Digital ID Checks Come To New York

Posted on August 12, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Want to participate in social media, even if you’re just an adult in New York state who wants to keep up with friends and family? Then hand over your digital papers, please! Privacy? The rules are “not a question of privacy”, apparently.

“The final rules for New York’s SAFE for Kids Act require users to verify their age (which means a form of digital ID) before an algorithm can curate their feed or a platform can send notifications after midnight.

“Attorney General Letitia James released the rules on July 28 alongside Governor Kathy Hochul. They take effect January 25, 2027.

“The law is written for under-18s but, as always has to be the case, the age-checking reaches everyone. To keep an algorithmic feed or overnight notifications, a user above 17 has to prove to the platform that they are an adult. Confirming who counts as an adult means collecting government IDs, face scans, phone numbers and email addresses from people who until now typed a birth date and moved on. James rejected the privacy objection to all this. The rules are ‘not a question of privacy,’ she said.

“Platforms can accept a government-issued ID upload and the rules force them to offer at least one other option.

“James’s office also lists a selfie image or video, or an email address or phone number cross-checked against other data that is held on a person. Any of those hands a company something it can tie to a real identity.

“It’s clear that the law isn’t shying away from allowing platforms to collect sensitive user data, including biometrics, and allowing cross-referencing against other data.”

     But it’s just like flashing a driver’s license at a liquor store, right?

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New Right Postliberal Socialists

Posted on August 11, 2026 by The Political Hat

     The French poet Charles Baudelaire once said that “the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist”. The “New Right”/”Postliberals” seem to be trying the same trick, though clearly they are not up to the devil’s level of competence, as can be seen by Rachel Bovard pretending that “new right” and “postliberal” are made up terms, despite delivering a “keynote address entitled ‘What’s New in the New Right’ as a post liberal conference.”   So, what does their words and action actually indicate?

     They are “new right” in that they claim to be on the right while hiding the fact that they don’t mean the Right from an American or even Anglo-American vein, but from a post-Western vein. It is an intentional and dishonest trick. They are “postliberal” because they are against the Classical Liberalism which was a natural and organic development of our Anglo-American heritage spanning back to nearly a millennium.

     They again intentionally conflate that with Progressive Leftism that stems from the same European thinking that they openly embrace. They are socialist in the old sense of the term before Stalin, et al., convinced people that “Socialism = Communism”. Be they democratic socialists or social democrats, they are all very Unamerican.

     Anyone who thinks reforming the regulatory state is nothing more than cutting the number of regulations (but not reducing the substance) or having fewer employees (lack of too many results in greater regulatory burden) doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. The question is not the number of regulations or the number of employees to process those regulations, but on the breadth of government itself in its control over people. You can have bigger government with fewer employees/regulations.

     All in all, the postliberals are wolves wearing a shepherd carcass like a skinsuit while saying they will protect the sheep from the shepherd draped in a wolf hide.

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“Autonomous Zones”, Redux

Posted on August 10, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Reminiscence of the George Floyd riots and the Urban Leftist “autonomous zones”, protesters in Madison, Wisconsin tried to recreate their nascent social justice autonomous collectives after the shooting of a suspect.

“The mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, called for protesters to disband from an ‘autonomous zone’ established at the site where police shot and killed a knife-wielding homeless man last month.

“…

“Authorities said officers shot and killed Ruiz, an ex-felon, while he was resisting arrest on July 22 in the state’s capital city. Madison Police Chief John Patterson said Ruiz pulled out a knife during the altercation and wounded an officer before police fired the fatal shots.

“State investigators are reviewing what led up to Ruiz’s killing, but many residents in the deep blue city determined the killing was unjust shortly after it became public knowledge.

“Protesters harangued police and public officials at press conferences about the incident while holding up signs saying ‘Corrupt cops deserve to die too.’

“Last week, demonstrators ramped up their protest campaign by positioning their cars and other objects to barricade themselves inside the ‘Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone’ where he was killed.

“The area, which is modeled after Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, calls itself a ‘law-enforcement-free zone’ that has become a gathering place for both activists and the city’s homeless population.”

     Unlike in 2020, when these “Autonomous Zones” were allowed to run rampant under the directorship of “Warlords”, a broader consensus to not tolerate this, at least to the degree these “Zones” were tolerated six years prior.

“Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says the city will tow vehicles that are blocking streets at the area where a Madison police officer shot and killed 38-year-old Corey Ruiz on July 22.

“The message comes after the site of a makeshift memorial to Ruiz turned into an encampment, which has blocked off a near east side intersection for more than a week.

“On Sunday evening, the mayor announced that the city has put out tow notices for personal vehicles blocking the streets and said those notices will be ‘acted upon.’

“Beyond that, the mayor has not said what tactics the city will use to clear the area if people do not leave voluntarily.

“‘I want to thank the Madison community for their patience as we work to reopen the intersection of Williamson Street and Baldwin Street, while also ensuring that those who want to visit a memorial will have space to do so,’ the mayor wrote on Sunday. ‘City of Madison staff and community partners have been actively delivering the message that the best path forward is for the occupation to end peacefully so the real work of healing the community and enacting change can begin.’”

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News of the Week (August 9th, 2026)

Posted on August 9, 2026 by The Political Hat

 

News of the Week for August 9th, 2026


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Firing Line Friday: The Playboy Philosophy

Posted on August 7, 2026 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     The question of public morality and sexual mores in society is hardly a new one, and the debate is as heated as ever. Let us look back sixty years ago when William F. Buckley, Jr. and Hugh Hefner debate the sexual revolution and the Playboy philosophy.

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Quick Takes – Killing Without Consent: Euthanasia For Pre-Teens; Euthanasia Without Parental Consent; Euthanasia Against An Adult Patient’s Wishes

Posted on August 6, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Shut up, the homicidal physician explained!

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

Death, Rx

     The Netherlands has decided to include children under 12 on their kill list.

“For or the first time since a change in the law in the Netherlands, a child under the age of 12 has died by euthanasia.

“The death of the child was confirmed by the country’s health minister, Sophie Hermans, as she presented the annual report by the committee that reviews all late-term abortions and medically-assisted deaths of children to parliament on Monday.

“According to the report, the child was under the age of 12 and had been seriously ill, but no further details were given.

“Assisted dying for terminally sick children aged from one to 12 has been legal for two years in the Netherlands.”

     This isn’t the first case of killing kids under 12 since infanticide has been legal for a while there.

“[D]octors commit legal infanticide when babies are born with terminal illnesses or serious disabilities. This is allowed under the ‘Groningen Protocol,’ a bureaucratic checklist to determine which babies are killable.

“After the Holocaust, infanticide was considered such an egregious human rights atrocity that some German doctors were hanged for having killed disabled babies. Their excuse? Killing these babies was compassionate and for the benefit of the babies as well as their parents and the Reich. …

“That defense didn’t fly. But it might these days, as Dutch doctors do the same thing and it is depicted benignly as ‘death with dignity.’”

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Critical Theory & The Father Of The New Left

Posted on August 4, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Much of Cultural Marxism is pushed by the privileged few who take their wealth and position for granted and demand that even more is due them, as James Lindsay explains.

Some haunting words from Critical Theorist and father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, in an interview he gave in 1969, at least if you think about them.

Question: What is, in your opinion, the basic reason for these violent student demonstrations in so many countries?

 Marcuse: For American and West German students, whom I know better, it is a requirement that is not merely intellectual, but “instinctual.” They want an entirely different kind of existence. They reject a life that is simply a struggle for existence…because they think it is no longer necessary.

There’s a lot to chew on there in just a few short sentences. The violent students acting in protest (and one might mark ours today as the same) “want an entirely different kind of existence” and “reject a life that is simply a struggle for existence.” That’s pretty concerning and incredible, really.

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Digital Big Brother Demands Your Diploma, Mortgage, and Employer

Posted on August 3, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Yet another state will demand that, in order to access some of the internet, you hand over your digital papers.

“Missouri wants to see your ID before you can look at legal content, and it is selling that demand as child protection. Governor Mike Kehoe signed House Bill 1839 on July 9, turning an attorney general rule into hard law and dropping the state deeper into the widening group of governments that treat online anonymity as a loophole to close.”

     But they don’t just want to verify your age; they’re interested in far, far more, in order to be able to link you with specific websites.

“The check collects far more than a birthday. A visitor can hand over a government-issued ID, a form of digital identification tied to their legal name, or submit to what the bill calls ‘a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.’

“That transactional data, the text spells out, can be pulled from mortgage, education, and employment records. Confirming that someone has cleared 18 now means surfacing where they went to school, who holds their loan, and where they work.

“Missouri could have asked for a birth year. It chose instead to build a system that welds a person’s real identity to the specific sites they visit, about the most sensitive browsing there is.”

     Purportedly, this information is not supposed to be kept on record… which is also the promise given by 3rd party “verifiers” who have leaked just such records.

     Ah, but it’s just naughty pictures to protect children, some may say. But this is never about children and it would be foolish to think that this would be limited to just naughty web sites. Once the infrastructure is in place, and the requirements normalized, it can and will be applied to whatever the states wants to apply it to

     The full bill passed into law can be read here, or below:

Missouri HB 1839 (2026) by ThePoliticalHat

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News of the Week (August 2nd, 2026)

Posted on August 2, 2026 by The Political Hat

 

News of the Week for August 2nd, 2026


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Firing Line Friday: McCarthyism: Past, Present, Future

Posted on July 31, 2026 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     Senator Joe McCarthy, AKA “Tailgunner Joe”, was always a controversial figure. Let’s look back sixty years ago when William F. Buckley, Jr. debated Leo Cheme on the question of McCarthyism and it’s past, present, and future.

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