the side of “ocean acidification is way overblown,” I will highlight a May 13, 2026 paper by van Wijngaarden, Ridd, Cornell and Happer, title “Acidification of Water by CO2.”

Nuccitelli is a frequent writer at Yale Climate Connections (yet another black eye for Yale). In Nuccitelli’s piece, he appears to have given up on trying to claim that changing pH is killing off the tropical fish. So instead, here, he emphasizes the effect on coral. He claims that “acidification” is killing off coral, but can’t attribute dying coral just to pH, so he throws in warming as well:

Florida’s barrier reef is in trouble – and it’s costing us. The reef has been experiencing a severe outbreak of stony coral tissue loss disease over the past decade. The likely cause: stress from the warming climate and acidifying waters, both the result of burning fossil fuels. . . . Human burning of fossil fuels affects Earth’s oceans via the one-two punch of warming and acidifying waters, which occurs as carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean.

No quantitative information is provided for the amount of coral loss, if any. The “likely cause” of the disease is said to be a combination of “warming” and “acidifying waters.” How does he know that? How much from each? Is there any actual proof? If so, Nuccitelli does not choose to cite it. I guess it’s just obvious to his readership.

After asserting the “likely cause,” Nuccitelli moves on to calculating the cost, not of the portion of the coral that may be lost, but of the entire tourism industry related to all the coral:

The financial stake of losing the reef is high. Florida’s coral reefs are estimated to draw in over $1 billion in tourism revenue each year, provide $650 million in flood protection benefits and support over 70,000 jobs. What’s more, coral reefs protect people and property by dissipating up to 97% of wave energy, lessening storm surges.

And then Nuccitelli goes on to rely on a recent paper from Nature Climate Change (from January 2026) that purports to calculate a new measure of “social cost of carbon” on an assumption that global warming will significantly decrease the productivity of the oceans, not just for coral, but all other life. The NCC paper does not appear to deal with the acidification issue at all.

Top Democratic officials and lawmakers are breaking with Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner as his past blunders and online history stack up.

Platner’s ascendency to the top of the ticket in Vacationland broke with the Democratic establishment in Washington, D.C., and since Maine Gov. Janet Mills exited from the race, questions about whether he is the right choice to take on Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, have exploded.

Much of that is fueled by scandals that have cropped up seemingly week after week, be it a tattoo on his chest of a Nazi symbol or inflammatory posts online.

Some in the Democratic Party warn that it’s spurring a “civil war” between the moderate and left wings of the party.

Melissa DeRosa, former New York Mayor Andrew Cuomo’s chief of staff, told Fox News’ Bret Baier that Platner’s rise and ensuing questions of his fitness as a candidate are demonstrative of the bubbling conflict within the Democratic Party.

“The main race really demonstrates the civil war that’s happening within the Democratic Party, and there are a lot of Democrats, moderate Democrats like myself, who will not cry tears should we lose Maine,” DeRosa said.

“I mean, that would be a pickup to begin with.”

Senate Democrats view Maine as one of the most viable pickup opportunities in the 2026 midterm cycle in their quest to regain control of the upper chamber.

Platner is not the candidate that party bosses wanted, but since jumping into the race last year, he has built a growing national profile that reached new heights earlier this month when he landed on the cover of Time magazine.

The left’s glamorization of political violence begins as performance, but history shows how quickly chic nihilism can become something far darker.

Brian Thompson’s shooter suspect in hostel CCTV. (security camera, Wikimedia Commons)

On the morning of May 18, 2026, on the granite steps of Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, three chic women arranged themselves like starlets at Cannes. The heels. The practiced hip-thrust. Weight cocked to one side, chin down, eyes up. With enough mascara between them to repaint Gracie Mansion. But the most revealing part, the part that showed the most skin, was the laminated press credential blessed by the office of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It certified they were card-carrying members of the working press. Only they were not here to cover a criminal. Luigi’s Angels, or as they call themselves, more affectionately, the Mangionistas, were there to worship a charismatic idol and to defend his violence.

Brian Thompson was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Was is the operative word here. He was walking to his company’s investor conference in broad daylight. A bullet went into his back. He arched and stumbled and hit the concrete hard. Then the killer stepped closer, took a look and fired again into the man’s leg. The cold December sidewalk against Thompson’s face, the blood spreading, the bystanders frozen, the normal morning around him with its coffee cups and crossing signals, while the spine that had just been torn through sent up whatever a body sends up in its last conscious minute. The shooter walked off and rode his bike through Central Park.

Outside the courthouse, the three women told reporters, breathlessly, what they thought of the dead man. “F-ck Brian Thompson,” said Ashley Rojas. “I don’t give a flying f-ck he died. F-ck his mom.”

Lena Weissbrot pronounced his two grieving children “better off without him,” told them to enjoy the “blood money,” and rated the murdered executive responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. To watch a group of women cheer, loud and unembarrassed, for the assassination of a man who was guilty of holding a job somebody did not like looks like a crazy one-off kind of crime.

Except that it isn’t. We heard it in 1932. In Berlin.

In the breakthrough election of July 1932, British historian Dick Geary documented, some 6.5 million German women voted for the Nazis, nearly half of the party’s 13.7 million votes, and they did it even as Hitler promised to drive hundreds of thousands of them out of the workforce to make room for men. They voted in force for a movement that despised their independence. By the time the regime held power, some 13 million of Germany’s 40 million women were active in its organizations, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The surge ran strongest among young women and first-time voters who had never been political before.

That dynamic fits another electorate closer to home. Eight decades later, the CIRCLE project at Tufts University found that 82% percent of women under 30 in New York City voted for Mamdani against 65% of the men, a gap so wide it has stopped being a curiosity and become a movement, and one so 1932 that the comparison no longer feels like a coincidence. The Chicago Tribune, cabling from Paris on the German 1932 election results, described the Nazi program as “anti-Republican, anti-Semitic, and anti-capitalist.” The Nazi Party had a more official name – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – and it ran against finance and big business as hard as it ran against Jews. Where have we heard that lately?

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who twice came in second in the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process, calls the wealthy “the billionaire class” and says they have spent 40 years “looting the country.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells a cheering hall that “no one ever makes a billion dollars; you take a billion dollars.”

The shape is familiar: a productive people, a small moneyed few who produce nothing and drain the rest, a demand that the few be stripped and made to pay. Where the Nazi press wrote of the parasite bleeding the productive nation, the contemporary U.S. “progressive” Democratic denounces the billionaire, the corporate parasite, the bloodsucking insurer, the Wall Street ghoul. Some even go so far as to name several prominent Jews. The point is not that today’s democratic socialists are Nazis. It is the demonizing grievance that built the movement, a productive nation set against a parasitic moneyed few, is a theme. And themes recur.

Mamdani’s own record supplies the text. He spent months refusing to condemn “globalize the intifada,” conceding at last only that he would “discourage” a movement that led to the murder of so many Jews. He also had the temerity to liken the phrase to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a comparison the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum pointed out was historically outrageous and deeply offensive to survivors. He has backed the boycott of Israel since college. He declines to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He told a Democratic Socialists panel that when the boot of the NYPD is on a New Yorker’s neck, “it’s been laced by the IDF.” It would be naive to call this the language of the death camp. But the same office that parses Israel so carefully also handed a press badge to the woman who said, “I don’t give a flying f-ck he died.” That is not a mindset interested in sensible solutions.

Mamdani’s own wife supplies more of it. Rama Duwaji, the illustrator he married in early 2025, has been documented liking posts that celebrated the October 7 Hamas attack and one that called the New York Times investigation into the sexual violence of that day a “mass rape hoax.” She illustrated an essay for a writer who has called Jews “vampires,” “demons,” “ghouls,” and “parasites.” The through-line runs into Luigi Mangione, the defendant who wrote in the notebook he was carrying when apprehended that the “parasites simply had it coming.” Vampires, demons, ghouls, parasites: This is not language that is merely adjacent to Nazi antisemitism. It is the same language, transcribed without a single substitution. Here is where anti-free market rhetoric and anti-Jewish hatred stop being a theory and start becoming a hit list.

In the months around Mangione’s arrest, an arsonist firebombed the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor while his family slept, for what the governor “wants to do to the Palestinian people.” A gunman shot two young Israeli embassy staffers, a couple about to be engaged, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, and chanted “Free Palestine!” as he was handcuffed by police. A week later, an Egyptian living in Colorado firebombed a march for the Israeli hostages, and an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor died of her burns. The cult of violence on the extreme American left is not a metaphor.

We call it madness because madness is consoling. Madness is rare, it is individual, it is always somebody else. But the celebration of a killing is no glitch in human nature; it is one of the oldest and most dependable things about us. It is what let Stalin starve millions and call it progress, and it has stood beneath every public stoning, every sacrifice on every altar since people first gathered to watch someone die for the good of the group. The horror is that the impulse is among the most ordinary things we do, and that it always begins with decent people deciding that the death of someone outside the circle is deserved. The women on the steps are not an aberration. They are the system’s most reliable signal of what is coming. They are not the noise. They are the tell.

The lesson is not about women or female nature. The Hausfrau who pulled the lever for Hitler and the young American who livestreams her devotion to Mangione share a single vulnerability: Under the right conditions, an otherwise non-violent woman, devoted to chic causes, will give herself completely to a charismatic man who frames killing as the solution to her perceived problems. The irony is that she often seeks liberation and ends up handing over her own agency. She is not the author of a totalitarian movement. She is its warmth, its alibi, its stooge, and she is the last to know it. That is why a press pass is not a small story. Confronted with the outrage, Abril Rios declared that no pressure would make her bow to her “oppressors.”

There may be a reason it is happening now. The world has grown too complex to hold in the head, a blur of systems and supply chains and feeds and AI trillionaires that no one can fathom, much less trace to a source, and the mind under that load looks for an exit. The simplest exit ever devised is a charismatic man who has already done the thinking, and an enemy who, conveniently, seems to deserve whatever he gets. That second half is the lie, the one that gets perpetrated every generation: the substitution of a hated group for an innocent one, the murderer dressed up as the new sheriff in town. For a moment, the mind that wants the madness to stop in a single click, a decisive ending, is the whole appeal. So we shoot Kennedy. We shoot his brother. We shoot MLK. We shoot Reagan, Ford, and Trump. The chic women applaud. This is the cult of the simple answer when the true answer has become too heavy to lift.

Karl Marx wrote that history arrives the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Berlin in 1932 was the tragedy. Three women in heels doing a hip-thrust for the cameras on a courthouse step, badges on their chests, cheering a man who shot a father of two in the back, is the farce. But the farce is not the harmless version of the tragedy. It is the tragedy that has not yet remembered what it is. 1932 is a date. It is also a temperament, and the temperament is back.

Jeff Cunningham, American Greatness

Hong Kong has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s biggest cross-border wealth hub for the first time, as an influx of investment from the Chinese mainland helped it eclipse the traditional haven.

Wealth managers in the Chinese territory booked $2.9tn of international assets in 2025, according to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group. About 60 per cent of that came from mainland China, with BCG forecasting that the rapid increase in Asian fortunes would widen the gap between Hong Kong and Switzerland to almost $600bn by the end of the decade.

China’s growth has been bolstered by a return of equity capital markets activity in Hong Kong that has allowed companies to raise funds offshore, as well as the country’s manufacturing dominance in sectors such as electric vehicles.

But the rise of the Asian city as a cross-border hub also reflects broader shifts in global wealth flows, with clients seeking to spread their assets across multiple jurisdictions to hedge against geopolitical tensions, sanctions risks and political instability. “This is a completely new phenomenon. I haven’t seen anything like it,” said Michael Pellman Rowland at Baseline Wealth Management, a Swiss-based independent manager with global clients….

Russia is stuck on the Ukrainian battlefield and lashing out with massive strikes on Kyiv. The growing fear in European capitals is that President Vladimir Putin will try next to reshuffle the cards by expanding the conflict to Europe.

In recent weeks, Russia has made increasingly bellicose statements against the Baltic states. It has threatened to bomb “decision-making centers” in Latvia after accusing the country of hosting Ukrainian drone operators, an allegation denied by the Latvian authorities. Air-raid alarms were sounded in Lithuania last week, forcing the government into a bunker, after suspected Russian drones approached its airspace from Belarus.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has also published the addresses of companies allegedly working on drone production with Ukraine in eight European nations, warning of “unpredictable consequences” and “sharp escalation” if military assistance to Kyiv doesn’t cease.

While fears that Russia could expand the conflict to Europe aren’t new, recent developments have made them more urgent. Several European national-security officials have warned that Russia could try to test the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by targeting one of the Baltic nations, Swedish and Danish islands in the Baltic Sea or alliance territory in the Arctic.

“The security environment in Europe has deteriorated during the last 24 months, and we see a greater inclination from the Russian side to take greater operational risks in their hybrid operations, moving up also to kinetic elements,” Sweden’s Defense Minister Pål Jonson said in an interview. “We are cognizant that we need to be focused on strengthening our ability to deter and defend against the Russians.”

The Wall Street Journal

Cognizant could be heading toward one of the biggest tech layoffs of the year, following cuts at companies like Amazon and Oracle. Reports suggest the IT services firm may reduce between 12,000 and 15,000 jobs globally, although the company has not confirmed a final number.

From a US perspective, the move reflects a wider shift in how large tech and consulting companies are restructuring their workforce as clients rethink spending. While Cognizant is headquartered in the United States, most of its employees are based in India, where over 250,000 people make up the company’s largest workforce hub out of a global total of more than 357,000.

The expected layoffs are tied closely to the company’s financial planning. In its April 29 earnings update, Cognizant said it expects to spend between $230 million and $320 million on severance. That figure has led analysts to estimate the potential scale of job cuts, based on typical compensation packages offered to employees who are laid off.

Much of the impact is likely to be felt in India, where salary levels are lower compared to the US. Industry estimates suggest that severance payouts there could cover several months of pay per employee, allowing the company to stretch its budget across a large number of roles.

The restructuring is part of a broader shift in the tech services model. Industry executives say clients are moving away from the traditional pyramid structure that relies heavily on entry-level hiring. Companies are now less willing to pay for training large groups of fresh graduates, instead prioritizing more experienced talent and automation.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S has also signaled that changes are coming across the organization. Speaking during the earnings call, he pointed to a move toward a “broader and shorter pyramid,” combining digital tools with human workers. The approach reflects how AI and automation are beginning to reshape hiring strategies across the global tech industry.

While the final numbers are still unclear, the direction is consistent with what’s happening across US tech. Companies are tightening costs, investing in AI, and reshaping teams, even if that means significant job cuts in the near term.

The American Bazaar