Hello and welcome to… well, there's no gentle way to say this… Monday.
There. I said it.
It's June 29, 2026. It's National Camera Day, National Waffle Iron Day, National Almond Buttercrunch Day, and Hug Holiday. Given what's in the news this morning, you're going to need the waffle iron and the hug, in that order. Oh, and grab a cuppa. This one's a bit longer than most.
1613: The Globe Theatre burns to the ground during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. A cannon used as a stage effect ignited the thatched roof. It was rebuilt the following year. Note to future theater directors: practical effects have consequences.
1767: Parliament passes the Townshend Acts, slapping new import taxes on the American colonies. The Boston Massacre followed shortly thereafter. Funny how that works.
1927: The Bird of Paradise completes the first transpacific flight from the mainland to Hawaii — 25 hours and 50 minutes. Nobody had done it before. Nobody was sure it could be done. They did it anyway.
1956: Eisenhower signs the Federal Aid Highway Act, authorizing the Interstate Highway System. The open road got a lot faster, and America got a lot bigger.
1958: Brazil defeats Sweden 5-2 to win its first World Cup. A 17-year-old named Pelé scored twice. The world took notice and never quite looked away.
1972: The Supreme Court rules in Furman v. Georgia that capital punishment as then applied is unconstitutional. States scrambled to rewrite their statutes. The debate continues to this day.
1974: Isabel Perón is sworn in as President of Argentina after her husband Juan dies in office — the first woman to serve as head of state in the Western Hemisphere. History noted. Moving on.
1995: Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian space station Mir — the first such linkup in history, and a genuine landmark in post-Cold War cooperation, back when that phrase meant something.
1995: The Sampoong Department Store collapses in Seoul, South Korea, killing 502 people. Engineers had flagged structural warnings for months. Nobody in charge wanted to hear it. Sound familiar?
2006: The Supreme Court rules in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees violate domestic and international law. The war on terror gets more complicated.
2009: Bernie Madoff receives a 150-year prison sentence for running the largest Ponzi scheme in American history. He expressed remorse. His investors expressed something rather less charitable.
Birthdays today include: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator and author; Bernard Herrmann, film composer whose scores defined Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver; Gary Busey, actor; Colin Hay of Men at Work; Nicole Scherzinger, singer and lead vocalist of the Pussycat Dolls; Colin Jost, comedian and SNL Weekend Update anchor; and Kawhi Leonard, NBA champion and two-time Finals MVP.
If today's your day as well, hope it's a great one.
* * *
I've been watching the parallel lines between the Democratic Socialists of America and the "No Kings" movement for a while now, long suspicious they're more connected than anyone in the mainstream press wants to admit. The New York Post, in a piece by Carl Campanile, pulls that thread a little further than most:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's socialist cronies who swept last week's Democratic primaries boasted about an affordability message — but critics say it was an anti-Israel furor that is fueling the party's swing to the left.
State Democratic Party Jay Jacobs admitted voters' feelings on Israel helped propel Mamdani buddies to three House primary victories, including firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier and former city Comptroller Brad Lander who upset incumbent Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, respectively.
Both Espaillat and Goldman backed the Jewish state — which may have motivated young activist liberals with pro-Palestinian views who have staunchly opposed Israel military action in Gaza.
"Yes. I do think the Israel-Palestinian issue had an impact in the election," Jacobs told The Post on Sunday. "It hurt establishment Democrats."
Well, no duh, Jay. Glad you caught up. But before the party establishment starts rearranging deck chairs over this stunning insight, let's talk about the weak turnout that produced these results: roughly 17%. Seventeen. That's the percentage of New York Democrats who showed up and handed the DSA three House primary victories. Come November, the general election electorate buries that number and then some — and that electorate includes a very large, very motivated Jewish vote that still nominally calls itself Democrat. For now.
Consider what these candidates actually ran on:
Chevalier came under intense scrutiny during the campaign but still defeated five-term incumbent Espaillat in a close contest in the 13th House District, which covers Harlem/Washington Heights and parts of the Bronx.
She had attended an anti-Israeli rally in Times Square one day after Hamas' horrific terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. At the rally, demonstrators torched the Israeli flag and flashed swastikas.
Chevalier centered her platform on halting US military aid to Israel and pushing for full divestment from the Jewish state.
DSA candidate Valdez, who is now a state Assembly member, won an open seat in Brooklyn-Queens House District 7 by defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, the favored candidate of retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez.
Meanwhile, Lander — who is Jewish and a former DSA member — claimed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. He easily defeated two-term incumbent Goldman in a landslide.
Read that last one again slowly. A Jewish candidate, running on a platform accusing Israel of genocide, just knocked off a two-term incumbent in a landslide. In New York. Do you suppose papers like the New York Times are going to spread the word about his positions?
Now, about those parallel lines I mentioned.
"No Kings" gets sold to you as spontaneous grassroots democracy in action — regular Americans flooding the streets out of patriotic concern. Sounds like the American Revolution, Jefferson, Paine, Adams, et al. The media loves that story. It's tidy, it's sympathetic, and seemingly requires no further examination. But let's look at what's actually going on beneath the banner.
"No Kings" is not an organization. It's a brand — a coalition model with Indivisible, MoveOn, and the group 50501 serving as the national coordinating backbone, providing training, digital tools, permits, and organizational infrastructure to hundreds of local groups that plug in underneath. The DSA is one of those groups, and their participation isn't accidental or incidental. It's official policy. The DSA's own national leadership said so directly in their October 2025 newsletter, calling No Kings protests evidence of "how many people are ready for a fighting alternative to the catastrophic status quo." Their national convention followed that up with a formal resolution committing DSA to continued participation in No Kings mobilizations — alongside anti-ICE organizing and preparations for May Day strikes.
At the street level, the Twin Cities DSA chapter showed exactly what that participation looks like in practice. They showed up at No Kings events and handed out nearly a thousand DSA flyers, signed up 92 people to their email and phone lists, and used the rallies as recruitment fairs for DSA 101 orientation sessions. That's not protest. That's a membership drive with a march attached.
And it goes further left from there.
Fox News Digital identified key participation by a network of radical socialist and communist organizations funded by Neville Roy Singham — a Marxist tech billionaire whose money flows through groups including the People's Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the ANSWER Coalition, CodePink, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. I’ve written about him previously. I’ve long suspected his money comes directly from the Chinese Communists.
These groups were entirely clear about their strategy going in. One internal message circulated ahead of the protests read: "People everywhere are becoming increasingly hostile to the Trump agenda, and more sympathetic to revolution. Now is not the time to sit on the sidelines, it's the time to go out and join the people, get our revolutionary message in front of them, and turn a day of protest into long-term gains for the people's movements."
Turn a day of protest into long-term gains for the people's movements. That's not a concerned citizen. That's a strategy document.
Then there's the money. Indivisible — the lead coordinating organization, whose name appears on the permit for the flagship No Kings march — received a two-year, $3 million grant from George Soros's Open Society Foundations in 2023. The Government Accountability Institute traced nearly $300 million in grants flowing from six major donor networks to over 100 official No Kings partner organizations. The organizers push back on that figure, arguing it conflates general operating grants with specific protest funding. Fair enough as a technical distinction. But funding an organization is funding its agenda. When you pour millions into Indivisible year after year, you're funding its capacity to mobilize — the staff, the digital infrastructure, the ability to coordinate thousands of events in a single day across all 50 states.
So here's the structure, laid out plainly. The front layer is Indivisible and MoveOn — respectable-sounding progressive groups that give the whole operation a civic-minded veneer and keep it off the front pages of papers that might otherwise ask questions. The middle layer is the DSA, officially committed to participating and openly using the events to recruit. The back layer is the harder-left network — the socialist and communist organizations from the Singham orbit, who are entirely clear-eyed about using these mass mobilizations to advance what they call revolutionary organizing.
The "No Kings" branding is smart politics. It invites people with genuine concerns about executive power to show up and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people whose actual goal is the overthrow of the capitalist system — and the genuine concern-havers have no blinking idea who's standing next to them, or who paid for the march permit.
That's not a grassroots movement. That's a matryoshka doll.
And now connect it back to those New York primary results. The same ideological current that's been running through No Kings — anti-Israel, anti-capitalist, explicitly socialist — just knocked off three incumbent Democrats in New York City with 17% of the electorate. The DSA didn't just show up to protests and hand out flyers. They fielded candidates, built infrastructure, and won.
So here's the question the Democrat establishment needs to answer, and bloody fast if it wants to survive: Has the DSA captured the party, or do the mainstream Democrats still holding that label have the spine to fight back? More correctly, does the Democrat establishment have the desire and the courage to tell Democrat rank and file types what’s really happening here? Because right now the socialists are 3-for-3 in New York primaries, running on anti-Israel platforms, backed by an organizational network with nine-figure funding and a stated interest in revolution, and the party chairman's big response is to acknowledge — apparently with some surprise — that voters' feelings on Israel had an impact.
The DSA didn't sneak in through the back door. The establishment, so busy on defeating Trump, didn’t protect their left flank. And 17% of the electorate just walked right through that defensive hole.
The real test comes in November. But if establishment Democrats think a low-turnout primary loss is the worst of their problems, they haven't been paying attention — which, come to think of it, is exactly how they got here. They’re going to need to pivot rather abruptly from attacking Trump and concentrate on defeating their own left wing or risk massive defeat come November. Mainstream Democrats are going to bail on the party is things don't change.
Thought for the Day: Socialism is the theory that if you abolish profit, bread will somehow bake itself out of good intentions.
VIP members: Hit the heart and let’s hear your comments on today's topic. Your involvement makes a difference.
Take care, my friends. I’m afraid we live in interesting times. Assuming we both survive, I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy PJ Media's conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member