Zohran Mamdani ran a brilliant campaign last year by promising to make New York City affordable through democratic socialism.

Now the bill is arriving.

Firefighters are good. Firefighters are socialism. Therefore, socialism is good. That is the intellectual caliber of the movement now ascending in American politics.

New York’s new pied-à-terre tax took effect this month. Almost immediately, the luxury real estate market tanked. Wealthy buyers, it turns out, are not livestock. They can delay purchases, move money, change residency, or simply decline to participate in Mamdani’s experiment.

This elementary fact appears to have surprised the people running America’s largest city.

That’s the trouble with democratic socialists. They are forever astonished when human beings refuse to behave like figures in a budget projection.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has a solution: Make the argument so stupid that nobody can discuss socialism seriously at all.

Appearing recently on “The Dean Obeidallah Show,” Ellison announced that police departments are socialist because taxpayers fund them.

“You call the cops; guess who pays them. Your tax dollars,” Ellison said. “Guess what that is. That’s socialism, pal!”

He threw in fire departments, water inspectors, and public works for good measure.

No, pal. That isn’t socialism. That’s just government.

Ellison wasn’t offering a forensic definition, of course. He was performing a cheap semantic trick for people he assumed would nod and applaud before thinking.

Police are socialism. Firefighters are socialism. Roads are socialism. Public schools are socialism. (Well, yes, kind of.) Once every government function becomes socialist, socialism no longer requires a defense. You already support it. You have no choice. Unless you plan to extinguish your own house fire, arrest your own burglar, and pave the road yourself, welcome to the revolution.

Joe Rogan has been repeating the same dumb line for years, I’m sorry to say. Last year, he again called the fire department socialist because everybody pays for it and everybody receives protection.

I like Rogan. He isn’t a malefactor like Ellison. He simply does not know what he is talking about. That is less wicked, but it is increasingly difficult to excuse in a man who has spent thousands of hours interviewing people who actually know things.

Millions hear Rogan and think: Well, gosh, that makes sense.

No, it doesn’t. It’s flat wrong.

Worse, Ellison and Rogan smuggle in the same fraudulent choice: socialism or chaos.

Either government employs police officers and firefighters, builds roads, and inspects drinking water, or every citizen must hire his own private constable, buy his own fire engine, and fill the pothole at the end of the driveway.

That is not the choice.

RELATED: The media’s Democratic cover-up is collapsing

Chuwy/Getty Images

Socialism concerns ownership and control of productive property. Government collects taxes, enforces laws, maintains courts, fields armies, and provides services. Governments did all of those things long before socialism acquired a name.

By the Ellison-Rogan standard, if we can call it that, every king who collected taxes was a socialist. Ancient Rome was socialist because it built aqueducts. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were socialists because the national government employed customs agents. Louis XIV was apparently waiting for the workers to seize Versailles.

The alternative to socialism is not anarchy. It is limited government.

Conservatives sometimes make the mistake of talking as though government itself were the enemy. It isn’t. Not necessarily. Bad government is the enemy. Unlimited government is the enemy. Government that exceeds its legitimate purposes, devours private institutions, and treats citizens as dependents is the enemy.

But we need government.

We need cops and firefighters. We need courts, armies, roads, and public works — the odd toll road notwithstanding. Somebody must enforce contracts, punish violence, defend the country, and preserve public order.

Ordered liberty requires order.

The American political tradition does not reject government. It recognizes that government is necessary and dangerous and therefore must be limited by law. That is a much older and more serious idea than the facile view that every tax-funded service is socialism and every objection to socialism is an argument for anarchy.

Ellison knows better. That’s what makes him a bad guy. He understands perfectly well that a police department is not socialism. He chooses to speak as though he does not because the confusion serves him.

If cops and firefighters are socialism, then socialism is already as American as apple pie. No need to defend rent controls, wealth taxes, government grocery stores, confiscatory tax schemes, or the steady expansion of public power on their merits. Just offer the child’s syllogism: Firefighters are good. Firefighters are socialism. Therefore, socialism is good.

That is the intellectual caliber of the movement now ascending in American cities.

RELATED: ‘Back the blue’ cannot mean blind obedience

Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

Ellison is dishonest about words because dishonesty serves his politics. Rogan is careless with ideas because being laughably wrong has never reduced his audience. Mamdani is careless with markets because he imagines moral righteousness repeals the law of supply and demand.

These are not serious people. But they are seriously dangerous.

They hold offices, microphones, audiences, and influence wildly disproportionate to their judgment. They confuse applause with vindication and slogans with thought. They speak with total confidence because none of them expects to pay for being wrong.

The people who do pay are homeowners, renters, workers, employers, customers, and taxpayers who cannot laugh, wave, and leave the consequences to somebody else.

Democratic socialism’s new champions are not merely wrong about economics. They are frivolous about power. They offer socialism or chaos because admitting the existence of limited government would ruin the con.

They are playing with cities and states they are not wise or disciplined enough to govern. Shine, perishing republic!

​Democratic socialism, Keith ellison, New york city, Police departments, Socialism, Zohran mamdani, Taxpayers, Joe rogan, American politics, Fire departments, Opinion & analysis 

When he’s not filming “Unashamed” podcasts, duck hunting, or hanging out with his family, Jase Robertson can usually be found combing the land with his metal detector. His interest in treasure hunting sparked several years ago when a family friend battling cancer introduced him to the hobby. His enthusiasm for metal detecting grew over time and eventually culminated in the Fox Nation series “Duck Family Treasure.”

This deep fondness for unearthing lost treasure recently drew Jase to a story about a lost biblical treasure that many have forgotten or perhaps never heard of. On a recent episode of “Unashamed,” Jase shared the fascinating and mysterious tale of Oded Golan and the James Ossuary.

Golan is a Tel Aviv-based Israeli antiquities collector. According to his testimony, he purchased a bone box in the mid-1970s from a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, paying only a modest sum. The box bore an Aramaic inscription that read: “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

The implications of such a discovery, Jase explains, were enormous because if proved legitimate, it would “give proof to the Bible itself.”

But for decades, Golan didn’t think much of the box or its inscription. As a secular Jew, he didn’t connect it to the biblical James. Around 2001, however, he happened to show the box to a visiting French epigrapher André Lemaire, who instantly recognized the potential significance.

Lemaire published his analysis of Golan’s bone box in “Biblical Archaeology Review.” The ossuary was then briefly exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, causing worldwide sensation as possible first archaeological evidence linked to Jesus.

“This turned into an eight-year trial,” Jase exclaims.

The public attention attracted the Israel Antiquities Authority, which then convened experts to analyze the box’s inscription. They ultimately declared the “brother of Jesus” part was a modern forgery, citing patina analysis, style differences, and other evidence.

“I’m a treasure hunter so I was familiar with [patina],” says Jase. “The patina all seemed legit except on the part where it said ‘brother of Jesus.’”

But this accusation makes him a bit skeptical. “[The box] had a lot of patina on it, which you can’t fake patina. … Any treasure hunter knows that,” he says.

The experts’ conclusion that the “brother of Jesus” inscription was forged ignited a massive international scandal, complete with police raids on Golan’s home, dramatic claims of a sophisticated forgery ring, and headlines labeling it the “forgery trial of the century.”

The ensuing years-long legal saga became a grueling courtroom battle of rival experts, ending in Golan’s 2012 acquittal on forgery charges (though he was convicted on a minor trading offense). The judge, however, noted the verdict did not prove the inscription authentic.

“They just really couldn’t prove that it wasn’t authentic,” says Jase.

The ossuary was eventually returned to Golan. It remains one of the most controversial artifacts in biblical archaeology, with scholars still divided on its authenticity.

Jase wonders if the authorities’ seeming frenzy to disprove the inscription stemmed from Judaism’s rejection of Jesus as deity.

“In their mind, they’re like, ‘Well, Jesus is not the son of God. This guy’s got some proof,’” he remarks.

Ultimately, whether the box contained the actual bones of Jesus Christ’s brother James is not a matter of great importance, Jase argues.

While he believes there’s “pretty strong evidence” the bone box could be legitimate, trying to prove its authenticity is “the wrong search,” he says.

“I really feel like in my heart that we serve God in faith. If you’re trying to look to prove there’s a God, I just don’t think that’s the way God designed it.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from the Robertsons?

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​Unashamed with the robertsons, Christianity, Jase robertson, Biblical archaeology 

The three companies that make most of the world’s memory — Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix — are saying their entire output is spoken for.

Micron has completed pricing agreements for its full 2026 supply of high-bandwidth memory and says tightness will persist beyond 2027. SK Hynix says customer demand has already claimed all of its DRAM and NAND production for the coming year. Samsung expects its high-bandwidth memory sales to more than triple.

These conditions reflect a structural reallocation, and the structure in question is the global AI data center.

Powerful buyers secure in advance what smaller buyers receive on less favorable terms.

Most people do not think about DRAM or NAND flash. These crucial components of computing are usually invisible, until they are not. Robert Dennard invented the one-transistor DRAM cell in 1966. NAND flash emerged in 1987. Both became so pervasive and reliably cheap that they disappeared into the background hum of modern life, noticed only during the periodic price spikes that briefly made technology reporters use the word “shortage” before everyone forgot again.

That era of comfortable ignorance is now over for a single reason: artificial intelligence.

Memory’s dark secrets

HBM is a kind of DRAM. What makes HBM distinct is its architecture. Individual DRAM dies are thinned to less than the width of a sheet of paper, punctured with thousands of microscopic holes called through-silicon vias, stacked eight or twelve layers high, and then integrated onto an interposer alongside a processor. The result is memory that can deliver more than a terabyte per second of bandwidth to a single chip. The latest Samsung HBM4 reaches 3.3 terabytes per second through a 2,048-pin interface. Nvidia’s DGX B200 system aggregates eight GPUs for a combined 64 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth.

Every wafer of silicon devoted to HBM is a wafer not devoted to the DDR4 that goes into a student’s laptop, or the LPDDR4 in a budget smartphone, or the conventional DRAM in an automotive controller. Micron says HBM carries a three-to-one trade ratio against DDR5 in that producing one unit of HBM consumes the wafer area that could have produced three units of ordinary memory.

The advanced packaging lines needed for HBM are themselves scarce. The clean-room space is limited, and new fabs take years to build. Micron’s next Idaho facility will produce its first wafers in mid-2027. Another Idaho fab follows in late 2028. A New York fab arrives sometime after 2030.

A great increase in supply is not imminent.

RELATED: China’s new AI master plan is a glimpse at total technological control

bernie_photo/Getty Images

What makes AI so hungry for memory is the nature of inference. When a large language model generates a response, it maintains something called a KV cache, a running record of the conversation’s context that must remain in fast GPU memory for the duration of the interaction. The cache grows with prompt length and must be held open for every concurrent user.

Researchers have demonstrated two- to fourfold throughput improvements simply by managing this memory more efficiently, which gives some indication of how much capacity is currently being consumed by the brute fact of keeping a conversation alive. Contemporary AI is a persistent system that continuously occupies memory.

A new currency of capital

The old memory market was cyclical and anonymous. Spot prices rose and fell. Inventory accumulated and cleared. No one signed multiyear contracts for commodity DRAM. That market is gone.

Micron now holds 16 strategic customer agreements with pricing floors, cash deposits, and remaining performance obligations totaling $100 billion.Tencent has signed a three- to five-year DRAM deal with China’s CXMT worth nearly $3 billion to guarantee supply for its AI and cloud operations. Customers are seeking contracts of up to three years even for legacy products like DDR4 and LPDDR4 because they cannot be sure of getting them otherwise.

Memory has begun to behave less like a commodity and more like a strategic reserve, allocated by contract and commitment rather than by price discovery on the open market. It has become another resource, like liquefied natural gas or cloud computing capacity, that powerful buyers secure in advance and smaller buyers receive on less favorable terms.

The geopolitics follow predictably. South Korea is treating the memory boom as a national industrial project, with SK Hynix planning investments of 100 trillion won. Japan is pushing next-generation NAND manufacturing. The United States is trying to reshore leading-edge DRAM through Micron’s Idaho and New York expansions, backed by federal incentives. Memory fabs are instruments of national positioning within the AI supply chain.

The cost of recollection

The British retailer Currys has warned that memory shortages driven by AI data centers will raise prices for smartphones, laptops, and consumer electronics. The fact that a chatbot prompt issued in a data center in Virginia can affect the price of a replacement phone purchased by a student in Texas is the peculiar indignity of the present arrangement. The same wafer starts, packaging lines, and engineering hours can serve DDR5, HBM4, enterprise SSDs, or automotive memory, but not all at once.

AI reorganizes scarcity and makes visible the hidden architecture on which digital life has always depended.

We are accustomed to thinking of memory as something personal, something human. The word itself carries that connotation. But in the semiconductor industry, memory has become a capacity metric, a throughput variable, a strategic asset to be reserved and allocated in the service of optimized computation. With the structural shortage of memory, one meaning of the word yields to another.

​Tech 

The place between wakefulness and sleep is a strange limbo where a number of odd things can happen. Some people experience an overwhelming sense of dread, terrifying visions of shadowy figures or intruders in the room, a crushing pressure on their chest, and the complete inability to speak or move anything except their eyes.

This phenomenon is called sleep paralysis.

According to the modern medical explanation, sleep paralysis is a temporary brain glitch that occurs during the sleep-wake transition, where the brain awakens while the body’s natural REM atonia (muscle paralysis that prevents acting out dreams) lingers.

But there’s a growing belief that sleep paralysis isn’t just some freaky biological occurrence but rather a spine-chilling spiritual attack.

On a recent episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess dove into the ancient history of what modern science dubs a “harmless” sleep condition.

While Rick says that what science calls sleep paralysis “hallucinations” may be just that — the “brain playing tricks” — the dread, chest pressure, and shadowy figures sound suspiciously similar to stories of demonic attacks.

And in fact, in other countries all over the world, sleep paralysis is indeed believed to be the work of demons.

Citing Vicki Joy Anderson’s sleep paralysis book “They Only Come Out at Night,” Rick notes that horrifying tales of night monsters who sit on a sleeper’s chest date back to ancient times. This night hag takes different names depending on the country, but the core phenomenon — chest-crushing paralysis and malevolent presence — is remarkably universal.

“All these cultures with all their different names, they describe something demonic, and every single name seems to describe an experience where the demon is strongly pressing down on them and they cannot move — every single one of them,” he says.

Based on the anecdotes in Anderson’s book, Christians who experienced sleep paralysis and called on the name of Jesus experienced “instant relief.”

In addition to calling on the name of the “Lord Jesus” specifically, Rick advises Christians experiencing sleep paralysis to find a “prayer partner” who will commit to praying daily for relief, to confess sin and repent, to refrain from doing things or consuming content that could open demonic doors, and to recite Psalm 91 as a prayer each night before bed.

He then addresses those who are not Christians and thus cannot access the supreme power of Jesus.

“If you’re not redeemed, then that’s the first thing you got to do. You need to be under the authority of Jesus Christ. You need to be abiding in Him. You need to place your faith in him, not in rituals, not anything like that, but in Him — then access the power that He has.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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​Strange encounters, Rick burgess, Spiritual warfare, Christianity, Demonic attack