Free Republic

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant advocate called to “seize private property” and blasted home ownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” in a series of pro-communist social media posts. Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, made the statements and urged her followers to elect more communists in several lecturing posts on her now-deleted X account that were unearthed by internet sleuths. Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she said then.

After living in southern California for four years, upspeak, or the upward intonation at the end of a declarative statement commonly associated with “Valley girls,” rubbed off on me. At first I tried to get rid of it, worried about sounding like “one of those girls,” one like Clueless’s Cher Horowitz, someone that no one took seriously. Never mind that my upspeaking friends were pursuing graduate degrees at prestigious universities around the world, getting perfect LSAT scores, and finishing master’s programs before turning 22. But linguists Robin T. Lakoff and Mary Bucholtz included upspeak as a linguistic practice that “systemically...

After years of wondering what caused the last couple of generations of kids to start speaking in such an irritating manner, like silly children, I finally made a short audio recording with an overview of the bad speech habits of young people and brief advice for breaking those habits.