“LET THE RECORD REFLECT THAT SPARTACUS DID NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION:” Oh My: Ted Cruz Ends Cory Booker With Epic Reply in Hearing About SCOTUS Protests.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
June 3, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The Democrats’ Problems With Men Are Worse Than Many Realize.
A recent comment from Joy Behar of The View perfectly illustrates another reason Democrats are having this problem. They come off as scolding hags.
From Breitbart News (emphasis is mine):
Co-host Sara Haines said, “I think it’s the wrong way to go about the problem, because the Democrats are asking how do we get male voters? The disillusionment of men is how do we care better about our men and boys, it should be about how we solve the root problems that drove men to feel like they had nowhere to go.”
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “The most common thing I hear from men who were open to supporting Trump, they feel like they want to be able to provide for the future and build wealth and don’t want to be ashamed they want to provide and want to have money. Then they do see these statistics of how men are falling behind and want to be able to highlight it and talk about it but not be pushed back that you’re saying, oh, well, you’re excluding girls and women if you want to advance men.”
Behar said, “You wonder what I think? I think it’s a waste of money. Maybe these guys should spend their money on teaching men to not be such sexists. Maybe that’s it.”
Tim Walz, who was supposed to be the Democrats’ secret weapon with male voters, is equally clueless.
Read on for more of Walz’s brilliant “code talking to white guys,” which continues to go over as well as it did on the campaign trail last year.
UPDATE: Jordan Peterson and Megyn Kelly: The Democrats Tried Passing Off Tim Walz as a Man.
DISPATCHES FROM 1968: Left-wing violence is being normalized.
At the Network Contagion Research Institute we’ve been scratching our heads ever since we noticed this explosion of online support for Thompson’s murder in December last year. It was disturbing to say the least. What could possibly explain the wild-eyed celebration of extreme violence on the streets of New York? Why was there a mass circulation of images featuring Musk being killed by Nintendo characters?
Well, after working through a heap of survey data and social media language trends, we’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society. The NCRI has uncovered more than just an online ecosystem of unsettling ideas. What we’re seeing is the rise and proliferation of assassination culture on the internet. It’s more than just a collection of jokes, symbols and memes. It’s an entirely new subculture for incubating radical and subversive ideas that are anathema to the things America has historically stood for.
Over the past several decades we have assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right, and they often have. What we never expected to see was the enormous growth in similar calls emerging from the mainstream left. We undertook a nationwide survey to understand it better and discovered that a breathtaking half of those who identified as politically left-wing agreed that the murder of public figures could be at least somewhat justified. What’s more, 56 percent of them agreed that there could be some justification for killing Trump. Just under half agreed that the same could be said about the fate of Musk. Tesla dealerships, too, merit at least some destruction, according to 59 percent of those surveyed.
And so we took a deeper dive into the online networks where so many young people spend much of their time today. We found a massive upsurge in coded endorsements of political violence, as well as users adopting and wielding the name “Luigi” as a codename for killing executives and wealthy individuals, all gamified with Nintendo memes featuring the character Luigi, an Italian plumber from the Super Mario series, as a wink and a nod to Mangione
It’s acceptable, it’s normalized, and, most strangely, it’s increasingly being portrayed as fun. It looks like the dissemination of what scholars call permission structures. Think of them as a kind of psychological corridor that can lead people, ego and pride intact, toward radically antisocial or even subversive behaviors such as the murder – or attempted murder – of public officials and corporate executives.
What would drive any American to actually support or condone such violence? It’s clear that the US healthcare system is unequal, unfair and in need of reform. But never in my life have any of my friends openly said that the public execution of C-suite executives might be an acceptable course of action. It’s not the America I grew up in, that’s for sure. Seeing the rise of assassination culture has been a bit like discovering an entirely new continent.
It is? If you’re as young and blinkered as the author of the above piece at Spectator World, I guess. But as Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times in 2017: Notes on a Political Shooting.
John F. Kennedy was hated passionately by many Republicans in Dallas, but Lee Harvey Oswald’s beliefs were Marxist, not right-wing. Nationalist movements, not partisanship, inspired Sirhan Sirhan and the Puerto Ricans who almost killed Harry Truman. George Wallace was shot by a man trying to make “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.” One of Gerald Ford’s two would-be assassins was a member of the Manson cult, the other a sympathizer with the Symbionese Liberation Army. John Hinckley famously shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.
And most recently — if a little less famously, because the media spent a long time assuming that he was Tea Party-inspired — Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabby Giffords because he was a lunatic obsessed with (among other things) the government’s control of grammar, and she had failed to answer his town hall question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
So [Bernie Bro Joel] Hodgkinson’s seeming normalcy, his angry but relatively mainstream Democratic views, might be a warning sign for the future of our politics.
And how. After the assassinations of JFK and RFK, violence from the left continued well into the early 1970s, Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism:
Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” “The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don’t,” explained a secret member of a “bombing collective,” but “between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks.”
In 2021, Politico focused on one of those bombings: When the Left Attacked the Capitol.
In the winter of 1971, you could still find vestiges of an age of innocence in Washington. The previous decade had been one of the most unstable in the country’s history, rocked by political assassinations, racial violence and explosions at public buildings. But at the U.S. Capitol, it was still easy to stroll through without having to empty your pockets or show a driver’s license. No metal detectors or security cameras. You didn’t need to join a tour. Which is why two young people who melted into the crowd of sightseers were free to scour the building for a safe spot to set their bomb.
They were members of the Weather Underground. Since 1969, the radical left group had already bombed several police targets, banks and courthouses around the country, acts they hoped would instigate an uprising against the government. Now two of these self-described revolutionaries wandered the halls with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing. They slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber. They hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, the phone call came into the Capitol switchboard. The overnight operator remembered it as a man’s voice, low and hard: “This is real. Evacuate the building immediately.”
It exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Both Europeans lost their heads.
You may recognize a few of the suspects:
Neither Jones nor anyone else in the documentary named the bombers. However, at least three published accounts have identified them as two women then in their late 20s—Kathy Boudin, one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, and Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school whose looks, brains and take-no-prisoners attitude had made her a romantic icon within the left. Neither Boudin nor Dohrn has publicly admitted or denied placing the Capitol bomb. Neither responded to questions for this article.
* * * * * * * *
The Weather Underground continued to stage nonlethal bombings in the 1970s, notably a blast inside a Pentagon bathroom and at the State Department. (They called ahead on those, too.) When the Vietnam War finally ended, the group lost its center of gravity. By 1980, Weather had effectively disbanded. Dohrn, along with her husband and fellow member, Bill Ayers, came out of hiding. They didn’t go to prison. The government had dropped most charges against them for the same reason they couldn’t prosecute Leslie Bacon, and also because agents on a desperate hunt for clues had been caught conducting illegal break-ins at homes of the fugitives’ friends and relatives. The FBI’s overreach had backfired, but the era of left-wing extremism imploded on its own.
Curiously, CTL-F “Obama” brings up zero mentions. But the article does mention:
As a slogan of the 1960s went, what goes around comes around. That 14-month-old son who Dohrn and Ayers raised for Boudin? He became a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer and a public defender. In 2019, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco, a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris. [Mercifully, both are now out of power — Ed.] And on Jan. 6, as the pro-Trump mob attacked, Chesa Boudin sent out a tweet: “Hoping everyone who works in the Capitol is safe from this despicable effort to take down our democracy.”
Irony can be awfully ironic, sometimes.
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Fantastic Four — Return Of The M-She-U?
UPDATE: Disney Lays Off Hundreds of Employees In Its TV and Film Divisions.
BOULDER TERRORISM SUSPECT WAS PREPARED FOR MASS MURDER: FBI.
“From a behavioral and psychological profiling perspective, this suggests impulsive extremism or a desire for martyrdom rather than escape or survival,” Jason Pack, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, told the outlet.
At one point during the attack, Soliman reportedly yelled, “Free Palestine.”
“These traits [are] often associated with ideologically driven lone actors. This kind of attacker typically operates without a support network but may be influenced by online propaganda or perceived injustices,” Pack said.
“The erratic behavior, crude weaponry and politically charged language point to a disorganized, emotionally unstable individual whose radicalization, if confirmed, could place the case within the growing trend of unpredictable, lone-wolf-style domestic attacks,” he added.
An arrest affidavit detailing Soliman’s interview with local law enforcement following his arrest suggests a lack of sophistication in his actions.
“During the interview, SOLIMAN stated that he researched on YouTube how to make Molotov Cocktails, purchased the ingredients to do so, and constructed them,” according to the affidavit.
What, not the New York Review of Books?
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Genghis Khan was a nice guy. Israel is evil. Frisco parents push back on ‘ethnic studies’ mandate.
Most parents who talked to The [San Francisco] Standard requested anonymity, the reporters write. “They described fear of being labeled as racists or right-wing and of having their children singled out at school.”
Jewish parents say their children are told Jews are oppressors. “In October, students at one high school were shown a presentation claiming that Israel’s founding was an ‘invasion’ that ‘decimated Indigenous populations,’ akin to European settler-colonial projects in Australia and the Americas,” write Wallach and Kaiser. “Following pushback from parents and students, that slide was removed from the presentation.”
“Other parents of freshmen, many of them self-proclaimed liberals, took issue with what they characterized as lectures and assignments that demonize the United States and Western civilization,” they write. One parent said her child was taught that Genghis Khan was peaceful.
Well, I don’t know about “peaceful,” but as the ultimate eco-warrior, the Grauniad assures me that: Genghis Khan was good for the planet.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL — at least in the UK:
One reason I started writing this newsletter is so we could share information and data with people they might have missed but really need to know. Here are two things that caught me eye over the last 48 hours, which I think you really need to know:
Firstly, in the UK, the number of illegal migrants and small boats entering the country is now rapidly spiralling, fuelling the immigration crisis and a broader collapse of public trust in the established parties and, for that matter, the entire system.
On Saturday alone, some 1,195 illegal migrants entered the UK on 19 small boats. This is the largest number for a single day this year, the fourth largest on record since the border crisis began, and means that overall number this year, nearly 15,000 illegal migrants, is some 42 per cent higher than the same point last year.
While immigration is already the number one issue in British politics, and is the main reason why millions of voters are abandoning the established parties for Reform, the numbers now look set to spiral even higher, with The Times this weekend forecasting that around 50,000 migrants will arrive this year, a new annual record.
None of this will surprise longer-term readers, of course. Even before Labour came to power, in May 2024, we explained why Labour’s plan for “smashing the gangs” would not work and the crisis would get worse. And this is now happening.
Also happening in the UK: England now has a blasphemy law.
Officially, blasphemy was abolished by New Labour in the 2008 Criminal Justice Act. But today, with the conviction of Hamit Coskun, blasphemy laws now exist in England.
This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate. The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society describes as ‘a troubling repurposing of public order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws’.
Hamit Coskun burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in February, before being attacked by a man named Moussa Kadri who has since pleaded guilty to the assault. Mr Coskun was initially charged under the Crime and Disorder Act with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam harassment, alarm or distress’. This means that the Crown Prosecution Service were treating Islam itself as a person, and a victim of Hamit’s Quran burning. Under English law this is nonsensical, as only people can be harmed in this fashion, so this charge, if it had been successful, would have established a special, protected status for Islam. Weeks ago I made a Freedom of Information request of the CPS, asking in how many instances of ‘the religious institution of Islam’ appeared in recent indictments. Just this morning they responded, saying that it would take too long for them to review all the charges they had made, and that they would not comply with the FOI request.
In other words: Welcome to the Islamic theocracy of Great Britain. “t won’t have escaped your attention that our new backdoor blasphemy laws only seem to cover one religion in particular. Those who seek to ringfence Islam – and Islam alone – from ridicule or criticism no doubt believe they are protecting an embattled little guy. But Coskun’s case rather complicates that narrative.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
MY IRONY METER JUST BROKE: 75th Anniversary Edition of Orwell’s 1984 Comes With a Trigger Warning.
UPDATE: Shock: Orwell’s 1984 Slapped with Trigger Warning.
The 75th anniversary features an introduction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of “Take My Hand.” She explains why some new readers might find Orwell’s masterpiece upsetting.
“I’m enjoying the novel on its own terms, not as a classic but as a good story, that is until [the main character] Winston reveals himself to be a problematic character,” Kirn reads from the trigger warning text.
Taibbi starts to laugh as Kirn continues.
“[Winston] dislikes nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones … Winston’s views on women are at first despicable to the contemporary reader … he’s the kind of character who can make me put a book down,’” he continues with her text.
“How many books have you thrown away by Hemingway, by Tolstoy?” Kirn asks as an aside before continuing from Perkins-Valdez’s introduction.
“When I was younger that’s exactly what I would have done, but I’m a more seasoned reader now and I know the difference between a flawed character and a flawed story. I remind myself that this is a dystopian novel and Orwell is suggesting misogyny is likely in a totalitarian society and Winston is a product of that environment.”
“Thank you for your trigger warning for ‘1984,’” Kirn said. “It is the most 1984ish thing I’ve ever f***ing read.”
Kirn summarizes the rest of the trigger warning, which includes suggestions that the book is racist.
Wow, you caught him, Dolen! The man who wrote “Shooting an Elephant“ is a crypto-racist in spite of himself. The Bletchley Park racial cryptographers strike again!
GREAT MOMENTS IN PUBLIC EDUCATION:
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY*: Suspect in Colorado Anti-Semitic Terror Attack Says He Wanted To ‘Kill All Zionist People.’
The suspect in Colorado’s anti-Semitic terror attack said Monday that he had planned the attack for a year, telling federal investigators that he “wanted to kill all Zionist people” and “would do it again.”
Mohamed Soliman, a 45-year-old illegal immigrant from Egypt, admitted during a police interview that he specifically targeted the Jewish group that gathered Sunday to raise awareness for Hamas’s hostages, according to an affidavit filed Monday.
The Justice Department on Monday charged Soliman with a federal hate crime. Soliman is also facing state charges of 384 years for 16 counts of attempted murder, 48 years for 2 counts of using an incendiary device, and 192 years for 16 counts of attempted use of an incendiary device, according to Boulder district attorney Michael Dougherty.
Terror charges have not been ruled out, according to acting U.S. attorney J. Bishop Grewell.
Soliman threw Molotov cocktails and used what the New York Times called a “makeshift flamethrower” on peaceful Boulder, Colo., demonstrators, injuring 12 victims, including a Holocaust survivor.
Investigators also found a black container nearby with 14 more Molotov cocktails.
The terror attack came just weeks after anti-Israel terrorist Elias Rodriguez murdered two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, as the young couple left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
*At least according to NBC, who invented plural “lone wolves” in an attempt to keep their readers in the dark: Lone Wolf? Wait. What? You Have to See NBC News’ Boulder Terrorist Attack Headline to Believe It.
Evergreen:
GREAT MOMENTS IN HYPERBOLE: David Brooks Invokes Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin To Mark Musk’s Departure From DOGE.
New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.
Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?”
Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.”
He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.”
At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady. With that in mind, Brooks reference to the trio of communist dictators comes across as even more absurd:
Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anybody on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy. And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.
MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas, borrowing Fonzie’s leather jacket and t-shirt, jumps the shark as well by taking the same talking points and compares Musk to LBJ: MSNBC panel stunned to silence over report on deaths linked to Elon Musk’s DOGE.
MSNBC says Musks USAID cuts is more deadIy than the Vietnam War..
These people are ridiculous.. 🤦♂️🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/uozM7FEpaq
— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) June 2, 2025
More: Bono’s ‘300,000 dead’ claim over USAID cuts gets smacked down by Rogan, Musk: ‘Liar/idiot.’
MORNING IN AMERICA: Job openings showed surprising increase to 7.4 million in April. Complete with an “unexpectedly” moment from CNBC: “Employers increased job openings more than expected in April while hiring and layoffs also both rose, according to a report Tuesday that showed a relatively steady labor market.”
FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: The New York Times published Tom Cotton’s editorial on June 3rd, 2020, and the repercussions continue to this day. From Noah Rothman, then-with Commentary, the next day: The New York Times and the Vanguard of the Incognizant.
“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” The senator has advocated extraordinary measures involving the domestic deployment of uniformed soldiers for several days—as we’ve witnessed mass protests in American cities during the day and wanton violence, rioting, and looting by night. This exhortation is not new for him, but the venue in which it was placed—the New York Times opinion page—inspired a frenzied revolt from within the journalistic institution that published him. More remarkable, the aggrieved staffers and writers at the Times generally declined to issue a counterargument. They simply declared Cotton’s arguments anathema and sought to wield whatever power they could muster to see them banished.
One by one, New York Times staffers added their voices to a coordinated campaign of shame directed squarely at the paper’s management. “Running this puts Black [New York Times] staff in danger,” wrote technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, writers Caity Weaver and Jacey Fortin, climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi, book critic Parul Sehgal, graphics assistant Simone Landon, reporter Katherine Rosman, styles desk editor Lindsey Underwood, culture writer Jenna Wortham, contributor Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and columnists Kara Swisher and Charlie Warzel. The News Guild of New York soon chimed in with a statement: “[Cotton’s] message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence,” the Guild affirmed in what was billed as a “response to a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”
As I wrote back then (and the rest of this post continues in the original post’s tense), as a result of their staff’s meltdown over the Cotton op-ed, the New York Times, already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series, promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more. Or as Tina Lowe writes at the Washington Examiner, “New York Times employees can bully their bosses into submission — just don’t criticize a celebrity:”
A newspaper, beyond its moral purpose to tell the truth, is functionally a business. To turn a profit, it must balance journalistic integrity with revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Thus, it came as absolutely no surprise when the New York Times fired Alison Roman, the up-and-coming chef who irked professional celebrity Chrissy Teigen with a rude remark in an interview that was falsely smeared as racist and subsequently piled onto by Teigen.
* * * * * * * *
As you may recall from a long day ago, after the opinion page published a fairly straightforward op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, arguing to utilize the military in quelling protests — a position shared by the majority of Americans and 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, mind you — several staff members instigated a civil war, all sharing the same copypasta bullying their bosses: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
* * * * * * *
Publishing the opinions of the Taliban wasn’t a bridge too far for the staff, and employees claiming that destroying property isn’t violence on national television isn’t a bridge too far for the management. But a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is, and as a result, journalism will suffer in the future.
The bitter babies at the New York Times wanted less speech, and they got it. They’ll now publish fewer op-eds overall. There is a wholly illiberal war on the free press, and its primary aggressors aren’t in the White House or corrupt police stations. It’s being waged from within the inside.
Bari Weiss, one of the saner voices at the Times, responded to her colleagues’ collective primal scream in a Twitter thread earlier today:
Naturally, as this Mediaite headline notes: NY Times ‘Civil War’: Opinion Writer Bari Weiss Gets Buried By Colleagues for Tweeting Her Takes on Newsroom Friction After Cotton Op-Ed.
In 2015, Ashe Schow, then with the Washington Examiner wrote, “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”
The Gray Lady is finding out, good and hard.
Meanwhile, Daily Beast editor-at-large Goldie Taylor threatens violence against Weiss, in a since-deleted tweet:
As William F. Buckley famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
June 2, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Andrew McCabe Can’t Understand Why Kash Patel Called Boulder Attack Terrorism.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth: “The Egyptian illegal immigrant who used a flamethrower and molotov cocktails to set a group of Jewish people on fire Sunday at a demonstration in Boulder, Colo. is now facing federal hate crime charges for attacking a group of demonstrators bringing attention to the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
JIM GERAGHTY: The Ideology and Violence of Hamas Take Root Here in America.
The ugly truth is that Hamas’s war against the Jews has come to America. Sure, the perpetrators of these attacks may not have Hamas membership cards, but their worldview, agenda, and increasingly, their methods are indistinguishable from that of the terrorist group.
And this is why no one believes, or should believe, anyone who says, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m just anti-Zionist.”
You may say you’re anti-Zionist, but your political allies keep trying to kill random Jews. They also keep tearing down public menorahs, making threats to Hillels on college campuses, spray-painting hateful messages on synagogues. This crowd insists it is only objecting to the policies of the Israeli government and, entirely coincidentally, that rage just keeps accidentally hitting random American Jews.
The governor’s mansion is not an IDF base. A young couple are not IDF soldiers. A parade of elderly Americans calling for the hostages to be released is not an IDF commando unit.
One of the core tenets of Hamas and every other virulently antisemitic terrorist group is that there is no such thing as an innocent civilian, that every Jew everywhere in the world is a legitimate target. We’re seeing that same worldview at work on our own soil. These people don’t hate Israel; they just hate Jews and don’t want to admit it.
On May 27, the “DSA Liberation Caucus” — a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus” within the Democratic Socialists of America — declared, “Free Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners.”
Remember, Rodriguez shot and executed Milgrim as she attempted to crawl away. But in the minds of these people, he’s a “political prisoner.” You see, murder is part of their political agenda.
Exit questions: “How do you survive the Holocaust and live to see old age, only to have some monster try to incinerate you a second time — this time on the streets of the United States? An attempt to incinerate you a second time for being a Jew, right here in America?”
JOEL KOTKIN: Where have all the Jews gone?
Just as in the past, American Jews are moving away from urban cores – where violence and now anti-Semitism are more obvious. Historian Arthur Hertzberg estimated that between the end of the Second World War and 1956, one-third of all Jews left the urban centers for the suburbs. When you think of Jewish communities, particularly outside orthodoxy, you think not of the Lower East Side but Long Island and Westchester. In LA, Boyle Heights has been supplanted first by the San Fernando Valley and increasingly the Conejo Valley even further from Downtown. In Greater Baltimore today, three-fourths of all Jews live in the suburbs.
The same forces – crime and rising anti-Semitism – have also prompted many Jews to move to the South. Long seen as too conservative and Christian fundamentalist, the South is now the ‘it’ place for Jews, both in terms of basic safety and economic opportunity. Demographer Ira Sheskin notes that while the north-east’s share of US Jews has dropped from 68 per cent in 1955 to 41 per cent today, the South’s share of the US Jewish population has soared from a mere eight per cent in 1955 to 24 per cent. The ‘hot’ cities for Jewish growth include Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, as well as Miami.
More and more Jewish young people are choosing colleges on similar grounds. For generations, the dream of Jewish parents was to send their offspring to the Ivy League, or the great public universities like Berkeley or UCLA. But today, the leading destination for Jewish students is the University of Florida, with the University of Central Florida ranking third.
The reason for this shift is simple. Jewish young people are safer in the South. According to one study ranking universities’ level of hostility toward Jewish students, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and three University of California campuses were among the most hostile. The least hostile environments included Tulane in New Orleans, Washington University in St Louis and five colleges in Florida.
Jews may be in the depths of despair, as their havens throughout the West sometimes seem to be turning into an anti-Zionist, Jew-hating hellscape. But they have hope, too. After all, Jews have survived outside Israel for two millennia by adapting, shifting their locales and their political loyalties to fit changing realities. We may be horrified by recent events. But in the face of those who yearn for our destruction, we will persevere.
And it’s exposed the absurdity of Colorado’s priorities:
ROGER SIMON: Did CNN Cause the Boulder Terror Attack?
My title is deliberately salacious. Admittedly I’m in that kind of mood, given the events in Boulder June 1 and those in DC just a few days earlier. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
The Intifada is being globalized, as they say. It’s here in the USA and it’s happening in high and low places.
The low, we can assume, refers to the two events above that were apparently perpetrated by lone wolves against Jews or their Christian supporters by single actors.
But who inspires them to act that way? Many people, actually, from our educational system to extremist politicians to foreign entities to religious zealots. But our media is prominent among them. When potential terrorists see Israel continually criticized in our media, they feel encouraged, correctly or not. They can think they are in a zone of safety here in the USA, that their act will be well received by many.
Read the whole thing.
FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY, THE PIVOT BEGAN: ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.
As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”
QED: Shot: Grief and COVID-19: Mourning our bygone lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an epidemiological crisis, but also a psychological one. While the situation provokes anxiety, stress and sadness, it is also a time of collective sorrow, says Sherry Cormier, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in grief and grief mentoring. “It’s important that we start recognizing that we’re in the middle of this collective grief. We are all losing something now.”
Many people are reckoning with individual losses, including illness and death due to the novel coronavirus, or loss of employment as a result of economic upheaval. But even people who haven’t lost anything so concrete as a job or a loved one are affected, Cormier says. “There is a communal grief as we watch our work, health-care, education and economic systems — all of these systems we depend on — destabilize,” she says.
—The American Psychological Association, April 1st, 2020.
Chaser: APA’s action plan for addressing inequality.
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to you while still reeling from the tragic murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the ongoing protests, which are reverberating in a shockwave throughout our nation and around the world.
These recent events present us with an urgent challenge—as an association, discipline and profession, and individual psychologists—to bring our expertise to bear to address the range of underlying problems these events represent from discrimination to racism, which have resulted in long-standing social, economic, and political inequalities, from police brutality, to the disproportionate spread of the coronavirus among black and brown people, to the soaring unemployment rates among communities of color.
APA is urging psychologists to share their thoughts and recommendations for using the power of psychology to address the “pandemic of racism,” both in the short and long term. As part of that process, we must also examine our role as a field and as an association in perpetuating these ills.
—The American Psychological Association, June 2nd, 2020.
Note the photos atop those Webpages. The April 1st post is illustrated by photos of an elderly white woman looking frustrated in her apartment, and a young black woman staring wistfully into the distance outside the window of her apartment, with the photos separated by a white dividing line to emphasize both persons’ isolation from the world. Contrast that with the photo of the massed protestors carrying “Black Lives Matter” placards atop the June 2nd post.
NPR also pivoted on June 2nd, 2020:
The DNC-MSM and local mayors turned on a dime from enforcing hard-line lockdown rules and shaming anyone who went to church or got a haircut, to letting rioters congregate with impunity. Bill de Blasio was quoted five years ago today, “When you see…an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seated in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”
Flashbacks:
● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.
● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.
● Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.
June 1, 2025
NEW YORK REP. JERRY NADLER SAYS DHS AGENT HANDCUFFED HIS STAFF MEMBER AT CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE:
New York Rep. Jerry Nadler says a member of his staff was handcuffed by a Department of Homeland Security agent at his congressional office Wednesday.
The incident was caught on video.
According to a DHS spokesperson, Federal Protective Service officers were responding to reports that protesters were inside Nadler’s district office in Manhattan.
“Upon arrival, officers were granted entry and encountered four individuals. Officers identified themselves and explained their intent to conduct a security check, however, one individual became verbally confrontational and physically blocked access to the office. The officers then detained the individual in the hallway for the purpose of completing the security check. All were released without further incident,” DHS said in a statement.
In a statement released Saturday, Nadler said the DHS agents “forcefully” entered his office and handcuffed a member of his staff.
“The decision to enter a Congressional office and detain a staff member demonstrates a deeply troubling disregard for proper legal boundaries. If this can happen in a Member of Congress’s office, it can happen to anyone–and it is happening,” Nadler said, in part.
Related: “Nobody is above the law.”
—Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), May 15th, 2019.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Furious Al Gore Seen Blowing Hair Dryer At Ice Caps To Stop Them From Regrowing https://t.co/Rba36hH5VZ pic.twitter.com/OV7vq4twGs
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 31, 2025
OKAY, BUT SHOULDN’T CONGRESS FOCUS MORE ON PASSING THE AGENDA OF THE CURRENT PRESIDENT? Watergate-Style Hearings for the Biden Coverup.
The massive coverup of Joe Biden’s mental decline has stimulated plenty of indignant commentary. Missing from the hand-wringing is a demand for accountability, which brings to mind the quip: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This newspaper and recently published books have exposed the trickery and lies of Mr. Biden’s minions and Democratic allies, who attempted to wield power in a leaderless vacuum. It was perfectly described in Tunku Varadarajan’s review of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin,” as resembling “a hush-hush leftist capture of an infirm president.”
A White House cadre, with media connivance, hoped to drag their puppet over the electoral line to win four additional years of power, dangerously undermining the institutional integrity of the presidency. Memorial Day has come and gone, and Washington’s elite is already enabling the machinery to which the Democratic left turns in the face of scandal—elevating sideshows such as insupportable claims that Republicans are destroying Medicaid or rants regarding President Trump’s dispute with Harvard, all to make this latest deceit disappear like April’s cherry blossoms.
Republicans will end up rewarding this duplicity if they elevate cheap talk over accountability. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is holding aggressive hearings on the coverup, but they have been too narrowly aimed. Mr. Biden’s using an autopen and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s declining to release the audio of the president’s interview with Robert Hur are small potatoes amid this vast whitewash of history.
If Congress takes seriously that it should act when Americans are cynically hoodwinked, it must begin an investigation into the coverup that matches or exceeds the Senate Watergate Committee hearings.
John Fund explores: Why the Biden Health Cover-Up Really Matters.
The media are supposed to be watchdogs of potential governmental abuse. Instead, they are in danger of becoming lapdogs serving the interests of some of those in power. (The danger, with Trump in office, is dramatically reduced.) In Biden’s case, his aides worked overtime to conceal the president’s frailty from the media and intimidate anyone who questioned his abilities, and the media failed in their duty to probe more deeply and question the official White House line.
“This was a cover-up — plain and simple,” admits Chris Cillizza, a former reporter with the Washington Post and CNN. “For at least two years (or close to it) senior people in the White House knew that Biden’s condition was bad enough that it needed to be concealed from people working in the administration.”
The media should have realized how powerful a motivation their sources had to deceive them.
They all knew that, but were too invested in getting their man across the finish line for the second time (or possibly the fourth time).