Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“I am not sure if you caught Zohran Mamdani’s swearing in ceremony and his speech as he became New York City’s new mayor, but it was an eye opener for sure. I am going to leave his notion that the collective is better than the individual comment aside as I want to focus on a gesture he did during the event, that was precisely the same as Elon Musk made during a similar event almost a year ago. Yet, the mainstream media has taken two dramatically different views to create a false narrative that the public happily ate up.” (01/02/26)
“In an extraordinary military operation, the United States launched a large-scale military operation in Caracas, Venezuela, early Saturday, with Special Forces seizing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. There is a pending 2020 indictment of Maduro in the Southern District of New York, where he is expected to be taken to face prosecution. The operation comes not long after the 37th anniversary of the capture of Manuel Antonio Noriega on Dec. 20, 1989. Noriega was convicted of drug and money laundering offenses and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was tried in Miami. Maduro was indicted in a four-count superseding indictment …” (01/03/25)
“The last thing that protesters in Iran need are threats of intervention from the U.S. government. The last thing that the U.S. needs is another conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. is not helping anything in Iran by threatening to attack the country. It is a reckless threat, and it puts the U.S. and Iran on yet another unnecessary collision course.” (01/02/26)
“Newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promises to ‘replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ Funny that he chose those words. In Europe, where collectivist anti-fossil-fuels ‘green’ policies have been enacted in the name of combating a conjured-up climate emergency, many people get dangerously cold in the winter. So far, this hasn’t happened on a large scale in America, where the climate collectivists have not been as adept in imposing their lethal program as their European counterparts. Freer markets keep people warmer in winter.” (01/02/26)
“I do not mean this as a negative assessment when I say that what Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural address as mayor of New York reminded me most of was Woody Allen’s Manhattan (albeit with a more all-encompassing view of the city. Like Manhattan, Mamdani’s speech was a love-besotted tour of New York) though with a focus on the city’s multiracial working and middle class you can’t find anywhere in the Allen oeuvre. For Mamdani, this focus was intended to be a means of identification and reassurance (I am one of you, I know you), legitimacy (I represent all of you), and commitment (I will fight for you all). It was a homeboy speech. A local, not an express, was stopping at every other street corner to celebrate the halal carts and the delis.” (01/02/25)
Zohran Mamdani was not yet the new mayor of New York City when the city council signaled that it would serve as willing accomplice in his assault on fundamental property rights. In December, the city council passed legislation that had been hanging fire for several years, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), to further limit New Yorkers’ right to use and dispose of their own stuff. COPA would give ‘give certain nonprofits … an early shot to bid on certain residential properties that go up for sale, before they hit the wider market.’ The law pertains to buildings ‘with poor conditions or where an affordability provision is expiring.’ … If COPA is not dead on arrival, it will depress market prices as the city strongarms owners into making deals at lower-than-market prices.” (01/02/26)
“Companies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia — such as banks, shippers, oil refiners, traders and insurers — have historically faced a choice when dealing with U.S. sanctions regimes. They could do business with a targeted country such as Iran and risk being sanctioned, effectively cutting them off from U.S. suppliers, banks, customers and all the wealth of U.S. markets. Or they could refrain from doing business with the world’s rogue states and retain their access to the U.S. economy. In the 2000s and 2010s, most companies chose the U.S. The risk of being cut off was just too great. Today, however, a growing business ecosystem is taking the other side of that choice: They are willing to risk getting cut off from the U.S. because there is enough money to be made elsewhere.” (01/02/26)
“Since at least the trial of Sextus Roscius in the days of Ancient Rome, humans have had a strange fascination with murder. The source of this fixation is debatable. Perhaps it stems from the basic human fear of death or else from our desperate need to see justice and order done in a chaotic world. Whatever the root, humanity’s interest in murder has now transformed into an entire commercial industry filled with reality TV shows, podcasts, and sensational journalism. Detective fiction has long been the most cultured avenue of our murder obsession. In the books of authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and John Dickinson Carr, the quest to discover a murderer turns into a cerebral window into human nature and society. The latest iteration in this great tradition is Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies featuring the enigmatic Southern Sleuth Benoit Blanc (played by the inimitable Daniel Craig).” (01/02/25)
“I don’t mean to imply, by the title of this article, that I think America is about to totally ‘destroy’ itself. I happen to believe that the United States, in some shape, form, or fashion, will be around for a long time into the future. I don’t know what shape, form, or fashion that will be; indeed, America has already monumentally changed, since 1789, from the virtuous, limited, constitutional government (a ‘confederacy,’ Alexander Hamilton called it), into a society with a dominant federal government that does whatever it can get away with. In effect, we have become, in a way, exactly what our Founding Fathers rebelled against. But time changes many things, and countries are among those things.” (01/03/25)
