In New York, The Burnt Hand Teaches Best

In Virginia and New Jersey, Democratic extremism wins easily

Nov 05, 2025

Last night’s election results were unsurprising, when viewed in the aggregate. Off year elections go against the party in the White House in Virginia. New Jersey and Virginia are two states that both went solidly for Kamala Harris. New York is a leftist city, and its new mayor is a natural generational evolution from Bill de Blasio onward. On the surface, this all makes sense.

It’s when you dig a little deeper that you see how wild this is. The Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey were moderates only as a veneer — holding radical positions on trans policies, sanctuary states, and law and order. The newly elected socialist in the country’s biggest city will have the first actual professional job on his resume listed as mayor of New York. And in perhaps the only real surprise of the night, in a race the Washington Post declared a measure of partisanship over decency, partisanship won out solidly, with assassination fantasist Jay Jones replacing normie Republican Jason Miyares as Attorney General.

I write about the races this morning in my latest column at The New York Post. From my perspective, last night truly represents the direction of the Democratic Party: aggressive, socialist, extreme, and winning the races where Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot.

The voters spoke Tuesday night, and rather than reject Democrat extremism, they embraced it emphatically.
In New Jersey and Virginia, two fake moderates — high-test resume female candidates practically built in a lab by the party establishment, who nonetheless hold to extreme leftist views on social policy — cruised to victory, in line with polls and the expectations of the political elite.
None of the outcomes were surprises, except perhaps one — the Virginia Attorney General race, where Jay Jones, the bloody-minded partisan who was exposed for openly fantasizing about murdering a Republican political opponent and hoping his children died in their mother’s arms, won handily.
Jones’ victory is a vindication of the pro-assassination faction of the radical left.
It turns out you can celebrate your opponents’ deaths, and muse about how great it would be if their children died, too, without any repercussions.
It might even help you prove your bona fides.
You’re a true leftist now, Jay Jones.
The Commonwealth is a long distance from the great Doug Wilder and the old Virginia Way.
Every four years, the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey have outsized importance in the minds of the national political class.
Lacking any other data points, they seize on the results in these states as indicators of the national mood.
But the truth is, more often than not, these off-year elections are independent variables, dependent on local battles and priorities, and motivated by backlash against whoever occupies the White House.
The rare exception is 2009, when Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey presaged the rising tide of the Tea Party movement to sweep Republicans into office as an offset for President Barack Obama’s overreach.
In other years, national politics and decisions about investment played a decisive role in undermining hopefuls.
Such poor decision-making has been rampant in Virginia, where underfunded Republican candidates have lost elections more narrowly than expected.
And then there is New Jersey, which always seems to be participating in a live-action reenactment of Charlie Brown racing toward Lucy and the football.
Even if there’s some momentum and its candidates lean into charismatic messaging, the state is still even more solidly blue than Virginia.
The real lesson from this one, though, is that Democrats’ strategy worked, and Republicans continue to struggle without Donald Trump atop the ticket.
Trump’s impact on American politics has transformed the Republican electorate — inspiring a more diverse group of voters, including a wider portion of the growing populations in America, with a strong motivation to vote for the Trumpian MAGA GOP that fueled his history-making popular vote victory in 2024.
The problem for the GOP is that when Trump isn’t the name at the top, that same electorate lacks the motivation to show up.
In Virginia and New Jersey, Trump offered relatively little in support to candidates who were already climbing uphill.
And in the end, they couldn’t overcome the odds.
The extremism of the Democratic Party is locked in now.
They have elected governors who want their states to be sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, men allowed in girl’s locker rooms, and an anti-law and order agenda that is no less extreme than what we are about to see from the young fellow whose first real job on his resume will read “Mayor, New York City.”
They have also elected an attorney general right across the river from Washington, DC, who hopes for his opponents’ deaths as if it was normal.
Well, the pain is coming — for New Jersey and for Virginia — in the form of higher taxes, lower crime penalties, and an aggressive culture war against everything that Donald Trump has done in his second term.
Sometimes citizens have to learn the hard way when the results of what they ask for are delivered, in spades.
As JRR Tolkien wrote, it is “the burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.”
We’ll see soon enough how the voters feel about it, and if they will reward the Democrats for their extremism when it comes time for the midterms . . . or if they decide to vote with their feet in the meantime.
Either way, the lesson begins now.

Goodbye, New York City

Heather Mac Donald in The Spectator:

Thus launched into the real world with an unclouded ignorance of private enterprise and public virtue, Mamdani drifted through his first six years after graduation. Just as the young Barack Obama had struggled in Chicago to find a cause to organize around, Mamdani hopscotched among various left-wing activist groups – MoveON Seattle, TexPIRG and Chhaya, the latter a government-funded social justice organization in New York. His mother briefly employed him as a “music supervisor” on one of her films. A career as a rapper was abortive. He worked on an unsuccessful political campaign or two for New York progressives, then decided he was ready for office himself.
He was elected to the New York State Assembly for Queens in 2020 on the Democratic Socialists of America ticket. As a member of the State Socialists in Office bloc in Albany, he can take credit for a negligible three bills and a lot of missed Assembly votes. Next up: the New York mayoralty. Mamdani’s governing philosophy can be encapsulated in the slogans beloved of undergraduates confronting supposed injustice for the first time in human history: “People before profits!” “Fight corporate greed!” “Housing is a human right!” His campaign focused on four proposals, all inspired by the city’s alleged affordability crisis: he would freeze rents; make city buses free; offer free universal childcare; and open a government-operated grocery store in each of the city’s five boroughs.
These four proposals run the gamut from sweeping to weirdly narrow. But they all treat urban governance primarily as a means of shrinking the role of for-profit enterprise, expanding public control and redistributing wealth from its creators to the so-called poor. They may be quickly disposed of.
Proposal one: decommodify housing! Mamdani’s rent freeze would apply to nearly half of all rental units in the city: those whose rents are set by an appointed “Rent Guidelines Board,” not by the housing market. Those million or so rent-stabilized apartments make up one-third of the city’s homes, including owner-occupied homes.
Even left-wing economists have concluded that rent controls produce only housing shortages. Yet for those with an undergraduate mindset, landlords are greedy for wanting to earn a market rent, whereas tenants enjoying a below-market rent are merely receiving their due.
The four-year freeze would decimate New York’s housing stock. The city’s small landlords are already at death’s door. Maintenance costs have risen by 28 percent over the last five years; the regulated rents fail to cover repairs, property taxes or the costs of deadbeat tenants. Thanks to the city’s advocate industry it takes about two years to evict a nonpaying renter, during which time the landlord has to provide him the same services as paying tenants. Apartment owners shell out their own lawyers’ fees; activist-assisted tenants do not.
There are already 50,000 to 60,000 abandoned rental properties in the city. That number would balloon under a rent hike moratorium, adding to the city’s blight. Ripple effects could spill over to the banking sector. But more abandoned properties merely mean more opportunities to move “toward the full de-commodification of housing,” as Mamdani puts it. Meanwhile, the rent freeze would do nothing to lower the cost of other housing in the city, in which the majority of New Yorkers live.

David Ellison’s First 100 Days

Variety cover story:

“Studios are irrelevant; they’re on the ropes. They’re dinosaurs, and the age of dinosaurs is over,” says Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker. “Their only move now is to consolidate, but there’s no hope even if they get bigger. They’re too late to the party.”
Not according to David Ellison, who projects an image of Paramount as a land of abundance. He wants “more content, not less,” says one source with direct knowledge of his thinking. The proof is in the mad dash his film chiefs are making to build their slate from its current eight annual releases to 15 by 2026, 17 by 2027 and 18 by 2028. Cindy Holland, who helped Netflix develop its original programming strategy and is now running Paramount’s direct-to-consumer operation, is opening the purse to bring better programming to Paramount+.
Hollywood may be wary of the Ellison family. The WGA called the prospect of Paramount buying Warner Bros. Discovery “a disaster for writers, for consumers, and for competition” and vowed to work with regulators to block the merger. But an industry still reeling from the collapse of Peak TV has been reenergized by the emergence of a new, deep-pocketed buyer. And analysts credit Ellison for embracing an expansive vision.
“They clearly have a long-term point of view,” says Jessica Reif Ehrlich, Bank of America Securities senior media and entertainment analyst. “They have a plan to invest in more compelling content, and they are executing on it.”
Since taking over Paramount, Team Ellison has embraced Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of “move fast and break things,” spending money freely, like purchasing Bari Weiss’ The Free Press — a fledgling Substack-based news outlet — for $150 million. It has also slashed staff and dispensed with top Paramount executives at a dizzying rate, replacing them with executives with unfashionable — by Hollywood standards — viewpoints, from vocal Israel supporters (CBS News editor-in-chief Weiss) to political conservatives (Paramount co-chair Josh Greenstein), and jumped into business with a new brand of power brokers, namely White. Those who remain have faced pointed questions, often delivered in blunt tones, that betray irritation at how inefficiently the new regime feels the legacy media company
had been run.
Taking a page from the MAGA playbook, Ellison doesn’t seem to care about optics. An Oct. 29 round of roughly 1,000 layoffs hit women in high-profile roles hard. Among the 14 reported TV executives who received a pink slip — spanning CBS, BET and MTV — 11 were women. Over at CBS News, some cuts — like Tracy Wholf, a senior producer of climate and environmental coverage — were viewed as Trump-friendly moves. One staffer says that the ax conspicuously fell on those whose reporting featured an anti-Israel bent, including foreign correspondent Debora Patta, who had been covering the war in Gaza for the past three years. A source close to Paramount says the October layoffs were not motivated by MAGA politics or gender.
But Israel is an important issue. Larry Ellison is reportedly a close friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is a prolific donor to Friends of the IDF. Weiss has been so vocal in her support of the country that she faces frequent death threats. She and her wife, The Free Press co-founder Nellie Bowles, require a detail of five bodyguards that costs the studio $10,000-$15,000 a day. There has also been a noticeable step-up in security measures around the company’s executive leadership (one insider says the entire C-suite has received threats).
Paramount’s leadership has not shied away from making its views on the war in Gaza public. In September, it became the first major studio to denounce a celebrity-driven open letter signed by A-listers like Emma Stone and Javier Bardem that called for a boycott of Israeli film institutions implicated in “genocide and apartheid” against Palestinians. (Warner Bros. followed, but cited legal reasons for its decision.) And sources say Paramount maintains a list of talent it will not work with because they are deemed to be “overtly antisemitic” as well as “xenophobic” and “homophobic.” Whether the boycott signatories are on that list is unclear.

✍️ Feature

The New Yorker: The Mamdani Era Begins

🌍 Foreign

🏛️ Domestic

🗳️ 2028

Examiner: Newsom’s Prop 50 Win Makes Him a Leading 2028 Contender

📰 Media

💻 Tech

Axios: Trump, NASA, and Jared Isaacman’s Moon Mission Against China

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

🪶 Quote

“‘Oh yes, you had,’ said Gandalf. ‘You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. I did not tell you all this before, because it is only by musing on all that has happened that I have at last understood, even as we ride together. But if I had spoken sooner, it would not have lessened your desire, or made it easier to resist. On the contrary! No, the burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart.’”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

The Transom

In New York, The Burnt Hand Teaches Best

In Virginia and New Jersey, Democratic extremism wins easily

Goodbye, New York City

David Ellison’s First 100 Days