The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

The BIG Lie

“We pulled [a deal] off without firing a missile. We got 97% of [Iran’s] enriched uranium out. … There’s no dispute that it worked, and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.” —former President Barack Obama

Bad Ideas

“In that no-bad-ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do and think about doing around the Electoral College. We talk about … expanding the Supreme Court. … Let’s talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and DC. … We’ve got to neutralize these red states from cheating.” —former Vice President Kamala Harris

Race Bait

“Make absolutely no mistake: the agenda of this Supreme Court and the agenda of the Klan are far too similar.” —Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL)

“This is Jim Crow 2.0. It’s sick. Stone-cold racism [on] a scale I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, never have seen in my lifetime. It’s all happening, bringing us back to a pre-1960s world.” —California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on red-state redistricting

“Anti-woke is anti-black. All these attacks on DEI, it’s anti-black. The level of racism is sick.” —Gavin Newsom

Friendly Fire

“I think the extremism is driving it, without a doubt. I mean, look at the primaries all across in the Senate and in the House and look at the kinds of people that have already been elected. … In Maine, for example, Graham Platner, avowed communist. He described himself as a communist. Antifa, that’s not a slur for me. That’s not GOP kinds of hit. That’s his own words, how he described that.” —Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)

“The same people that were outraged — outraged — about the war in Gaza, they [didn’t care] about Iran executing 30,000, 40,000 of its young people.” —John Fetterman

Political Futures

“The throughline in Democratic thinking on courts and constitutions is not principle. It is outcome. Courts that deliver Democratic victories are independent guardians of democracy. Courts that do not must be delegitimized. That is not a constitutional philosophy. It is a power philosophy wearing constitutional clothing.” —Erick Erickson

“While detailed policy arguments matter, I agree with Congressman Jim Jordan, who said that the best nationwide theme the GOP can run on is ‘They’re crazy. We’re not.’"  —Gary Bauer

For the Record

"It’s unbelievable, unbelievable, how much you have been fleeced by your own government over the past 15, 20, 30 years. Nobody, nobody, was looking at this. Nobody was asking difficult questions, like, for example, ‘Are dead people getting food stamps?’” —Vice President JD Vance speaking in Bangor, Maine

“Fraud is exactly what happens when you’ve got a government that is not fighting for the American people but is fighting for fraudsters and illegal aliens. And it had to stop. And under the Trump administration, we are fighting it every single day.” —JD Vance

The Bottom Line

“China represents what communism can become when fused with advanced technology, centralized state power, economic leverage, and absolute intolerance for dissent. The regime does not merely punish opposition; it seeks to eliminate independent thought itself. … Yet despite these realities, much of the Western world continues to treat the CCP as simply another difficult trading partner rather than an authoritarian power with expanding global ambitions. Why? Because money clouds moral clarity.” —Armstrong Williams

“Unlike democratic nations that operate on election cycles, the Chinese Communist Party operates on decades. It can wait. It can plan. It can exploit. It has taken advantage of America’s openness — our markets, our universities, even our political institutions — to undermine us from within.” —Ben Shapiro