Chadwick Moore

A throwaway line item in an otherwise innocuous spending package unveiled one way the Biden administration and the Democratic party sees "racial equity." The Washington Free Beacon revealed a week ago that the Department of Health and Human Services would be distributing free crack pipes to drug users to promote hygiene and advance racial equity. The cost was around $30 million and the program is similar to what left-wing fiefdoms like Seattle and San Francisco already do. The story had all the elements of tabloid gold — even better in clickability than the last Biden crack pipe story: Hunter’s laptop.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

So, you got a cold. It happens around this time every year, to almost everyone. You got the sniffles, your head is a little foggy, you have an occasional sneeze, there’s some persistent phlegm lingering in the back of your throat. It’s mildly annoying, and you’re reminded this is bound to happen at least once every winter, and life goes on as normal but with a few more tissues in your pocket. Give it three days, a week max. Maybe you take some over-the-counter medicine, have chicken soup for lunch, sleep next to a humidifier. Upon greeting friends or coworkers, you politely decline a handshake or hug. “Sorry, I’ve got a cold,” you tell them — and they appreciate your consideration. “Oh, I just got over that,” one might say, “something’s going around.

On Friday night’s season finale of his weekly HBO chat show Real Time, Bill Maher encouraged Democrats to recruit a “messaging czar.” They need someone to point their party in the right direction, he insisted. “Vote Democrat because white people suck” isn’t working, Maher said. “I’d say, do the math, but math is a form of white supremacy,” he went on. Why do Democrats seem out of touch? Because “no one likes a snob” and “your microaggression culture doesn’t play well in the Rust Belt.” With each dig at the left — which, for conservative viewers, amounted to little more than tired memes and stale culture war ephemera — Maher’s audience erupted in applause.

Visitors to New York tell me how surprised they are to see so few masked up people on the streets. But a sizable portion of the NYC population isn’t letting go of the disgusting, soggy, disease vectors strapped to their faces — and they never will. This set aren’t true-believers in the still-unproven effectiveness of masks; for them, it’s both an identity and psychological disorder. On the streets of any city, the forever-masked are broadcasting their allegiance to authoritarianism, letting you know they’re most comfortable somewhere on a hierarchy of coercion, whether among the hopelessly obedient, or tyrants themselves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You now have a visual cue letting you know exactly who you’re dealing with and who to avoid.

Crime is the biggest issue in the New York mayor’s race, according to both candidates and the moderators of Tuesday night’s debate. No one bothered to pretend the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has been anything other than a complete disaster. In just seven years, de Blasio turned the safest big city in America into a vast, lawless, festering homeless shelter. His successor apparent, Eric Adams, is a former police officer and the current Brooklyn borough president. New Yorkers mostly put up with the decline of their city, not wanting to acknowledge the failures of their aloof, ruling monoparty.

The New York City mayoral race is split between two factions of Democrats: those who cut a tempered figure offering government solutions to the nightmares their own party created and stoked over the last year — and the kooky true-believers with the thousand-yard stare who continue to preach fire and damnation. The current, term-limited mayor, Bill de Blasio, belongs to the latter camp, though most of his fire dances not from brimstone but just above the slide of a bong. His ideological successor, race-hustling civil rights lawyer Maya ‘Defund the Police’ Wiley, who was recently endorsed by her sister-from-another-mister in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, isn’t doing so great in the most recent polling, though still rounds out the top four.

When it comes to former president Trump and the gays, one of the innumerable enduring myths perpetrated by media claims he banned US embassies from flying the rainbow gay Pride flag during the month of June. This lie is a personal favorite as a radiant example of the media’s pettiness during the Trump years and the degree to which they’ll just make something up or, at the very least, refuse to conduct the tiniest bit of due diligence to fact-check a falsehood they want so badly to be true. Here’s what really happened: in 2019, of the 307 US embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions around the world, three requested to fly the rainbow gay Pride flag during the month of June.