UN Convenes Climate Conference in Brothels

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The Brazilian rainforest is so endangered that the latest UN climate conference will take place there. Along the way to saving the planet, a four lane highway had to be cut through tens of thousands of acres of protected and endangered rainforest. Endangered by its protectors.

(But the good news, according to the Brazilian government, is that it’s a “sustainable highway.)

And if that’s not enough, fleets of jets will soon descend on the Brazilian rainforest as an estimated 45,000 attendees will show up to party, socialize, conference, and listen to lectures about how this time the planet is really on the edge of destruction. Please pass the canapes.

COP30, as the conference is known, hasn’t saved the planet in 29 conferences, but maybe the 30th one will do the trick, at least if the delegates can find someplace to stay in the rainforest.

The Brazilian government is announcing that individual rooms are available for planet-savers from other countries for as high as $600. Over the summer, the UN held ‘emergency talks’ not over saving the planet, but over the cost of hotel rooms to save the planet from $600 rooms.

‘Poorer’ African nations warned that they couldn’t afford the cost of the hotel rooms (but they can usually afford gold watches, elaborate palaces and private armies) and would not come unless the costs came down. With the fate of the planet at stake, UN negotiators held several ‘urgent’ meetings to discuss plans for lowering the costs of a hotel room to save the planet.

Unfortunately the only way to lower the costs of the planet-saving hotel rooms would be chopping down even more rainforest to build more hotel rooms. Sometimes you have to destroy the rainforest to save the rainforest, or destroy the rainforest to make it cheaper to host African delegates to discuss saving the rainforest from umm… the people destroying the rainforest.

By then it was too late to build new hotels, but two massive cruise ships were dispatched to the Brazilian rainforest to provide African delegates with cheap cabins to stay in. For the planet.

The MSC Seaview, a 1,000 foot cruise ship with 18 decks, massive pool, four-story glass-walled atrium, disco, theater and full-sized bowling alleys, and the Costa Diadema, that has a 4D theater, a spa across 4 decks and a crew of over 1,000, were dispatched to save the planet by hosting the African diplomats to discuss reducing emissions from things like cruise ships.

It would take the average person 100 years to produce as many ‘emissions’ as these cruise ships do in one hour. But sometimes you just have to pollute to stop polluting the planet.

These cabins on cruise ships going nowhere (an apt metaphor for both the UN and its serial climate conferences, currently up to 30 and counting) will be going for a mere $220.

While the Africans were appeased, the Europeans were still furious over the high price of hotel rooms and refused to book rooms at $600 a night. Not even for the sake of saving the planet.

The Brazilian government rushed to find cheaper motels and Airbnbs to save the conference and thus save the planet, and the Europeans relented, but cut back their delegations so that fewer diplomats will be coming to save the planet. And that might actually save the planet.

But since this is Brazil, for those truly passionate about saving the planet, many of the arrivals will have to make do with ‘love motels’ that in America are usually known as the sorts of places that charge by the hour.

As the New York Times described it, the ‘love motels’ are preparing “rooms that range from the sensual to the raunchy for a different kind of guest: diplomats and climate scientists, civil servants and environmental activists” and “taking out anything too erotic“ which suggests that they have no understanding of what diplomats and ‘civil servants’ actually do at conferences.

Diplomats and ‘climate scientists’ will be given the option of having the “erotic chair — a metal-and-leather contraption resembling a dentist’s chair that was bolted to the floor for safety” taken out. At another hotel, “an oversized framed picture of a person’s rear end” was taken down. The brothels are doing this in the hopes of charging foreigners as much as $650 a room.

There’s something undeniably fitting about using whorehouses to host UN conference attendees. For all the talk about saving the planet, these conferences are shakedown sessions at which nothing is done for the environment (which is invariably worse off after a mass of glorified tourists converges on some exotic out-of-the-way locale) and the only green is the kind that comes in wallets.

“I’m also listening to ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ by Rihanna nonstop,” Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, the vice chair for the implementation of the UN Climate Convention, told reporters at COP29 which was held in the oil-rich and otherwise bleak hinterlands of Baku.

Juan’s female dog in question was the Western world, and it’s tired of bringing the money to pay off third worlders, whether for expensive rooms in mildly redecorated brothels, for ‘climate offsets’ or for their ‘climate catastrophes’. Much of the talk at the COPs comes down to creating large funds with which to bribe Africa, Asia and Latin America into going along with the latest version of the Chicken Little hoax, from ice ages to global warming to climate change, that a bunch of special interests and their hired ‘scientists’ describe as the ‘climate consensus’.

Third world countries are too busy wiping out endangered species to care about the planet. The only reason they show up to these UN shindigs is to demand ‘compensation’ from the West. The compensation comes in the form of funds set up to help them deal with the supposed effects of ‘global warming’ and in the form of ‘climate offsets’ in which Western nations agree to ‘cut’ emissions, but in practice just pay third world countries to buy some of their non-emissions.

If this sounds confusing, imagine that UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres has promised not to cheat on his wife, but he finds himself staying in a Brazilian ‘love motel’ at a mere $650 a night and decides to use one of the menus to avail himself of a local lady of the evening who is similarly disposed to reducing emissions and saving the planet.

But UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres has taken a firm vow at COP29 to stop cheating on his wife. So he arranges for an ‘adultery’ offset in which he offers $220 to a local gentleman who is not cheating on his wife to offset his adultery. Guterres, now in possession of an ‘adultery offset certificate’ then commits adultery. And when Mrs. Guterres catches him in the act, shows her the certificate and explains that he’s not committing adultery, he’s actually reducing the total amount of planetary adultery by offsetting his adultery with the purchase of someone else’s unused adultery. And this is really a way to end adultery.

If this sounds like a complete immoral fraud, welcome to the business of saving the planet. You not only know more than all the ‘experts’, but you’re not paying $600 for a room in a brothel or paying $600 million in climate offsets to non-industrialized countries to buy their pollution.

Fortunately, President Trump is keeping American diplomats home and out of Brazil. That means we’ll save money on their hotel rooms/brothels and actually save the planet.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

America is Spreading ISIS Around the World

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 “More than 70 repatriation missions have returned 1,500 fighters to their home countries, yet much work remains,” Adm. Brad Cooper told a UN conference in New York. “Today, I join you all in calling on every nation with detained or displaced personnel in Syria to return your citizens.”

The ‘citizens’ and ‘fighters’ in question are ISIS. And some are coming here.

Even while one arm of the Trump administration is trying to deport Islamic terrorists and their supporters, another is trying to import them into our communities and around the world.

While ISIS is rebounding in Syria, carrying out 117 attacks, the United States has adopted the position that the tens of thousands of ISIS ‘detainees’ left over from the previous defeat of the Jihadist group have to be distributed around the region and the world including to the U.S.

When an Al Qaeda group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized control over Syria, with backing from the Islamist terror regimes in Turkey and Qatar, the Trump administration had a choice between opposing the move or supporting it as a way of getting US troops out of Syria.

The Trump administration dropped sanctions and a $10 million bounty on the head of former Al Qaeda leader and ISIS ally Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) who along with some of his former Al Qaeda associates was able to tour New York City. Widely reported attacks on Christians, Druze and other minority groups by Sunni Jihadists soon followed.

But the real and much less widely reported issue for the United States that hardly anyone was talking about were the tens of thousands of ISIS detainees being held by the Kurdish militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Unlike the Sunni Jihadist groups that were touted as ‘democratic’ during the heyday of the Syrian Civil War, the SDF is non-Islamist, includes Christians and women, does have Marxist roots, but is the only non-Jihadist game in town.

Turkey’s Islamist regime is obsessed with suppressing the Kurds in its own country and in those areas that its ruler, Erdogan, wants to expand into to rebuild the Ottoman caliphate, like Syria. During the ISIS war, Turkey covertly backed Al Qaeda, ISIS and other Jihadist groups to attack the Kurds. Erdogan did not go to all this trouble just to leave the SDF intact and operational.

The ISIS camps contain at least 9,000 ISIS Jihadis and around 30,000 ISIS family members, who maintain their own mini-ISIS state within the camps, with mothers preparing their children for an endless war. They all pose a significant national security threat wherever they go.

The Trump administration might have insisted that Erdogan leave SDF alone enough to be able to control the camps and keep those inside from breaking out or detain ISIS inside Turkey.

But the man in charge of our Turkey and Syria policy is Tom Barrack, a major Lebanese Arab donor and Jeffrey Epstein associate (Epstein reportedly gifted Barrack an $11,000 watch) who had previously been in court for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of a Muslim oil country (he was acquitted) and whose speeches can be hard to distinguish from Turkish propaganda.

Barrack bemoaned that under Western colonialism, “Sykes-Picot divided Syria” by which Arab nationalists generally mean Greater Syria, but at the same time insisting that federalism for Kurds and Druze is a non-starter because “you can’t have independent non-nation states within a nation.” Barrack reportedly purged American diplomats supportive of the Kurdish militias.

Officially, the new Al Qaeda regime is supposed to take control of all the Kurdish areas, including the ISIS detention camps, but the deal hasn’t been implemented because no one trusts Al Qaeda, and meanwhile we’re pushing other countries to take their ISIS terrorists.

According to a “Syrian military strategist”, the push to export ISIS terrorists is about authorizing a “limited military operation against the SDF” by Turkey and the Al-Qaeda regime while “removing the detainee issue as a bargaining chip.” Once the ISIS terrorists are out, the Al-Qaeda-Turkey alliance is free to attack the Kurds without a mass ISIS jailbreak.

The problem is that we’re already engaging in a slow-motion ISIS jailbreak to enable Turkey’s tribal warfare against the Kurds and the centralization of an Al-Qaeda terror state in Syria.

While most of the ISIS terrorists and their families are staying in Syria or going to Iraq and other places in the region, possibly accounting for the surge in ISIS attacks, some are going to Russia and others to Western countries, including the U.S., which is a potential national security disaster.

Around 6,000 of the ISIS detainees are “third-country nationals”.

“These detainees in camps and prisons must be repatriated by their respective countries,” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan insisted, and we’re rushing to obey him.

Not everyone is.

France rightly refused to import around 200 ISIS detainees. Other European countries, some of which previously agreed to accept a small number of ISIS people are balking at taking them all.

And while CENTCOM, which is heading up efforts to clear the ISIS detainees out to make way for a Turkish-Al Qaeda assault on the Kurds, describe them as “foreign citizens”, that’s only by the Arab Muslim definition of ‘citizenship’ that always follows the father, not the birth country.

Many of the so-called ISIS families include children who were born to one or both foreign parents a decade or more ago in Syria or Iraq and have no ties to any other country.

Over the summer, the State Department announced that the United States had “repatriated a U.S. citizen minor” from Syria and claimed that they had given “this child, who has known nothing of life outside of the camps, a future free from the influence and dangers of ISIS terrorism” and urged that “every country must take responsibility for its nationals in northeast Syria and not look to others to solve the problem for them.”

So why is America being expected to solve Syria’s problem by taking in ISIS minors?

Any ‘minors’ living in an ISIS camp were almost certainly born in Iraq or Syria, not in the United States, to a parent who abandoned their American citizenship to join an enemy force. These foreign terrorist minors have no claim on entering America: a country that they never lived in.

The name of this ‘child’ was not given, but in one previous example of “repatriation”, Abdelhamid, a Muslim immigrant living in Minneapolis, left as a teenager to join ISIS, married an ISIS widow, and had a baby with her. Abdelhamid also adopted her previous offspring. The two boys, one of whom was born in Iraq to an immigrant who had temporarily lived in Minneapolis, and the other who had absolutely no blood ties to America, were ‘repatriated’ here.

While children are born innocent, ISIS members trained theirs to hate and kill from an early age. Visitors to the ISIS camps encountered children chanting support for Jihad and violence.

Repatriation means taking in terrorist teenagers already trained to wage war on America.

While there were only 22 U.S. citizens listed in the ISIS camps, each one is a potential ticking time bomb so even one is too many. One single Islamic terrorist killed 49 people in a Florida nightclub. One single Islamic terrorist driving a truck killed 15 people in New Orleans.

“If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about Syrian refugees a decade ago. The advocates for ‘repatriation’ might want to recall that wisdom before they bring the next future terrorist to our community.

“Repatriating vulnerable populations before they are radicalized is not just compassion—it is a decisive blow against ISIS’s ability to regenerate,” Adm. Cooper claimed. The “populations” were long radicalized. And we’re safer with them in Syria than we are with them living next door.

Fighting ISIS by importing ISIS into America, Australia, Canada and Europe is a terrible idea.

The disastrous ‘repatriation’ campaign puts the Trump administration on the same side as the terror lawyers who have been fighting legal battles to force European countries to take in those terrorists, and the ones who want to bring Islamic terrorists into America. President Trump ran on keeping Jihadists out of America but parts of his administration are pursuing appeasement of foreign interests in a way that not only empowers Al Qaeda but imports terrorists into America.

The last thing we should be doing is risking American lives for Turkey’s national interests. And yet we’re risking the lives of our civilian population so that Turkey can expand into Syria.

ISIS repatriation is a bad deal for America and for the rest of the world. We should stop pressuring our allies to take in terrorists and their families. They’re Syria’s problem now.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

An Orwellian Documentary Hijacks Orwell

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 The trailer for ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ begins with a heavy voiceover declaring, “when I sit down to write a book, I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose”.

Two minutes later there is a photo of a BLM activist holding up an “I can’t breathe” sign.

Such unintentional irony pervades a documentary which claims that what George Orwell really wanted to warn about in ‘1984’ were the dangers of free speech and political dissent.

Not Communism.

An Orwell documentary that treats ‘misinformation’ as the sort of threat that Orwell was warning about, rather than an Orwellian term for demonizing speech and providing a pretext for government propaganda and censorship of the kind that we see in ‘1984’, has lost the plot.

But ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ has an entirely different plot aimed at turning Orwell into Big Brother.

‘ORWELL 2+2=5′ was written and directed by Raoul Peck: a Haitian radical activist who made a movie celebrating Communist mass murderer Patrice Lumumba. George Orwell struggled against Soviet Communism. Peck made a hero out of the mass murderer whose name was on the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow: the Soviet Union’s training ground for third world dictators and terrorists including Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega, PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Peck’s previous movie ‘The Young Karl Marx’ was hailed as a “Communist bromance”. Orwell became famous because he was willing to criticise his own side. Peck only knows how to prop up his side and attack the other side. That makes him the worst possible candidate for the job.

Even though George Orwell had been writing about a leftist tyranny, the documentary executes its own version of adding 2 + 2 and coming up with 5 by focusing on democratically-elected leaders on the ‘right’, including Trump, India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orban or Israel’s Netanyahu, as his examples of “Orwellianism”. What would Orwell have made of the Labour Party’s mass censorship and arrests for political dissent across the UK? Don’t ask ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ which contends that the real threat isn’t Keir Starmer’s mass arrests but milquetoast Nigel Farage.

In a world where the British government arrests people for ‘misinformation’ and has passed laws forcing its propaganda to have a place of pride on smart TVs, Peck can’t find any other parallel.

Are there no dictators on the Left? Even Xi and Putin are only there because as Peck had complained during his ‘Young Marx’ press tour “Russia, China, are totally capitalist.” CEOs can be “dictators” practicing slavery, but not Communist Cuba or kingdoms in the Muslim world.

This isn’t Orwell. It’s Orwellian.

Unintentionally true to its name, ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ keeps adding up 2+2 to get 5.

In ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, mass censorship of social media isn’t the problem (it’s the solution), but the excessive freedom of speech on social media is what truly poses a threat to freedom. The documentary implicitly treats the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7 as something other than war (presumably it was peace) while Israel fighting back is war. Peck, who claimed that “I want people to look closer at the ugly side of Israel” wants to use “War is Peace” to attack Israel. Instead he only ends up affirming the cynical double standards behind Orwell’s anti-slogan.

Similarly mass surveillance of political opponents on the right by the left in America and Europe is freedom. By the time Peck starts warning about “misinformation” from conservative media and the dangers of online free speech, ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ has become Big Brother.

But ORWELL 2+2=5’s malignant genius is turning George Orwell into Big Brother, a big black and white head on a screen, reciting ominous phrases (actually being played by the actor who played Nick Brody on ‘Homeland’) and urging us to fight against and hate various groups like Republicans and Jews as the enemies of all that Mr. Peck believes in. Rather than an expose of lies, Orwell’s anti-slogans like “Slavery is Freedom” and “War is Peace” become propaganda that could just as easily have been recited by Big Brother accusing everyone else of his crimes.

It’s the ultimate tone deaf Orwellian reading of Orwell being falsely billed as the “ultimate and comprehensive documentary film about the exceptional writer George Orwell.”

‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is not here to expose lies, but to push them, hijacking George Orwell’s legacy in the most Orwellian manner imaginable. That begins with the bowdlerized opening quote about exposing lies which alters what Orwell said and removes the context of why he said it.

George Orwell was explaining that he wrote ‘Animal Farm’ and why he was going to write ‘1984’ to expose what could not be said about Soviet Communism using the medium of fiction while being impelled by a need to denounce Soviet lies. ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ strips away the context and uses the long dead writer as a club to attack President Trump, Bush, police officers and Israel.

Removing the specific political context from terms like “lie”, “war” and “freedom” and then aiming them at political enemies while pretending that nothing has changed isn’t Orwell, it’s Orwellian. Universalizing and updating Orwell was the usual approach of leftists who were uncomfortable with what George Orwell, an English writer named Eric Blair, was really saying about their complicity with a radical leftist totalitarian state and their schemes to censor his writing.

The “lie” that Orwell was referring to was the lie that pro-Soviet leftists were telling about Communism. And the lies that they were telling about him to silence him and end his career.

“Orwell has been put in a little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,” Peck complained, while arguing that his documentary ‘universalizes’ him. More aptly it puts Orwell in a box and turns him into a shill for every establishment leftist cause.

‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ isn’t really about the writer, it’s about weaponizing him under the guise of ‘updating’ him. George Orwell was a perpetual rebel who spent much of his life rebelling against leftist dogma because he tried to do his best to follow first principles. The concept is foreign to Raoul Peck who can only churn out militant agitprop to radicalize his fellow bourgeois.

What would Orwell’s positions be on some of the issues he’s employed against in the doc?

Take J6, a major feature of ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, which depicts the protests and riots, rather than the mass surveillance, relentless crackdown and militarization of D.C. under the guise of “protecting democracy” that followed in its wake, as the true Orwellian offense. But George Orwell was writing about the dangers of totalitarianism, not the danger of political protests.

That’s why Orwell could deplore Oswald Mosley, a British fascist, and support locking him up when a Nazi invasion appeared imminent, but also argue that detaining him when the danger had passed “was an infringement of every principle we are supposedly fighting for.”

Orwell might well have been no fan of Trump, but also would have warned about the rather obvious threat of totalitarianism from sending in the troops to occupy the nation’s capital, mass censorship of skepticism about the election and hefty prison terms for the same behavior that was hailed when it was being conducted by people on the left side of the spectrum.

Anyone claiming to speak in Orwell’s name ought to be able to do at least as much.

The mature Orwell was capable of both outrage and principled nuance. He was constantly engaged in self-examination that is entirely foreign to the heavy-handed propaganda of ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’. Take Orwell’s confession that, “I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.”

This “simple theory”, which Orwell whacks away in one casual sentence, is the heart and soul of not only ‘ORWELL 2+2=5’, but Raoul Peck’s entire great obsession with ‘colonialism’.

‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is cheap propaganda of the kind that the real George Orwell always hated the way that he hated the simplistic sloganeering and distorted reality produced by Marxism.

The opening quote about Orwell writing books to counter lies is used to imply that the writer believed in the supremacy of politics over art because all art is political. This tenet of Social Realism has been at the center of modern woke culture wars (in opposition to ‘ars gratia artis’ that art should exist for art’s sake). When you hear the insistence that all books, movies and music is inherently political, you are hearing this argument being applied to modern pop culture.

But did Orwell really believe? Of course he didn’t.

“The Marxist critic, by reducing everything to economic causation, destroys the meaning of literature, which is not just a reflection of class but of human experience,” Orwell warned.

George Orwell, or rather Eric Blair, was a man, not a set of political slogans. Raoul Peck boasts of exclusive access to Orwell’s letters, but all he does with that is use Orwell’s literary pseudonym to go after political opponents on the grounds of their favored economic theory.

Writers and directors are supposed to create art rooted in the human experience. Peck is capable only of distilling political theories into on-screen tirades. He isn’t fighting Big Brother.

‘ORWELL 2+2=5’ is Big Brother.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Socialism Didn’t Win. Social Media Hype Did.

By Daniel Greenfield

1. No, Mamdani Doesn't Have a Mandate.

Zohran Mamdani won a little over 1 million votes (at current count) in a city with a population of around 7 million adults.

That’s about 14%.

The total election turnout was a little over 2 million (that will likely increase) making for an election turnout of 28%.

That’s not even a third of New York City’s population.

New York City’s election turnout has always been weak. And while the city has a large illegal alien population, it still has 5 million registered voters. That’s a below 40% turnout rate even for registered voters.

The media is hyping this as the highest election turnout in decades. Only if you don’t pay attention to population growth.

In the 1993 showdown between Giuliani and Dinkins, a racist hack who let the city burn, and whom Bill de Blasio viewed as an inspiration, 1.9 million voters turned out in a city with a smaller population and 3 million registered voters for a 59% voter turnout.

The turnout fell in the 2001 election that was effectively a referendum on Giuliani’s policies by Bloomberg, versus another liberal Democrat, was at over 40%.

So no, this isn’t a mandate.

Putting together 1 million votes in a city whose Muslim settler population is somewhere below 1 million (most estimates are dubious) and whose leftist population is certainly in that range is not a big deal.

The opposition didn’t put together enough votes. Everything rested on turnout and with the Muslim settler population and the leftist TikTok voters and college students, Mamdani had a cushion that was hard to beat.

It’s not a mandate. It’s colonization and apathy.

2. Socialism Didn't Win. Social Media Hype Did.

Two mayoral elections in major cities with two candidates.

Both Omar Fateh and Zohran Mamdani followed the familiar AOC playbook of seizing their party’s nomination in low turnout primaries or in Fateh’s case, DFL conventions, against an established candidate.

Both were Islamists running on ‘free stuff’ and socialism.

Mamdani beat Cuomo in New York City while in Minneapolis, Jacob Frey appears to have defeated Fateh.

The difference didn’t come down to policies, it came down to social media hype.

Mamdani kept that fake smile up the entire time and painstakingly followed the ‘people’s struggle’ handbook of pretending he was representing some electorate other than fellow Muslims and leftists. Omar Fateh tried the same routine, but it doesn’t help that he looks like a fairy tale goblin.

Smiling only gets you so far when you look like you’re about to demand that a fairy tale queen guess your name or you’ll make off with her daughter.

Mamdani mostly benefited from massive amounts of astroturfed social media hype.

We’ve seen the waves of fake hype for Obama before, not to mention other radical candidates like Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul, in which a small social media campaign by radicals pumps up a candidate that otherwise no one would care about. It only works when the candidate, like Obama, has enough charisma to front it. No amount of hype could make anyone make Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul president. And the hype wasn’t enough for the Minneapolis goblin.

Socialism is only a part of it. The radical candidates don’t really run on socialism. They run on hype aimed at low-information voters. Especially young ones. That worked for Mamdani, but you have to have the media training, the looks, the polish and the personality to make it happen.

Those can be manufactured.

Consider the difference between the pre-politics and post-politics Mamdani.

Would this guy, who looks like the neighborhood sex-offender, have won? Less likely.

And compare 2000 era Obama with the guy who eventually took over the party.

Mamdani didn’t win a policy debate. He won a personality contest.

And would Mamdani had even won if he were facing a single focused opponent instead of two aging narcissists from the past who spent half their time squabbling with each other? Much like the Obama era might have been averted if the GOP hadn't run a holdover from another era who got the nod because 'it was his turn'.

3. These elections weren't about the issues. They were about the economy.

The average voter cast ballots based on his or her perception of the state of things and a big part of that is the economy. Trump and Republicans had that going for them in 2024. They don’t in 2025 and they won’t in 2026.

This is an urgent reality check.

Yes, Republicans and conservatives will agonize that Virginia voters didn’t make their decision based on the Jay Jones death threats. It’s 2025. Moral qualifications for candidates are deader than Gary Hart (correction Gary is still alive) which is why Graham Platner is doing better than ever after the SS tattoo and the Communist declaration. There may be nothing too awful that a politician can do to be morally disqualified. People vote down party lines, they vote based on which party they think is screwing them harder, based on identity politics and just sheer ‘cussedness’.

Conservatives become complacent. These elections should be a dash of cold water. President Trump has done a lot of great things, but much of the country is still agonizing over prices, over the economy at ground level, and is not feeling good about the state of the nation. Unless that changes, not just Dems, but Islamists and the far Left will exploit the opportunity to take more positions, climb the political ladder and eventually take over the country.

We’re not safe. We’re in the middle of a war. The echo chambers have become too cozy and we’re seeing too many memes while losing sight of the battle.

There’s still time before 2026 and 2028. But only so much time..

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Kamala’s F____ Rebrand

Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

After blowing through $1.5 billion to lose an election, Kamala is back. And wants to run again. 

“I am not done,” Kamala Harris declared. “I have lived my entire career as a life of service and it’s in my bones.” The terrible polls won’t be stopping her because “if I listened to polls I would have not run for my first office, or my second office – and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Kamala’s previous presidential campaign foundered when she couldn’t explain what the Harris-Walz administration would do differently than the Biden-Harris administration. This time around she can’t explain how she would run any differently in 2028 than she did in 2024.

107 Days, her campaign book, blames everybody and everything else for her defeat, including the Biden team, racism, sexism and only having 107 days in which to figure out who she was.

470 days later and counting, Kamala Harris is still claiming that Biden was “competent to serve” and couldn’t explain what she would have done differently except that we have to “do better”.

The only notable difference a year later is that Kamala has taken to swearing on camera.

The 2024 version of Kamala pitched “joy” while the 2025 one has taken to saying “F__” a lot.

“Are you f_____ kidding me? This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the SNAP benefits end in just hours from now!” Kamala ranted on Jon Stewart’s podcast. “I’m not going to be distracted by, ‘Oh, does the guy have a big f_____ hammer!?’ What about those babies?”

While Kamala appeared somewhat inebriated in that podcast, this seems to be her new brand.

On her book tour for 107 Days, she screamed that “to have some level of concern and care, if not basic f____ curiosity for other people” only to have her audience break into wild hoots and applause at the F-word.

“Right. I’m just like, ‘f___ it!'” Kamala showed off on another podcast.

At a Hollywood event about ‘misinformation’, Kamala claimed that “we are living history right now” and then shouted, “these m______” are crazy.”

The old Kamala used word salads, the new Kamala uses obscenity salads. She nerves herself up, shouts an obscenity into the microphone and then starts laughing at her perceived naughtiness, like discussing a sex scene in an Oprah book club, as the audience cheers.

Adding an F___ here or there doesn’t actually make Kamala any more coherent, but it distracts the audience from the senselessness of what she’s saying. The more she swears, the less you notice the random non-swear words that she arranges into a sentence like a broken chatbot.

But the carefully calculated Fs are another symptom of her hollowness. Rather than figuring out how to talk about the issues voters care about, Kamala tinkered with her personality again.

Voters, she has been told, are angry and value authenticity, they’re drawn to outsiders, and Kamala Harris decided to give them authenticity in spades by sounding angry and throwing out occasional curses. “’Oh, does the guy have a big f_____ hammer!?’ What about those babies?”

The voters wanted authenticity, but she misheard that as obscenity.

This is what Kamala was doing during those 107 days. Rather than understanding voters, she went into a hall of mirrors, played with her hair, adjusted her personality and then brought out celebrity guests. When that personality didn’t work, she tried on another one and another one. Elections are a costume party in which she dresses the part in the hopes of getting the job. That’s why we met Kamala the prosecutor, Kamala the social justice advocate, Kamala the wine aunt and Kamala the party girl, the one person we never met and never will is the real Kamala.

And there may not be a real Kamala. While we know there is a real Obama, the one we only occasionally see peeking through the angry cracks in his studied routine, there’s every reason to think that she’s all surface, a living hall of mirrors with no self deeper than the one we see. Kamala can’t relate to voters except by shapeshifting into another ‘relatable’ version. If you don’t like Kamala 3.0, try Kamala 4.0 who drinks on camera and says “F____” sometimes.

And if that one doesn’t work, well there’s at least 1,000 more days to go until 2028.

The new F___ Kamala isn’t any more appealing than the old one, but she is tapping into the fury of her base, the Hillary base, of upper middle class liberal women who hate Trump, but have no real strong political views beyond imitating whatever is popular on their social media feeds.

They instinctively recognize that Kamala, like Hillary, is one of them, having long ago sacrificed any hope for a normal life on the altar of ambition, who also tries to keep up with a pop culture that she’s too old for and who are frustrated that their non-existent talents are never sufficiently recognized after being promoted several levels above their actual competence and usefulness.

Kamala is relatable to them, but to no one else, and to a party whose base is already sliced so microscopically thin that it hardly exists outside of a few downtowns, bedroom communities and college towns, that’s not the best strategy. The only reason that Kamala, like her old peer and rival Gavin Newsom, got anywhere, was the willingness of some very rich people in the Bay Area to fund their ambitions. But $1.5 billion later, the Bank of Kamala is permanently closed.

And so Kamala is angry. The anger is slopped all over 107 Days: a book so toxic that it made a candidate that everyone in her party already hated that much more unelectable because it revealed that she’s not really angry at Trump, but at everyone in the party who didn’t do enough for her. Kamala resents Biden, his inner circle, Obama, and just about everyone in her party.

Democrats hate their party also and that gives them a limited common ground with Kamala. It allows her to go on tour while blaming some nebulous group of insiders for not propping her up and that’s where the relatability falls apart. Dems are angry because they believe that their party didn’t fight hard enough while Kamala is angry that they didn’t pander to her hard enough.

When Kamala shouts “F____”, she’s mirroring their anger, but not the real reason for the anger, and yet she’d like to harness that anger all the way through the primaries and to the nomination.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, even more of a chameleon than Kamala, who got started in politics by watching VHS tapes of Bill Clinton speeches and adopting his mannerisms (right down to chewing his lip during times of emotion) and then adding obvious echoes of Obama and Trump into the mix for a shapeshifting goulash, has now also started trying to sound very angry.

Unusually, Gavin’s got a point.

By 2028, Dem voters will be up to a boiling pitch of fury. Every nominee will be raging, throwing out “F____”s like the vulgarity store was having a Black Friday sale and trying to mirror their rage. Kamala, Newsom, Buttigieg and AOC, their faces red, their fists clenched, their feeds emojied will bestride the stages of New Hampshire and the caucasus of Iowa and scream.

As Joe Biden, who by then may well be dead or institutionalized, once told Obama, “it’s a big F____ deal.”

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Andrew Jackson’s Precedent for Trump’s Strikes on Drug Traffickers

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 1831, President Andrew Jackson dispatched the USS Lexington to the Falkland Islands to respond to attacks on American fishing vessels in the area. The Lexington rescued the American vessels and American citizens, and took some of the locals, loosely aligned with British and other local authorities, prisoner as punishment for seizing the American ships.

Jackson did not pursue a declaration of war which, in any case, would have involved a fairly nebulous authority in Buenos Aires, or more dangerously, with London, although after having already dispatched the USS Lexington, he suggested to Congress that “they may clothe the Executive with such authority and means as they may deem necessary for providing a force adequate to the complete protection of our fellow citizens fishing and trading in those seas.”

The Falklands Incident, as it was known, 194 years ago, was one of many interventions by American forces against, as Jackson put it, “bands” linked to governments, without being part of them that were attacking, looting, smuggling (including carrying slaves) or otherwise causing injury to our national interests. President Trump’s attacks on drug trafficker boats follows almost two centuries of military interventions against non-state forces beginning with President Thomas Jefferson’s war against the Barbary pirates who attacked American ships in the name of Islam.

Presidents sometimes sought congressional approval, sometimes did not or followed a loose middle ground, as Jackson did, or relied on general congressional authorizations for protecting national interests, combating piracy and smuggling, because while declarations of war against another state required congressional approval, actions taken against non-states did not.

There have been legitimate complaints about presidents in the past going to war against nation states without congressional approval, but, especially after 9/11, this was mixed up with illegitimate objections to attacks being carried out against terrorists, guerrillas, pirates, criminals and other non-state actors which require congressional funding, but not congressional approval.

From the Barbary Wars to the campaign against pirates in the 1820s, America’s first presidents routinely dispatched the US Navy to combat threats to U.S. shipping and trade, sometimes violating the ‘territorial sovereignty’ of foreign states in the process without the need for any ‘declaration of war’ since there was no actual war being fought with any actual nation state.

The idea that the United States could not engage in military operations on the high seas against threats without a congressional declaration of war would have been completely foreign to the men who built this country, founded it as a republic and oversaw its tumultuous early decades.

Jefferson relied on the ‘Act for the Protection of Commerce of the U.S. in the Mediterranean’, which was much like the Authorization for Use of Military Force employed by Congress after 9/11 against which lefties, libertarians and other anti-Americans ceaselessly rage against.

The closest counterpart to President Trump’s long range interceptions of drug traffickers in Latin America however was the African Slave Trade Patrol carried on by the US Navy, capturing slave ships and freeing slaves. (Despite the false smears of critical race theory and the 1619 Project, the United States had begun liberating slaves not very long after its constitutional birth.)

Much of the legal work of the African Slave Trade Patrol was carried out under the Piracy Suppression Act of 1819 which, among other things, made enslavement punishable by death.

After the Civil War, smuggling slaves was supplanted by a new evil: smuggling narcotics.

By the 1880s, the drug war was underway with the interception of ships smuggling opium from China, by 1922, the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act criminalized the possession of drugs in international waters and by the 1970s, drug vessels were being tracked by planes and satellites in international waters. The original American and European smugglers were replaced by Latin American Marxist terrorist organizations like the one now ruling over Venezuela.

Or the current leadership of Colombia.

Going back over 120 years, Congressional resolutions showed a clear understanding that the drug problem was being driven by nations cultivating drug crops. In the 1920s, blame was directed at China, Iran and the British who then ruled over India. Pressuring foreign countries to stop producing drug crops and intercepting drug smugglers was standard for a hundred years.

President Trump’s strategy is a continuation of pre-existing understandings and measures while avoiding the tedious games that had characterized previous anti-drug smuggling operations at sea like the infamous search for the ‘Night Train’ or more recent efforts to intercept drug subs.

Industrialized drug smuggling operations like the one being targeted by President Trump are not just the work of individual criminals or organizations, but of state sponsored enterprises closely linked to terrorist groups and enemy nations, operating out of some of the same areas where past presidents had used military force to protect our interests for almost two centuries.

While air strikes on these drug smuggling crafts rub some liberals and libertarians the wrong way, interceptions of drug vessels had always been backed by the threat of deadly force in international waters. Trump simply cut through the pretense of cat and mouse chases with narcoterrorist organizations that had enabled drug trafficking to become a massive industry.

President Thomas Jefferson, President Andrew Jackson, President Teddy Roosevelt and some of the most hallowed presidents in our history had led the way in protecting American sailors, cargoes and interests in international waters. President Trump is following in their footsteps.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

‘Palestinian’ Statehood is America’s Longest Nation Building Project

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In the spring of ’77, President Jimmy Carter visited the town of Clinton, MA, and called for a ‘Palestinian’ state. Why did Carter choose a town of 15,000 at a town hall where most of the attendees were asking him questions about the economy to announce what would become the single longest running nation-building project in American history?

No one knows.

But almost 50 years, 7 presidents and countless billions of dollars later, there’s still no ‘Palestinian’ state. And we are still nation-building that terror state in the name of peace.

Even as America struggled through a recession, Carter traveled around insisting on the urgent need of “the Palestinians to have a homeland”. The ‘Palestinians’ repaid him by hijacking a German plane that included American passengers and holding them hostage in Somalia.

After futilely pleading with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad to come to America, Carter finally met him in Switzerland, praised him as a “moderate leader” who had demonstrated “good will” and called for a “resolution of the Palestine problem and a homeland for the Palestinians.”

Carter nodded along while Assad made multiple antisemitic statements and then acknowledged that when it came to the ‘Palestinian’ issue, “I have not studied it.”

America was dragged into 48 years of disastrous ‘Palestinian’ nation building because Carter decided to call for a ‘Palestinian’ state, by his admission, without having studied the issue.

Why did Carter call for a ‘Palestinian’ state if he hadn’t even studied the issue? A year earlier, the Soviet Union and its Muslim and Communist allies, primarily Syria, had launched a major propaganda push that climaxed in a UN resolution (preceded by a bomb being planted at the UN) calling for a ‘two-state solution’ that was vetoed by the Ford administration.

Carter, knowing nothing, but eager to distinguish his foreign policy from Ford, played up to Syria and called for a ‘Palestinian’ homeland. Even though Carter knew nothing going in, he made that failed ‘nation building’ project into his defining legacy, until he eventually embraced Hamas.

(After being forced to leave office, Carter’s ties to the Pakistani BCCI bank which was also accused of aiding ‘Palestinian’ terrorism may have played a role in his growing radicalism.)

But bad ideas, no matter how poorly thought out, never go away, they just get passed around like a leaking ball from party to party.

In his second year in office, President Ronald Reagan delivered a baffling TV address announcing the ‘Reagan peace plan’ and claiming that “the military losses of the PLO have not diminished the yearning of the Palestinian people for a just solution of their claims”.

A few days later, Reagan awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Philip Habib, a Kissinger crony, the son of Lebanese immigrants who negotiated the PLO ‘ceasefire’ that resulted in a disastrous peacekeeping mission that would cost the lives of 220 Marines.

Habib had served as a useful catspaw for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia who used him to sideline American diplomats even as the Saudis allowed him to play ‘mediator’. Much like Qatar and Hamas today, the Saudis used the PLO to gain leverage over America and Israel.

Both Israel and the PLO rejected Reagan’s peace plan, and more hawkish members of the Reagan administration opposed it, but Carter and Ford praised it in a joint op-ed. The two former presidents had become ‘friends’ after visiting Egypt and urged Reagan “to commit every political resource” to the “tiring, bewildering, and even politically dangerous” task.

Wisely, Reagan did not listen to them and stake all his political resources to create a terror state. His vice president, George H.W. Bush, however proved less wise. And in his final year in office, with Reagan fading and some staffers actively undermining him, his secretary of state announced the Shultz Initiative. “The whole history of the Middle East shows that violence — terrorism, war — just has not worked,” he claimed. “It is negotiations that work.”

The history of his proposal would prove just the opposite.

After the Saudis and other Arab Muslim states dragged the United States into the Gulf War, the first Bush administration followed up with the Madrid Conference, which for the first time had the PLO running the ‘Palestinian’ side of the negotiations.

That led to the Oslo Accords under Bill Clinton and the creation of an ‘autonomous’ territory that, much like in the original Reagan proposal, wasn’t supposed to be a state, but would be anyway.

Contrary to Secretary of State Shultz’s claims, terrorism had worked quite well. And it worked so well that Yasser Arafat and the PLO saw no reason to stop. It worked so well that Hamas realized that if it killed enough people, it would overtake the PLO and dominate it.

And that too is happening.

Half a century after Carter reacted to a UN resolution by calling for a terrorist state, terrorism is worse than ever. The on and off peace negotiations involving the United States that led the world and the region to the current state of disaster have been taking place for 37 years.

And none of it has worked.

The first Bush and Clinton administrations tried legitimizing the PLO. The second Bush administration tried democracy leading to elections that Hamas won followed by the Hamas takeover of Gaza. The Obama administration tried negotiating a ceasefire with Hamas.

11 years later, the Trump administration presided over another ceasefire with Hamas.

After flying to Israel, Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed concerns about Hamas violating the ceasefire and claimed that “the way that we’re going to get to peace is to focus on the future” and achieve a “long-term, durable peace between Israel and Gaza” while Jared Kushner insisted that “everyone believes that it is possible to create something better in Gaza.”

Vance then finished by holding out for a “miracle”.

Searching for miracles or dreams of a beautiful future is how we got into nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for that matter in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s how seven administrations and now an eighth have been suckered into the same failed nation building project in an Islamic terrorist territory that for all the fantasies, dreams and cash has never produced peace.

And never will.

What none of the administrations understood was that the root cause wasn’t territory, it was Jihad. There was never a ‘Palestinian’ people. It was a marketing term invented by the USSR to legitimize the cause of its terrorists. The only cause there is not statehood, but the destruction of Israel in order to establish an Islamic state, not only over Israel, but around the world.

After a generation of fighting these same terrorists, who killed thousands of Americans on September 11, not because of land or statehood, but to create a global Islamic caliphate, our leaders still believe that what the Islamic terrorists want is a negotiated settlement.

Even though Hamas had named its attack ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the mosque in Jerusalem, making it abundantly clear that like Al Qaeda’s war on America, motivated by the alleged provocation of American troops too close to the sanctity of Mecca and Medina, this was a religious conflict and not amenable to any negotiations, peace plans or settlements.

Before we made the catastrophic mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost us the lives of some of our best young men, we made that same mistake in the West Bank and Gaza.

And we’re still making it because we refuse to recognize the motivations of the enemy.

Nation building in the Muslim world cannot and will not work, no matter how many experts are put on the job, because the Islamic religion of the terrorists is not, as too many presidents have insisted on believing for 48 years, a mere technicality underneath which they are just like us and want the same things that we do. If that were so, peace would have been here a long time ago.

The issue is that we have very different definitions of such foundational concepts as “peace”, “nation” and “rights”, and in the Islamic lexicon these definitions fundamentally exclude a long term settlement based on any terms other than the submission of non-Muslims to Islam.

And that’s been our problem for the longest time.

George Washington, America’s first president, left with a weak hand by British pressure and Muslim piracy, initiated the ‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship’ signed by Adams which appeased by the Jihadist pirates by claiming that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.”

The appeasement proved futile. The Muslim regime did not even bother recording this plea for tolerance. And Jefferson refused to continue appeasing pirates. When he asked why the violence continued, Jefferson was told that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Jefferson went to war. Not to teach them about democracy, or plead for tolerance, or to nation build afterward, but to deal them a blow hard enough that they would stop attacking us.

In the process, Thomas Jefferson made America a force to be reckoned with.

That is the only kind of ‘nation building’ that works. Fools build up nations for our enemies. Wise leaders build up our own nation. The ‘Palestinian’ nation building project is the fool’s errand of the Carter administration, bequeathed like a curse down to 7 administrations, all of which came to believe that the only hope for the future rested in achieving the happiness of our enemies.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Jared Kushner insisted that Israel has “to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better.” That’s a foolish mission for Israel and more so for us.

As the 50th anniversary of Carter’s disastrous proposal approaches, it’s time for America to stop building nations for terrorists and start trying to build our nation for our own people once again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Dem Officials are Incentivizing Anti-ICE Violence

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

At a meeting with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Rep. Robert Garcia announced that the House Democrats on the Oversight Committee would be launching a ‘Master ICE tracker’. This follows the previous removal of ICE trackers by Apple and Facebook after the apps and sites tracking activity by immigration law enforcement personnel led to multiple violent confrontations with illegal alien activists, ugly acts of violence and at least one death so far.
These confrontations are not just the work of random extremists, but of a leftist activist base supported by top Democrats and the media which have promoted ICE trackers, distributed the contact information for groups interfering with ICE arrests and subsidized the perpetrators.

Before Carlitos Ricardos Parias, an illegal alien TikTok influencer, was arrested in an alleged car ramming assault on federal agents in Los Angeles, he had received a ‘Certificate of Appreciation’ from Councilmember Curren D. Price Jr for his “tireless efforts to safeguard our neighborhoods from illegal raids”.

Such close cooperation between illegal alien rioters and local Democrat officials first attracted national attention during what some have called ‘Newsom’s Riots’ when leftist groups funded by the governor and other top Dems set off violent confrontations in L.A.. While the riots died down once the National Guard took decisive action, the violence has continued on a smaller scale as the Parias arrest shows with local confrontations by activists backed by California Democrats.

The situation is much more blatant in Portland, Oregon, where the city council unanimously endorsed the ‘Protect Portland Initiative’. Mayor Keith Wilson declared that the move reaffirms that the city is a “proud sanctuary city in a sanctuary state” for illegal aliens. Criminals.

The resolution imposes close oversight on the Portland police to prevent any cooperation with ICE federal law enforcement and to refuse any assistance to ICE personnel, and further orders officers to challenge immigration law enforcement personnel, to ‘log’ information about ICE officers, including ‘badge numbers’ to feed into an ICE tracker, and to protect “protesters”, “medics” and “legal observers”: the latter of which are categories used by Antifa rioters.

Portland police have been recorded shielding rioters from federal law enforcement and coordinating efforts to identify ICE personnel with them. Antifa and illegal alien rioters operate with local police as their human shields in an extension of the illegal ‘sanctuary city’ concept from harboring illegal aliens citywide to providing cover for rioters during confrontations.

This is not just illegal, it is the definition of an insurrection. States and localities providing tactical support and cover for militia groups and other irregulars engaged in attacks on federal personnel have historically met the legal test for being engaged in an insurrection.

California and Oregon Dems are playing a dangerous game, coming closer to a confrontation between local and federal law enforcement by drawing the police into a fight with ICE.

Local California elected officials have pressured police departments to confront ICE since this summer, they’ve urged police chiefs to interfere in arrests and demand identification from federal immigration law enforcement in order to pass on that information to leftist groups who then target those officers personally. They’re passing unenforceable laws ‘banning’ ICE personnel from wearing masks during arrests while leaving it to the police officers on the street to try and enforce them.

All of these activities have moved the status of the so-called sanctuary states and cities from passive refusals to cooperate with immigration authorities to direct confrontations, for now through radical proxies like the rioters and trackers, but that given enough incidents are likely to escalate into ‘blue’ on ‘blue’ violence. And that outcome is exactly the goal they are seeking.

Police officers are being told that their job is to ‘protect’ illegal aliens and rioters, and that federal enforcement, including the deployment of the National Guard is ‘unconstitutional’, and it will only take one or two police officers buying into this insurrectionist and secessionist rhetoric to trigger an incident on the street that begins with a physical confrontation and ends in a firefight.

That will not be a “tragic accident” or an “unfortunate incident” that Democrats and their media will blame on President Trump’s “overreach” and “militarization”, but the result of their plans.

In Portland, the scene of the worst anti-ICE violence, city officials and their local allies have worked to force immigration enforcement out through a variety of means, including zoning regulations and using a nearby housing project and its inhabitants as human shields.

A decade ago, REACH Community Development, a housing nonprofit, plunked down a housing project named Gray’s Landing across the street from where an ICE facility is now located. REACH is run by Margaret Salazar, a former member of the Biden-Harris transition team.

In an interview, Salazar has said that she supports the anti-ICE protests.

The housing project appeared there a few years after ICE leased the site of its current facility in what the New York Times fancifully describes as “a showcase for the state’s history of innovative urban design.” In reality, the ICE facility is in a generic office park across the street from a machine tool shop, right by an overpass, and in the vicinity of the kind of ugly new modernist buildings that cities slap together to attract hipsters to their slums. It’s hard to know whether Gray’s Landing set up shop there to sabotage the ICE facility or because it was cheap.

Gray’s Landing has been appealing for help from what it falsely describes as “Federal violence” and begs for support for “seniors, families, and veterans” from “violent tactics” by Federal agents. As its people know quite well, Gray’s Landing is not dealing with “clean up” costs and violence because ICE is there, but because rioters in support of illegal aliens keep attacking the facility. If there were no riots, there would be no ‘clean up’ and no “chemical agents”.

But the propaganda is a key part of the campaign to oust the ICE facility by abusing zoning regulations, overloading the facility’s ability to transport illegal alien criminals, while then hitting it with zoning violations because the criminals inside it are being detained too long according to the rioters and the police who have been turned into their accomplices to back up their claims.

Democrats and their rioter allies have manufactured a crisis to protect illegal alien criminals.

The political, regulatory, lawfare and street assaults on ICE are a multi-front war to protect a form of organized crime, human trafficking and illegal border invasion, that the Democrats disproportionately benefit from. And California and Oregon Dems are testing out strategies that will be copied by their colleagues across the country as part of a campaign of insurrection.

The anti-ICE violence is not random, it’s not extremist, it’s coming from the top down. It’s a coordinated insurrection and it should be treated like one.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Soros, Funders of Domestic Terrorism, Form 'Coalition' Against Fed Investigations

Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Soros clan, along with other family foundations of the liberal elite, Knight, MacArthur, Ford, Omidyar, and the Rockefellers, have announced that they’re teaming up to fight investigations by the Justice Department.

While Alex Soros, George’s son, bragged that he would not give in, “over my dead body”, the presidents of the MacArthur and McKnight Foundations have declared that everyone needs to dust off their “crisis plans” and put their “legal teams on speed dial” ahead of a crackdown.

What are they afraid of?

The Unite in Advance coalition was formed so quickly by the big liberal grant making groups funding radicalism to form a ‘united front’ that it didn’t even have the time to build a site.

While Unite in Advance’s joint letter mentions the Charlie Kirk assassination and subsequent investigations of Antifa and other radical groups, an initial version of this ‘unity’ push had come out back in April with over 700 leftist groups, led by the MacArthur Foundation and, despite the claims of ‘non-violence’ included signatories like the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, where a key figure supported Hezbollah, the Soros network, which has provided money to extremist and terrorist front groups, and BLM funders like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The latest incarnation of what the radical leftist funders are billing as the ‘Freedom to Give’ complains that they are being portrayed as “contributing to those acts of violence” and accuses unnamed figures, seemingly conservatives and the Trump administration, of plotting to “silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving.”

After decades of trying to censor, ‘debank’ and ban conservative groups, the funders of these efforts are suddenly hailing a “freedom to give” when the investigation risks turning their way.

It’s nice that the Knight Foundation, a major SPLC donor, and which also provided millions to fund ‘disinformation’ research which was used to deplatform and silence opposing groups, has suddenly come around to believing in the value of free speech. But only when it’s their speech.

But speech, on either side, isn’t a crime. Funding domestic terrorism however is.

The frantic calls for unity, the 700+ signatories of the April letter and the 200 plus and counting foundations that have signed on to the ‘Unite in Advance’ letter are rightly worried about their legal exposure to funding foreign and domestic terrorist groups, rioters and others engaged in criminal activities that, as Freedom Center Investigates has shown over the years, violates their nonprofit status.

Take the Climate Emergency Fund, a 501(c)(3), funding some of the environmental vandalism in America and around the world, which received a founding grant from the Aileen Getty Foundation. The Getty Foundation bragged about “Greta Thunberg and disruptive groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion” which vandalized art masterpieces around the world.

Then there was the financial backing for the BLM movement from big nonprofit players like the Ford Foundation and W.K. Kellogg. And there’s the Soros backing for groups involved in the campus pro-Hamas riots and the more recent anti-ICE riots. Even the legal ‘non-violent’ No Kings protests can fall afoul of the tax-exempt nonprofit status of an organization depending on how they are being conducted.

Free speech is sacrosanct, but that doesn’t cover burning down neighborhoods, assaulting police officers, attacking Jewish students on campus or vandalizing art museums. Nor, for that matter, does it cover blocking roadways, shutting down Congress and other illegal activities that have been billed as ‘civil disobedience’ but that serve as grounds for loss of tax-exempt status.

The big lefty foundations assumed that they could not and would not be held accountable. Now they’re panicking because the Trump administration is moving to finally impose accountability.

The billionaire funders of leftist hate and violence have taken to pretending that they’re “charitable giving organizations” that contribute to “communities”, helping “new parents and elders, veterans and school children, hospitals and libraries.”

The reality is that the vast majority of their ‘giving’ is political.

You don’t go to George Soros if you’re hungry. The Open Society Foundations describe giving grants to “movements, coalitions, networks, collectives and even informal groups”.

Not soup kitchens.

The MacArthur Foundation lists categories such as ‘climate solutions’ and ‘criminal justice’. The first signatory to the Unite in Advance letter is the Action for Transformation Fund which announced that it’s “moving resources to trans-led organizing”.

Other signatories include the Foundation for Systemic Change that works to “highlight ongoing economic, political, social, racial, ethnic, and environmental inequities”, the Fund for Nonviolence, which ironically helped unleash a crime wave, and iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility, which focuses on ‘systemic racism’.

None of this is charity, it’s leftist political organizing, and the refusal by the signatories to come out and say so, or to hide behind smaller local nonprofits, is dishonest and shameful.

If these big foundations had been funding soup kitchens, hospitals and libraries, rather than political organizing and radical violence, they wouldn’t need to preemptively form a ‘Unite in Advance’ front. And the heads of the MacArthur and McKnight foundations wouldn’t be urging foundations to “stand in solidarity”, organizing for mutual defense against “threats”.

They’re not afraid of being busted for feeding the poor, but for feeding violence and hate.

Now the groups that tried to shut down their political opponents are rallying to the Constitution and the First Amendment, things they never believed in and had worked to destroy, but suddenly rediscovered just in time to become born-again patriots and lovers of freedom.

But no one is buying it.

When these leftist groups had the chance, they tried to eliminate the political opposition. Now they’re terrified of having the actual laws, not imaginary laws about ‘disinformation’, but actual tax code regulations and domestic terrorism laws, being enforced against their activities.

And wouldn’t that be a shame.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

The Fall of a Black Lives Matter ‘Thugologist’

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

When the Feds finally raided Cedric Dean’s mansion, out front were the words “Thug Mansion” and “Black Lives Matter”.

Inside the homes of the expert ‘Thugologist’ in North Carolina were the fruits of his hard work from allegedly defrauding Medicaid of millions and some ruder types speculate that the author of ‘How To Stop Your Children From Going To Prison’ may soon need a new chapter.

But the BLM adjacent activist has had a lot of chapters in his life that began when he was sent to prison for armed robbery at 16, then locked away for 105 years on charges of operating a crack ring until he was freed by pro-crime sentencing reforms that went easy on crack dealers.

But even while in prison, Dean had invented first ‘Deanism’, which promised to cure criminals, and ‘Thugology’, which claimed that being a thug was a medical condition. Relaying messages to be posted on Facebook from prison, Dean claimed that “we have available thugologists from every region of the country” who were “reformed federal prisoners who sincerely want to make amends” and are ready to “facilitate requests from parents and caregivers” of the thugs.

The NAACP even appointed him as the Executive Director of NAACP Prison Branch 5135.

“Sane Thug Therapy” was hailed as the solution for teaching thugs to “control their misguided thoughts” even while Dean denounced police for shooting criminals, complaining, “BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER” to them. He published a book titled ‘Thugology’ and was hailed as an un-thuggish model prisoner and utterly reformed from his former thugological practices.

Reformed enough to jettison his ‘life without the possibility of parole’ sentence so that he could “devote himself full-time helping thugs and goons understand the forces behind their thuggery.”

Dean was out in 2018. Next year, Rep. Alma Adams invited him as her guest to President Trump’s State of the Union address.to celebrate the ‘First Step Act’ and its release of criminals. Dean was working to help criminals reform and he told a reporter that “people can change.”

Soon he was billing himself as a “nationally recognized behavioral health expert”, “agitator”, a “violence interrupter and peacekeeper”, a minister, a “social justice expert”, an “entrepreneur”, a “community leader”, a “reentry expert”, a “motivational speaker”, an “educator” and virtually anything you can think of including an advocate for the homeless.

Also he appeared at anti-police protest rallies, recorded a rap video in a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt with a black power fist, complained about “racial micro aggressions” and ran for city council while billing himself as a “Dedicated Democrat”.

But, like so many dedicated Dems, it’s “helping people” that got Cedric Dean in trouble.

Among the many organizations Dean created was the HELP Program: a supposed homeless shelter. He’s now accused of soliciting Medicaid ID numbers from people at homeless shelters and camps and using those to run up millions in charges for services that were never provided.

A few weeks after HELP took over a shelter, a woman and her 1-year-old were found dead. Dean claimed however that they had already been dead when he got there. Residents complained that Dean was pressuring them to leave and one confrontation ended in his arrest. Another hotel was shut down by a fire marshall after an inspection found “open electrical boxes and wire splices”, no smoke alarms or fire extinguishers and a “burn barrel” in the backyard.

Cedric Dean Holdings billed $14.5 million in services which, according to the government’s allegations, were “exorbitant amounts for services that the conspirators could not, within the bounds of space and time, provide; and conducted billing that was 894% more than the provider that submitted the second highest number of similar claims.” But the government may not understand that “space and time” are nothing to an expertly trained ‘Thugologist’.

The government alleges that the thugologist “billed Medicaid for approximately $1 million of purportedly rendered services per month, but… did not offer any actual services.”

Assuming you don’t count expert thugology as a service.

54 services were reportedly provided to someone who was deceased which is quite an accomplishment even for the most experienced thugologist who has a PhD in gooning.

The money however allegedly went to a good cause, “vehicles, jewelry and properties”, which any self-respecting thugologist needs if he’s going to convince thugs that there’s a better way to live the thug life than shooting each other over some rock when they can just become social justice activists, start nonprofits and teach each other to stay out of prison by turning to fraud.

While billing taxpayers for millions.

The final verdict may still be out on ‘thugology’ or so much else. Their status, like that of Dean’s Yukons and his Silverado seized by the feds, may be up in the air, but the real credit for all this goes to ‘diversity champion’ Claire Rauscher. The former federal public defender represented Dean when he was sentenced to life in prison and continued to work on his case, cutting his sentence down to 30 years, then to 24 years, and then he was out and going all sorts of places.

“He’s doing remarkable things—I always knew he would,” Rauscher, who has been awarded the title of Diversity Champion, gushed. “I’m really proud of Cedric.”

Who wouldn’t be?

The good news for Dean and Rauscher is that the diversity champion is now practicing in the area of ‘white collar crime’ and Medicaid is not a ‘thug’ crime, but a white collar crime.

Why break up the beautiful partnership between a thugologist and a diversity champion?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Mamdani Will Unleash Violence Against Women

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

There have been over 1,600 rapes, 2,000 sexual assaults with penetration and over 4,300 sex crimes as part of a staggering wave of assaults so far this year in New York City.

Total rapes were up 42% in just the past week, and as an exclusive FPM+ report titled ‘New Rape City’ revealed, are up as high as 300% in some parts of the city. And it’s getting worse.

In the middle of this shocking wave of sexual assaults, Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate currently ahead in the mayoral election, has offered proposals tailor-made to sex offenders.

Critics had already warned that Mamdani’s pro-crime proposals, including having social workers rather than cops respond to domestic violence calls, will enable further violence against women.

Mamdani’s proposal to free half of the criminals being held at Riker’s Island that called for exempting from prison those sex predators charged with sexual misconduct, forcible touching, as well as sexual abuse in the second and third degrees, and early release for sex abusers.

Additional details in the Mamdani endorsed proposals sought to release larger numbers of violent felons including rapists to pour fuel on the city’s already critical sexual assault crisis.

Why does Zohran Mamdani want to enable rapists, predators and domestic abusers?

Even in politics, Zohran Mamdani has a history of relationships with sex predators including those who prey on minors. In 2021, Mamdani hailed Matthew Thomas, a Democratic Socialists of America member who served as his Communications Director, who six years earlier had been charged for “sexual solicitation of a child” alongside a deputy to Joe Biden’s son.

Mamdani tweeted that Thomas “was a big part of why we won.”

And long before he ran for public office, Mamdani told a revealing story about the protests against the Muslim Brotherhood terror regime in Egypt. “Many women at the protest, and at protests in the days ahead,” he wrote in his college paper “had to contend with the very real threat of sexual harassment and assault, especially at night” but while he considered volunteering, he decided that “the last thing Egyptians needed was a well-meaning foreigner’s assistance.” The sexual assaults were often more like gang rapes and one of the victims was Lara Logan, then a mainstream media correspondent, but Mamdani didn’t want to get involved.

While Mamdani decided he didn’t want to ‘interfere’ to protect anti-Brotherhood protesters, he described increasingly being identified by others with the Muslim Brotherhood ruling movement. The same movement that created Hamas, played a major role in Al Qaeda and dominates Islamist movements, including the ones enabling his candidacy, in the United States. It’s the same movement on whose behalf he rallied protesters after the Oct 7 attacks. Mamdani refuses to condemn Hamas, including its sexual assaults, and won’t even call on it to disarm.

Egypt has a sexual harassment rate in the high 90s and high rates of violence against women. Mamdani seems all too comfortable with enabling the growth of a similar culture here even while phrasing the transformation in the familiar terms of social justice discourse.

When Zohran Mamdani didn’t want to interfere with Muslim gang rapes in Egypt or domestic violence in New York City (a behavior that Islam mandates) and wants to free sex offenders from custody, it’s always phrased as if the perpetrators, Egyptian rapists, Muslim wife-beaters or illegal alien sex predators, are the victims of an unfair system. But what’s really unfair is that women, girls and other victims can’t count on law enforcement to protect them.

And that’s because pro-crime radicals like Mamdani always side with the perpetrators.

“A key reason we have to make the bus free is that it reduces assaults on bus drivers,” Zohran Mamdani recently suggested. How would Mamdani like to reduce assaults on women?

Mamdani has failed to address New York City’s rising sexual assault crisis, but if he did, it would be invariably in the language of ‘restorative justice’ which always asks us to understand the point of view of the criminal, not the victim, whether it’s a bus driver or a rape victim.

An article in the same publication from which Mamdani garnered his proposal to free half the criminals in New York City’s most notorious prison proposed documenting the “complex relationships between crime victims and the individuals who caused them harm” and seeking “wherever possible, support reparative work such as restitution or mediation” between the victim and her attacker.

When Zohran Mamdani first ran for office, he championed “ restorative justice approaches” like these in which attackers, instead of going to prison, go to a chat session with a therapist and perhaps the victim.

At a pro-Hamas rally, Zohran Mamdani quoted Mariame Kaba. As he does so often. Kaba is known as the “godmother of police defunding” who wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” and proposed getting rid of prisons entirely.

As New York City suffers under a wave of sexual assaults, the personal experience of applying restorative justice to rape by the activist whom Mamdani cites almost more than any other is instructive as to what the women and girls of the city could expect under his idea of justice.

When a community organizer in a BLM-style group assaulted a sexual assault educator after telling her that “sexual violence prevention was something he was really passionate about”, Mariame Kaba was brought in to lead a “restorative process” to show how it would work.

And predictably the rapist went on raping.

“In the coming months and years after our process ended, other people came forward to share their own stories of sexual harm involving Malcolm,” Kaba admitted.

“After a year and a half long accountability process, Malcolm made the choice to continue raping Black women,” his victim complained. “The process had many goals, but the main hope was that at the very least Malcolm wouldn’t rape anyone else.”

But that’s how ‘restorative justice’ works. Or doesn’t. Depending on your point of view.

New York City, already suffering under a wave of sexual assaults due to pro-crime legislation which frees sex offenders to continue offending, would see the situation worsen a good deal.

And while women and girls are the leading targets, they would not be the only ones.

Mohammed Azeem called a man on a Manhattan subway train “cute” before sexually assaulting him. The obese Muslim predator taunted police and reporters as he was taken away. He had been previously charged with another form of sexual misconduct on public transportation.

Mohammed is currently being held at Riker’s Island on charges of rape and sexual abuse, but if Mamdani has his way, he may soon be free.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.