It’s been another busy week for the Inspired Idiots. Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the last several days in case you missed them.
New York’s top socialist has a fake union card and a townhouse from Dad
Gustavo Gordillo tells a great story.
He’s the son of Peruvian immigrants who “had nothing”. He worked fast food and cleaned houses. He rose up to become a unionized electrician, renting a modest apartment and fighting for every New Yorker squeezed by landlords and capitalist pigs.
And today he’s co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Then the New York Post started pulling records.
It turns out his grandfather came to America in 1958 to practice medicine and became president of the Ohio Psychiatric Association. That’s pretty accomplished for a family that “had nothing”.
It’s true that Gordillo joined the electricians’ union as an apprentice in April 2024. But he quickly stopped showing up for work and was thrown of the union for “prolonged absence.”
A union source told the Post that Gordillo took the slot “just for show.”
And it turns out his ‘modest apartment’ that he rents to burnish his working class street cred is also for show; Gordillo doesn’t actually live there, he actually lives in a posh townhome that his parents spent millions renovating with nonunion labor.
Last week, Gordillo’s fellow comrades on the New York City DSA’s leadership committee voted him into one of their top jobs— coordinating their socialist agenda with Mayor Mamdani’s office.
It’s such a joke… everything these people do is a con.
It’s the same con when the Chicago’s teachers union boss said school choice was for “racists,” then put her son in a private Catholic high school.
Or people like Barack Obama who spent years warning that rising seas would make homes uninhabitable, then bought a waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard.
They’re all frauds.
The EU has found €10 trillion of “idle” money. Guess where?
Ursula von der Leyen is the unelected President of the European Commission, i.e. the de facto head of the European Union. Last week she gave a speech to French business leaders in Paris and announced an amazing discovery: Europe has €10 trillion just lying around!
So where is it? It’s in regular people’s bank accounts. It’s their savings.
“Unfortunately, these savings are lazy,” she said. The EU’s official translation quickly changed it to “sitting idle.” She talks about other people’s money as if it were hers to spend and says she and her unelected members need to “put these savings to work.”
Her plan, called the Savings and Investments Union, would rewrite the rules for banks and insurers, essentially forcing banks to make certain investments that the European Commission wants… and doing it all with funds that regular, everyday Europeans are trying to save.
Hooray Democracy!
Some of these investments would go towards bankrupt governments. Others would go towards European companies that are deemed ‘too risky’ to private capital. Great. So when investors aren’t willing to back a company, the answer is to force banks to do it with their customers’ savings?
What could possibly go wrong??
Well, Germany serves as the perfect answer. It shut down its nuclear reactors, which had supplied a third of its electricity, and bet the grid on solar panels in a country where the sun barely shines.
German electricity now costs about 2.5 times what it does in the US, and the factories are leaving.
Von der Leyen herself admitted in March that abandoning nuclear was “a strategic mistake”— one she personally voted for, and one she has done nothing to reverse.
But this is how these people think: your savings are Europe’s resource, more dairy cows to be milked through the banking system.
Birmingham is going to the High Court to get the Union Jack off its lampposts
Birmingham is England’s second-largest city, and its local council has spent the past year pulling the country’s own flags— the British Union Jack and England’s St George’s Cross— off lampposts.
People kept putting them back up. So on Aug 26 the council, now run by a Liberal Democrat and Green coalition, asked the High Court for an injunction against “unauthorised attachments on the highway, including flags,” naming seven of the flag-hangers and “persons unknown.”
Breaching a High Court injunction is contempt of court— up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine, and the council’s draft order adds, in capital letters, that “YOUR ASSETS MAY BE SEIZED.”
Bear in mind, hanging something on a lamppost is otherwise a £2,500 fine. The council went to the High Court to turn that into a prison sentence, and its stated reasons are “public safety” and “community cohesion.”
Meanwhile, Palestinian flags have hung from Birmingham lampposts since the Gaza war started in 2023, and as far as we can tell nobody went to court over them.
And twelve days before it went to court, the council lit up the Library of Birmingham in green and white for Pakistan’s independence day.
My guess is that the council won’t sue anyone putting up a Pride flag. And judging by what gets waved at the city’s protests, you could probably get away with an Islamic State flag.
But the British flag in Britain, and the English flag in England, are now a safety hazard and grounds for contempt of court.
So what “community” is the council so keen to keep cohesive?
Britain let in nearly a million net migrants a year at the peak and housed a great many of them at taxpayer expense. Taxes are now at their highest since the 1940s, and the wealthiest and most mobile taxpayers have been leaving in droves.
What stays behind are all those “doctors and lawyers” arriving by dinghy from Africa and the Middle East… like the Afghan who crossed the Channel from Calais in 2022, won asylum by saying Afghanistan was too dangerous to go back to. He then spent eight weeks on vacation there in 2024, posting videos from a national park.
It really is pathetic. And governments like these are exactly why we keep telling readers to have a Plan B.
