Archive for 2025

November 2, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 2nd, 2025

RETHINKING HOW WE MISTHINK THE HOLOCAUST:

Every few months, another academic or journalist decides that the best way to honor Holocaust memory is to accuse Israel of repeating it. The latest comes from The New York Times, where Professor Marianne Hirsch, interviewed by Masha Gessen, claims we need to “rethink how we think about the Holocaust.”

It’s a long conversation—ostensibly about pedagogy and post-memory—but it eventually lands in the same familiar place: Holocaust memory, they say, has been “misused” to justify Israeli actions in Gaza, while Israel itself now stands accused of committing “genocide.” Gaza, in their telling, is the new Warsaw Ghetto.

That’s not scholarship. That’s moral inversion with tenure.

Hirsch and Gessen actively refuse to draw the simplest, most obvious analogy—the one between Hamas and the Nazis.

* * * * * * * *

But this isn’t morality. It’s literature pretending to be ethics. It’s a way for comfortable liberal Western observers to purge inherited guilt: If Jews are now the Nazis, then we can be the righteous ones this time.

That’s why the Nazi analogy persists. It satisfies a psychological craving for symmetry, not a search for truth.

What makes Hirsch’s version especially dangerous is that it comes from within. She is Jewish, the daughter of survivors, and so the accusation carries an air of moral authenticity.

It sounds like humility, but it’s really a form of moral self-cannibalism: turning the Holocaust—the ultimate warning to protect Jewish life—into a tool for condemning Jewish self-defense.

This is the newspaper that tried to rehabilitate the reputation of the Soviet Union in 2017, and created the “1619 Project” two years later to encourage academicians to (further) believe that America was born of Original Sin. So it’s not at all surprising to see the Gray Lady jump on the trend of, as Daniel Ben-Ami wrote at Spiked in March of “turning the Holocaust against Israel.”

Exit question: When will Hirsch and Gessen appear on Tucker’s podcast?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025

TRUTH:

Posted at 8:10 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 2nd, 2025

HMM: Physicists Have Mathematically Proven the Universe Is Not a Simulation. “Drawing on mathematical theorems related to incompleteness and indefinability, we demonstrate that a fully consistent and complete description of reality cannot be achieved through computation alone. It requires non-algorithmic understanding, which by definition is beyond algorithmic computation and therefore cannot be simulated. Hence, this universe cannot be a simulation.”

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your algorithms. On the other hand, there is Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 2nd, 2025

WATCH: John Brennan Loses It When Confronted by Former Tulsi DNI Advisor About Laptop Letter and the ICA.

Speciale confronted Brennan twice during an event at the conference that included Michael Hayden, another former director of the CIA. Speciale put Brennan on the spot, asking about the inclusion of the infamous Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment (ICA). Brennan had a meltdown.

UPDATE:

Related: The Illustrated Spygate Scandal.

Posted at 6:20 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025

TWO FELLOWS WENT ALL STABBY ON A BRITISH TRAIN YESTERDAY:

British police are emphasizing that the two men, one of whom has now been released, are ‘British born,’ which hasn’t reassured a soul that Britain doesn’t have an immigration assimilation problem.

Much as it now has a knife problem.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 5:23 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025

I CAN THINK OF A COUPLE OF BIG-NAME ACCOUNTS, TOO:

Posted at 4:48 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 2nd, 2025

TWO GAVINS IN ONE!

 

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025

READ:

Left unsaid: Europe also lost millions of its boldest risk-takers to this country.

Posted at 4:04 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 2nd, 2025

THE LAST TIME NEW YORK HIT ROCK BOTTOM: “Jonathan Mahler’s first book, the 2005 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, was a work of historical journalism that re-created the summer and fall of 1977… Now Mahler, a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, is out with a kind of sequel titled The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunities, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990:”

Mahler spends a good deal of time on the infamous 1987 Tawana Brawley case, where a young black woman was found in upstate New York covered in feces with racial slurs written upon her body and claiming to have been raped by four white men. The case brought a little-known Brooklyn preacher named Al Sharpton to the public’s attention. Sharpton championed Brawley’s allegations and put pressure on the state’s legal and political authorities to bring her alleged attackers to justice. It all turned out to be a hoax, with Brawley having fabricated the whole story.

Mahler does not shy away from presenting the case in its ugly details, with Sharpton likening Governor Mario Cuomo to the notoriously racist Mississippi politician, Theodore Bilbo, accusing the state’s attorney general, Robert Abrams, of masturbating onto a photo of Brawley, and framing a white New York prosecutor named Steven Pagones of perpetrating the ugly deed. Yet Mahler strangely absolves Sharpton and his allies of guilt, presenting them as victims of white racism, leaving the last word on the hoax to a black Catholic priest from Harlem: “If you create a monster in your lab and then it acts like a monster, I don’t think the creator is in a position to complain.”

If there was a flaw to Mahler’s first book, it was the lack of a larger analysis to accompany the vivid journalistic narrative. With The Gods of New York, Mahler tries to make some larger thematic points, and it is here that the book stumbles. He talks about the decline of the city as a “great working-class city,” which is true up to a point, but The Gods of New York is almost entirely a story of white and black; that millions of immigrants were arriving in New York in the 1980s and 1990s and making lives for themselves during these years goes unsaid.

Most strangely, one could read this book and not realize a renaissance in New York’s fortunes was just a few years down the road under first Giuliani, and then Michael Bloomberg. Giuliani is a main character in The Gods of New York and comes across, not entirely unfairly, as an attention-seeking and politically ambitious U.S. attorney whose prosecutions of white-collar cases often fell apart in the courts. Casual readers might draw an inference from the unflattering portraits of Giuliani and Trump—who during this time was knee-deep in an embarrassing money-losing venture with Atlantic City casinos—that there is a straight line from the politics of the late 1980s, with its corruption, racial tensions, and emphasis on financial capitalism at the expense of the working class, to the era of Donald Trump.

That’s not strange at all. Why would Mahler risk offending his fellow writers in the Times’ bullpen? They had a collective aneurysm over Tom Cotton’s “send in the troops” op-ed in 2020 and railroaded editor James Bennet, Covid expert Donald McNeil and Bari Weiss off the paper that year. As with other Mamdani supporters, they likely share the belief that the Giuliani-Bloomberg era was actually the city’s nadir, not the 1970s, and as the Babylon Bee joked in 2020:

Twenty years ago, when Mike Bloomberg was still its mayor and had carried over most of Rudy Guiliani’s broken windows police methods, Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote:

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”

More recently, as Steve wrote in August, thanks to 2025-era Democrats: Yep, Mamdani Will Be NYC’s Next Mayor.

If so, as Michael Goodwin writes at the New York Post this weekend: A Zohran Mamdani mayoralty would mean a long, sour decline for NYC.

It was only after Rudy Giuliani became mayor in 1994 that the police force was fully funded and smartly used.

Giuliani and his team, including top cop Bill Bratton, used the new officers in targeted enforcement campaigns under the revolutionary “broken windows” theory of policing.

The results came fast and were dramatic.

Within four years, the number of murders fell by 60%, with huge declines in other crimes, too.

The pattern continued through Giuliani’s second term and all through Mike Bloomberg’s subsequent three terms as Bloomberg and his top cop, Ray Kelly, kept the same policies and extended and improved them.

The result was a 20-year Golden Age of public safety and economic expansion that transformed New York into the safest big city in America and the world capital of capital.

Jobs and population booms followed, with the city gaining even more people than it had lost.

As I wrote at the time, an elderly friend who had spent his entire life in New York said he had never seen it shine as it did at the end of Bloomberg’s tenure.

Unfortunately, he was followed by Bill de Blasio, the worst mayor since Beame.

Insert Homer and Bart “worst so far” meme here:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025

DON’T BE FOOLED—OBAMA WASN’T CAMPAIGNING FOR SPANBERGER:

That’s a fascinating thing to say at a rally where Jay Jones just finished speaking. Here’s a guy who fantasized in writing about murdering a Republican legislator and his children, and Obama is lecturing the crowd about civil discourse. The disconnect couldn’t be more glaring.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Obama wasn’t really there for Spanberger at all. She appears on the path to victory regardless of whether Obama showed up or not. But Jones? He’s in serious trouble, and Democrats know what’s at stake. If Jones loses, Republicans will control the attorney general’s office for another term, and that’s a problem for a party that’s been quite open about using state attorneys general as a legal cudgel against the Trump administration. A friendly Democrat in that office means a reliable ally ready to file lawsuits, challenge federal policies, and generally make life difficult for the White House. Other Democratic attorneys general across the country have been aggressive in opposing Trump, and Virginia Democrats want that same firepower in Richmond.

Trust me, Obama’s trip to Virginia wasn’t about helping Spanberger. It was about boosting Jones through association, using Obama’s star power to drive enthusiasm and straight-ticket voting. If Jones rides those coattails to victory, Democrats get the attorney general they want to wage legal warfare against Trump. That’s the real reason Obama showed up.

Jonathan Turley explored this weekend “how the left found peace through hate.” Obama was clearly an early adopter, and is eager to spread the rage far and wide amongst his fellow leftists:

Related:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025

CLARICE FELDMAN: Tucker Got Your Tongue, Kevin Roberts?

William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection nails it: “Fuentes is not the main issue. Tucker and his normalization and stoking of Jew hatred (Fuentes was just one of many such guests) is the issue.”

I’m not sure that Roberts is actually diligent or smart enough to continue to hold his post. Shortly after his second statement Dana Loesch interviewed him and asked him whether it was “venomous” (to say as did Carlson) that you hate “Christian Zionists?” After a deer in the headlights look, Roberts concedes it is. That’s as close as he ever came to acknowledging Carlson’s incompatibility with Roberts’ organization and his own failures to publicly distance himself from him.

It should be a heated time this weekend in the Heritage boardroom.

One would hope:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 2nd, 2025
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