The Social World

Author: Neal Pollack

  • Gavin Newsom flies to UN climate summit

    Gavin Newsom flies to UN climate summit

    “We’re in Brazil,” California Gavin Newsom said. “One of our great trading partners. One of the world’s great democracies. I mean, hell, you need rare Earth minerals, this is the country we should be engaging with. Instead, middle finger with 50 percent tariffs. That’s shameful.”

    That’s certainly a point to argue, but the question is why, exactly, was Newsom in Brazil, telling the gathered at a UN climate summit that the Trump administration had “disrespected” them?

    “I’m here in the absence of leadership of Donald Trump,” he told a Sky News reporter. “He’s abdicated responsibility on a critical issue. I’m here to show up on behalf of my country. I’m here to showcase California’s leadership, dominance in the low-carbon greenco space. I’m here because it’s about more than electric power, it’s about economic power, and I’m not going to cede America’s economic leadership to China.”

    Newsom was all over the summit, meeting with Sonia Guajajara, Brazil’s minister of indigenous peoples, appearing on a panel saying that his zero-emissions vehicle mandate has “shifted consciousness,” and saying in regards to green energy competition from China, that “the United States of America is dumb as we wanna be on this topic, but the state of California is not.” He also blamed the Los Angeles wildfires on climate change, even though authorities recently arrested an arson suspect in connection with the Palisades Fire.

    As he usually does, Newsom got the White House’s attention. In a statement, the press office said, “Governor Newscum flew all the way to Brazil to tout the Green New Scam, while the people of California are paying some of the highest energy prices in the country. Embarrassing! If Gavin Newscum’s support for the climate agenda was sincere, he would not be attending a climate summit that required chopping down thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest for a special purpose highway. It’s time for Newscum and other countries to drop the climate façade! President Trump will not allow the best interest of the American people to be jeopardized by the Green Energy Scam. These Green Dreams are killing other countries, but will not kill ours thanks to President Trump’s commonsense energy agenda.”

    It’s not as though Newsom’s critiques lack substance. China is dominating the green-energy space while the Trump administration provides endless carveouts for big oil. There’s also something deeply disingenuous about Newsom’s endless climate crowing, in his behavior as a self-appointed shadow President to the corners of world politics who don’t like what Trump is up to on climate and other issues. Right-wing populism and Democratic socialism may be ascendant and may garner all the headlines and headspace, but there’s still a lot of money behind Great Reset neoliberalism. Newsom is its slick-haired, alarmist American avatar, a harbinger for a set of policies that people won’t like much when they arrive at their doorsteps.

    Even though Newsom’s fire-management policies helped exacerbate an unprecedented disaster in America’s second-largest city, he still had the nerve today to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with a Brazilian territorial governor on wildfire prevention and response. “We’re identifying areas of risk, enhancing forest monitoring, and sharing research and expertise for emergency response.” Ask the people of Altadena how “enhanced forest monitoring” went for them.

    “We’re on the tip of the spear of climate change,” Newsom said. The wildfires in LA occurred “in the middle of winter,” which, mind you, can often be warm and dry and windy in Southern California. But Shadow President Newsom, preening about Brazil, doesn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

  • The depressing truth about the media and John Fetterman

    The depressing truth about the media and John Fetterman

    When Whoopi Goldberg announced on The View that Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania would appear on the show to discuss why he voted to end the government shutdown, one audience member shouted “Boo!” It was just one audience member, on The View, on a Monday morning. But the liberal mind loves performative booing.

    Fetterman appeared on the show today via split screen from Washington, DC, wearing his signature black hoodie. The man won’t dress up for any occasion, and we must admire him for that. View host Alyssa Farah Griffin, the token Republican on the panel, said:

    You were critical of this shutdown from the outset, saying it never should have happened, never should have come to this, even at times criticizing your own party. So I want to ask you why did you ultimately decide to support this agreement? And where do you stand on the growing number of Democrats who are calling for leader Schumer to step down in light of the shutdown deal?

    That was a good question, though Fetterman wisely avoided the Schumer pile-on. “I effectively kind of led the charge that it’s wrong to shut our government down and then enough of us realized that that’s just too risky and that’s too much chaotic,” he said. “When you’re confronting mass, MASS chaos, you know, I don’t think you should respond with more chaos or fight with more chaos. It’s like, no, we need to be the party of order and logic.”

    Fetterman said he felt like the shutdown was hurting more people than it was helping, which is why he’s one of the eight Democrats who pulled the plug. It was time to stop playing with people’s lives just to own Trump. “And now I refuse to weaponize the SNAP benefit for 42 million Americans,” he said, “you know, that rely on feeding themselves and their family, or making flying in America, you know, less safe, or I refuse not to pay our military and all of the unions attached to all of this and people.”

    To me, a man who has now been forced to watch The View twice in two weeks, this was the most newsworthy of Fetterman’s comments, but not the most notable. Though the shutdown is in the news, Fetterman has a book to promote, Unfettered, which is mostly about his struggles with depression. Today’s New York Times review calls the book “dour and mournful.” Fetterman dedicates it to “anyone with depression.” In it, he writes, “I didn’t deserve anything except loneliness and sadness and isolation.”

    The View showed the book’s cover, but Fetterman used this platform to not talk about himself too much. Instead, he mentioned, on Veterans Day, how 17 veterans take their own lives daily. He begged us to think about them on this, a day that many of us get off from work.

    As he writes in the book, “a defining quality of depression, the building blocks of which I had probably struggled with ever since I was a kid. My parents were 19 when I was conceived, and I have always felt it was because of me that my parents were unable to follow their own dreams. When your self-image is negative, as mine was growing up, you gravitate toward shame. You gravitate toward feeling unwanted.” That feels familiar to anyone who’s ever even suffered a mild case of the blues, much less crippling depression.

    The View was very kind to the Senator, who clearly suffers from mental illness. He had to be hospitalized after he defeated Dr. Oz for the US Senate seat because he couldn’t deal with the criticism. You can’t, on the other hand, attribute kindness to the New York Times. In her review, Jennfier Szalai criticizes Fetterman for not sufficiently denouncing Israel or ICE. The book is out there, and all criticism is fair game. But sometimes, the last thing someone suffers from melancholy wants to hear, even a prominent Democratic senator who often sides with a Republican President, is a performative “Boo!” It’s a truly depressing situation.

  • We begged Hollywood for Sydney Sweeney

    We begged Hollywood for Sydney Sweeney

    Sydney Sweeney is back in the news again, because the news keeps making the news about Sydney Sweeney. This week, it’s an interview with Sweeney by GQ, titled “Sydney Sweeney on Life at the Center of the Conversation.” It’s sparked a “wokelash” among people who hate Sydney Sweeney, meaning no one you actually want to know.

    Even though GQ is short for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and the audience is ostensibly gentlemen who like to look at Sydney Sweeney, Katherine Stoeffel, GQ’s features director, conducted the interview. Women have always and will continue to work for GQ, but Stoeffel seems to not understand what gentlemen want and like. Inside American women right now, there are two wolves. Sweeney is one of them. Stoeffel is the other.

    The woke left appears determined to paint Sweeney, a hustlingly entrepreneurial actress, as a gateway to white supremacist America. In the interview, Sweeney says that the response to her American Eagle “great jeans” ad was “surreal,” which I’m sure it was, down to the fact that President Trump, king of the culture war, decided to comment on it. That’s not enough for Stoeffel, who wants a scalp.

    “I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt like every day of my life,” says Sweeney.

    Same.

    “Jeans are uncontroversial, jeans are awesome,” Stoeffel says, with her best vocal fry, while Sweeney laughs.

    “I like your jeans,” Sweeney says.

    “You look great in your jeans,” says Stoeffel, suddenly raising hope that things might get a little steamy there in the garden. But then comes the boom.

    “I think I know how you’re going to answer this, but I’m going to ask anyway. I mean, the President tweeted about the jeans ad.”

    Sweeney is still giggling.

    “Or Truth Socialed about the jeans ad. And that just seems to me like a very crazy moment for anyone, and I wondered what that was like.”

    “It was surreal,” Sweeney says, the laughter having left her eyes.

    “It was surreal. And it would be totally human. I would feel thankful that somebody had my back in public. And conveniently, some very powerful people had my back in public.”

    The tone ventures into: are you now, Sydney Sweeney, and have you ever been, a member of the Republican party?

    “Ech,” Sweeney says.

    “I wondered if you felt that way.”

    “Mmm,” Sweeney goes, followed by a few seconds pause. “I don’t think that. It’s not like I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming every day. I’m filming Euphoria. So I’m working like 16-hour days. And I don’t really bring my phone on set. I work and then I go home and I go to sleep. So I didn’t really see a lot of it.”

    Stoeffel continues to press.

    “You’ve made a really good case for keeping your thoughts and your life separate from that work. But the risk is that, you know, there’s a chance that somebody will get some idea about what you think about certain issues.”

    At this point, you can see in Sweeney’s eyes that she truly hates this person to whom she’s committed an hour of her life.

    “Hmm,” she says, while ordering a drone strike in her mind.

    “Do you worry about that?” Stoeffel asks.

    “No,” Sweeney says.

    And yet Stoeffel doesn’t stop, and, in fact, arrives at her gotcha moment. “The criticism of the content was that, basically in this political climate, like white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority. Like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking. And since you were talking about this, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that specifically.”

    “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about,” Sweeney said, “people will hear.”

    Sydney Sweeney is what people have been begging for from Hollywood stars for decades: someone who looks good, works hard, shows up on time, stays sober, keeps their opinions basically to themselves and makes their studios gobs of money. Katherine Stoeffel is a striver from a dying media class. One of them is today’s internet main character. The other will be a main character in most of our media lives for the next 20 years. Sweeney’s next movie is about a female boxer. Anyone who’s betting on GQ over her in today’s tense exchange has chosen the wrong fighter. Today, Sydney Sweeney knocked legacy media flat.

  • The medical emergency in the Oval Office

    The medical emergency in the Oval Office

    The buzzword in politics, in the wake of the socialist takeover of New York City, is “affordability.” That was certainly on Donald Trump’s mind today during an Oval Office announcement for cheaper GLP-1s, or, as Trump called them, “fat drugs.” Trump took brief potshots at Gavin Newsom and the Obama Presidential Library, and, of course, continued to urge pregnant women not to take Tylenol. 

    Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, when Trump called him out, said he was “not yet” on GLP-1s. “Good,” Trump said, adding “CMS administrator Mehmet Oz, he doesn’t take it” – obviously, since we can all agree Dr. Oz looks great. Trump did, however, roll call the quite large White House head of communications Steven Cheung. “He’s taking it,” Trump said.

    Duly outed, Cheung later said, less troll-like than in his usual style, “It’s important to encourage others to explore options to address concerns by speaking openly and honestly about it.” 

    HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., spoke, and so did Dr. Oz, who also touted reduced costs for fertility drugs, saying he was hoping it would lead to more “Trump babies,” a phrase that could lead to lots of frightening AI meme images. The event cut short at its midpoint during remarks from David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, when an attendee fainted behind the lectern. “You OK?” Ricks asked to the person, who was obviously not OK at that moment. Dr. Oz rushed to his side. RFK Jr. rushed off stage left. A half hour or so later, the event resumed, and Trump said that the man, who did not appear to be in need of GLP-1s, was, in fact, OK.

    “You saw he went down. And he’s fine. They just sent him out,” Trump said. “He’s got doctors’ care. But he’s fine.”

    Trump sat at the Resolute Desk and took what felt like 100 questions. No one takes questions like Trump. There were some fun statements about tariffs, which Trump claims have brought $21 trillion into the federal coffers. The ongoing Supreme Court tariff case is “one of the most important cases in the history of our country,” of “the eight wars I ended, I would say five or six were ended because of tariffs,” and, of course, “If I didn’t come along, our country would be destroyed right now.”

    Then it was back to the fat drugs. A reporter asked about potential side effects. Trump isn’t a doctor, but he’s friends with Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and, we presume, Dr. Drew. He said what you might expect the average Sunday afternoon football viewer to say: “I’ve heard about very little side effects in respect to these drugs. It’s all positive. And that’s usually not the case. You see these crazy commercials on television where they tell you 15 different things that can go wrong. And then they tell you to buy it.”

    True enough, Mr. President. Next, the press conference came full circle to affordability. Trump would not address repeated questions about grocery prices. But a reporter, obviously quite friendly to the administration, brought up yesterday’s Wal-Mart statement that this year’s Thanksgiving dinner will cost less than last year’s. Thank you for bringing that up, said President Trump. 

    “Our Thanksgiving meal this year will cost 25 percent less than Joe Biden’s. To me, that’s better than anything there is. That’s better than a poll. You’ve got everything included. From the trimmings from the turkey. From everything. Lotta different items. That is a big factor. And I was angry last night with the Republicans. I said, you don’t talk about this stuff. I had to rely on a question from a reporter to get that out. We should be talking about it. We had the highest inflation in the history of our country under Biden. Gas prices are close to two dollars a gallon. Under them, it was four or five. When gasoline goes down and energy goes down, everything else follows. What the Democrats do is they lie. We are the ones who’ve done great on affordability. They’ve done horribly at it. They take commercials out, ‘under Democrats you have affordability.’ It’s just the opposite. Every price is down.”

    This includes, after today’s announcement, the price of GLP-1s, which many people will need after an inexpensive Thanksgiving feast. Trump closed with this less-than-gracious thought about the retiring Nancy Pelosi:  “I thought she was an evil woman who did a poor job, who cost the country a lot in damages and in reputation.” You’d expect nothing less about Pelosi from Trump, her sworn enemy. But she’s got doctors’ care, and she’s fine. 

  • Wokeness ended my backroom Jeopardy! habit

    Wokeness ended my backroom Jeopardy! habit

    In May I got a Facebook message from a guy named Mikey Walsh, who I’d met once at a trivia night at Mister Tramps, one of the diviest dive bars in Austin, Texas. He told me he’d been running a quiz called “Buzz In Buzzed,” which was exactly like Jeopardy!. Several of the regular players had been on Jeopardy! like me, and he was looking for more contestants to play.

    “This is not a business,” he said. “It’s free to play, and there’s no prizes. It’s just nerds playing trivia for fun.” This wasn’t the kind of offer I turn down. The opportunity to play fake Jeopardy! in the back of the bar for no money? Sign me up, I said.

    A couple of weeks later, I went to Buzz In Buzzed. It had been several years since I’d been at Mister Tramps, but it was the black-walled grime-pit I remembered. Walsh set up a Jeopardy! rig in the back room, where Tramps usually throws its sparsely attended standup nights and drag queen bingo. I sat in an uncomfortable chair, buzzer in hand, at a fold-up plastic card table.

    Walsh, who works at a local sandwich shop, found himself with some extra cash. A lifelong Jeopardy! fan, he decided to use the money to buy an electronic quizzing rig, and a USB recording module so he could approximate the sounds from the game show. He rested it in a plastic crayon box.

    A $20 lifetime subscription from a service called JeopardyLabs allowed Walsh to create Jeopardy!-style games that have the same general topics and rhythms of the original. But he includes stuff you’d never see on the actual show – for example, forcing contestants to identify GIFs from Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid and answer questions about rock that’s so indie you would have had to attend the specific live show to know the answers. He throws in some old – slightly altered for copyright reasons – Final Jeopardy questions in a category he calls “Actual Hard Jeopardy! Fuck You.”

    At first, Walsh’s games were just him and regulars from Mister Tramps, mostly local mechanics having a beer after a long shift. Though Walsh was pretty good, regular scores of negative 6,000 were common. Then he posted the game on the Jeopardy! Reddit forum. Other Jeopardy! fans showed up and started playing. Suddenly the games were hard, as though NBA-quality players had started shooting hoops at the local playground. A young computer programmer appeared, lost, and decided she didn’t want to lose anymore. So she started studying, improved – and then she was doing the trouncing. Earlier this year she appeared on the TV show and easily won a game.

    I made my first appearance at back-room Jeopardy! after Memorial Day and played a game against another former contestant and also a guy who will probably be a Jeopardy! contestant one day. I absolutely dominated the proceedings until I shanked a Daily Double in the second round, putting me a little behind. And then the power went out in a massive hailstorm.

    Walsh conducted Final Jeopardy by flashlight. The answer to the question was Peep Show, the Mitchell and Webb sitcom created by Succession’s Jesse Armstrong. Somehow I missed it, even though I’ve seen every episode of Peep Show, and I lost the game. I also lost the following week. Then came my third game, where the Final Jeopardyquestion was: “In early 1976 this band from Salford, England, took its name from the sexual slavery wing mentioned in the 1953 House of Dolls.” I knew that this was Joy Division, won the game and got to pose for a smug photo.

    “I almost dumped this Final because someone told me they were triggered, but I thought, fuck it, it’s a fact,” Walsh wrote on Facebook. Fuck it indeed. I was hooked.

    Buzz In Buzzed has a distinct Austin, indie vibe about it, but it’s not an anomaly. A vast world of trivia competitions bubbles underneath the surface of ordinary life. Online leagues in a variety of formats run every day, featuring the best quizzing minds in the world. It’s a fiercely competitive world. My team, Crash Test Smarties, in the exceedingly tough and competitive Online Quiz League, includes a winner of the Jeopardy! teacher’s tournament, two three-time Jeopardy! champions (including me), an Only Connect quarterfinalist, and the 2021 winner of the UK Brain of Brains competition. Last season, we finished sixth.

    Buzz in Buzzed was fun all summer, but then, as often happens in subcultures, there was petty drama. I’ve made some of the dearest friends of my life playing trivia, but many players can be performatively woke. When answers come up at BiB that people don’t like, it’s tradition to boo loudly. Over the weeks, I’ve heard the great brains boo “Christopher Columbus,” “Pete Hegseth” and, in one egregious instance, “capitalism.” When one answer was “Houthis” I decided to boo, but no one else did.

    I went to play BiB on the day of Charlie Kirk’s murder, which was probably a mistake. One of the players said they “didn’t give a fuck.” I decided to give a little lecture, which made everyone uncomfortable. Then, later, they all loudly booed “J.K. Rowling.” I left the room with my cider in hand, thinking that these weren’t really my people after all, even though I love answering quiz questions just like they do. The next day I removed myself from the BiB Discord server and haven’t been back.

    Walsh, who prefers to keep things apolitical (though he did once hilariously refer to Dean Cain as a “piece of shit Superman actor” in a question), says there’s not a path for me returning. I miss it. It’s fun and competitive and the drinks at Tramps are cheap. Those are surely good enough reasons to overcome trivial political differences.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene auditions for The View

    Marjorie Taylor Greene auditions for The View

    Last week, in anticipation of her appearance on The View this morning (or afternoon, depending on your local listings), Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out an image of her perfect “100 A Liberty Score,” given out by Conservative Review and Blaze Media. “Nothing has changed about me, I’m 1,000,000% America ONLY,” she wrote. “Sorry I’m not sorry. I don’t obey Republican men’s demands that I, as a woman, don’t remain seen but not heard.”

    Well, there’s no chance of us not hearing Rep. Greene. As I’ve pointed out before, it rings a little hollow to cry “sexist Republican” when you a) are a Republican and b) the thoroughly Republican-dominated government includes a Justice Department and a Department of Homeland Security run by women and a female White House Chief of Staff. But there MTG was today, on The View, crying sexism. 

    MTG molded into the all-female panel very well. Whoopi Goldberg bemoaned high soybean prices and the Argentina bailout, two topics on which I’m sure she has substantial expertise. “What is going on?” she asked MTG. 

    “I don’t know,” Greene said. “I’m so America First. I feel like I live it and breathe it.” People in her district, she said, “are so tired of their hard-earned tax dollars being sent overseas to foreign wars, and foreign aid and foreign causes, while life in America just becomes more and more unaffordable.” 

    This is what she campaigned on, she said. “Everyone is saying Marjorie Taylor Greene has changed. Oh no. Nothing has changed about me.” Manufacturing in her district is crumbling, she said. Small businesses, shuttered during COVID, cannot reopen. People are suffering in Georgia, which is why it’s fortunate that their representative is in New York City chit-chatting with Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines. “I’ll do anything I can to save this country,” she said. 

    “Maybe you should become a Democrat, Marjorie,” Joy Behar said to  her, in all seriousness. 

    “I’m not a Democrat,” she said. “I think both parties have failed.” 

    “So you don’t believe in the Q-Anon conspiracies anymore?” Hostin asked her. 

    “Oh, I went over that a long time ago,” said Taylor Greene, who recently commented to Bill Maher that she thinks UFOs may actually be “fallen angels.” 

    “So you’ve changed,” Hostin said, hopefully. 

    “No, I haven’t. I was a victim – just like you were – of media lies and stuff you read on social media. You all have attacked me on this show many times.” 

    “We have.” 

    “Because of things you’ve read about me that weren’t true.”

    “Or clips we’ve seen.”

    “Or clips that took me out of context.” 

    At another moment, Behar said, “you’re slamming Republicans too much. You’re taking my job.” 

    Maybe that’s the point. Taylor Greene laughed, as unwitting victims of social media conspiracy theories are wont to do.  

    “You’re slamming Republicans a lot on topics like healthcare, and the Epstein Files,” Behar said. “I know Truman’s still your favorite president. I mean, Truman is mine.” 

    Behar was referring to Harry S. Truman, who died long before MTG was born, but the comment brought to mind a different, somewhat more contemporary Truman. The whole world is now Taylor Greene’s Truman Show. She made a lot of new friends today on that glistening set. 

    “There’s a lot of paid social media influencers,” she said, to a chorus of “mmm hmms.” 

    “And I found it very interesting that they were the MAGA accounts” – with ‘MAGA’ in air quotes – “but they were all paid, and they all attacked me when I announced I was coming to join you ladies on The View. And I think that was very weak and pathetic. But when I talk about weak Republican men, I’m pretty much talking about the leadership in the House and the Senate. They’re not getting our agenda done.” 

    There’s more than a shred of authentic critique in what Taylor Greene is saying. But we’ve all had someone ring our doorbells, trying to sell us something that we don’t want, or that we don’t need. And I’m pretty sure that today on The View, the house megaphone for clueless, entitled liberalism, MTG wasn’t trying to sell America First. The only product on offer was herself.  

  • When foreign-policy critique becomes blood libel

    When foreign-policy critique becomes blood libel

    “I’m a Christian man,” the college student at the University of Mississippi said to J.D. Vance, our future 48th (or 49th) President, during a TPUSA event attended by thousands. Uh-oh, here we go.

    “And I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something… or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign aid package to Israel… to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza.’”

    That was nothing you wouldn’t hear outside of, say, Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed, but then it got dark. The student continued, “I’m just confused why this idea has come around considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the persecution of ours.”

    Judaism doesn’t support the “persecution” of Christians. The religions share half a Bible. Christianity’s savior was a Jew until the Romans murdered him. Here we go again with a foreign-policy critique turning into a disgusting blood libel.

    The audience, trained by groypers to hate Jews since childhood, roared with approval, and J.D. Vance didn’t seem willing to anger his base. “Sometimes Israel has similar interests to the United States and sometimes they don’t,” he said, as though he were talking about Almond Joy and Mounds. But sometimes you feel like a nut, and Vance said there were “significant theological differences” between Judaism and Christianity.

    Instead of adding something like “Israel is our trusted ally and Jews do not control the United States, they are a valued part of America’s rich, diverse tapestry,” Vance said, “What I’m not OK with is any country coming before the interests of American citizens. That’s what we’re going to do… I promise you.”

    And so we come to the central problem. As on the left, there’s a significant number of people on the political right who simply hate the Jews. This week, Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, who went on and on, as he does, about how “organized Jewry” is a threat. Tucker laughed and laughed in front of the roaring river that forms the backdrop to his online life.

    In response, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, who as recently as this year called anti-semitism “evil,” refused to condemn this conversation. “We won’t start canceling our own people… that includes Tucker Carlson, who remains — and always will be — a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” He also said, “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course anti-semitism should be condemned.”

    It should be condemned, and it often is, usually by Jews who feel the walls closing in around them. My social-media feed yesterday was full of World Series chatter, see-through Sydney Sweeney dress photos and conservative Jews saying that they feel betrayed by their political compatriots. Yesterday was a day you’ll never forget, unless you weren’t paying attention. When the left hates you and the right hates you, all that remains is vigilance. American Jews should get their passports ready. And maybe sign up for some Krav Maga.

  • Trump’s Asian vacation

    Trump’s Asian vacation

    President Trump is meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever it is in Asia. Regardless of the time, the meeting will have enormous implications for the future of the US economy and for geopolitical stability. Don’t worry, Trump told his dinner companions in South Korea last night. The three-to-four-hour meeting “will lead to something that’s going to be very, very satisfactory to China and to us. I think it’s going to be a very good meeting. I look forward to it tomorrow morning when we meet.”

    The China summit will cap what’s been an absolutely delightful Asian invasion for Trump and his retinue. Trump told reporters last week that he felt incredibly lucky. And he’s grinned his way across the largest continent like the luckiest man alive, on the vacation of his dreams.

    First, he did the Trump Dance on the tarmac in Kuala Lumpur alongside beautiful, gleaming young people dressed in traditional Malaysian garb. That was so much fun that he danced on his way out of Malaysia as well. Then, it was off to Japan, where he got a nice boat trip and appeared with new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi on an aircraft carrier. “This woman is a winner,” he said as he embraced Takaichi. Later, Trump and his new “very close friend” ate American rice and American beef at Akasaka Palace, watched the Japanese-tinged World Series together, and signed baseball hats that read “JAPAN IS BACK.”

    Next came South Korea, for a state dinner that featured “Korean Flavors meet American spirit, celebrating the enduring friendship through taste.” The dishes included “a salad of shrimp, scallops and abalone tossed with autumn herbs in a classic Thousand Island dressing” (gross), and A Korean Platter of Sincerity: “Braised short ribs featuring tender Us beef complimented by chestnuts, mushrooms radish and carrot, served with steam rice and spinach soybean paste soup” (good). Trump also enjoyed Grilled deodeok with gochujang-ketchup glaze and a “Peacemakers Dessert” with gold adorned brownie and seasonal fruits served with buckwheat tea.

    This sounds like the Best Trip Ever, and Trump even skipped what we would all do if going to Asia for the first time. No Mount Fuji, Shibuya Crossing, Nintendo Museum, or Gangnam district for him. He should give his gold-adorned brownie to whoever set up his amazing itinerary, even if it was Chat GPT.

    North Korea appears to be off the table this week. The Trump Magic Peace Touch must bless Korean Unification at a later date. Trump said to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung that “You have a neighbor that hasn’t been as nice as they could be, and I think they will be. I know Kim Jong Un very well, and I think things will work out very well.”

    When Trump meets with Xi today (tomorrow), they’ll be discussing the ongoing trade war and tensions over rare-earth minerals and fentanyl production. “We have to get rid of it,” Trump said. They won’t, however, be discussing ongoing tensions between China and Taiwan. “Taiwan is Taiwan,” Trump said, which is very true. He won’t be doing the Trump Dance in Taipei on this trip, even though Taiwanese food is particularly delicious.

  • Autopen report: Biden was a puppet president

    Autopen report: Biden was a puppet president

    Yesterday the House Oversight Committee released an extraordinary 91-page document called “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion and Deception in The White House.” Based on interviews with a dozen Biden aides, the committee concluded, essentially, that Biden was a puppet President incapable of self-functioning. Biden’s advisers took “steps” to make him appear marginally Presidential. The report states:

    “These steps ranged from addressing President Biden’s makeup, clothing, schedule, the number of steps President Biden could walk or climb, the amount of time President Biden needed to read and to spend with his family,” the report states, “keeping cabinet meetings to a minimum, eliciting ‘direction’ from Hollywood on the State of the Union and other events, and using teleprompters even at small, intimate events.”

    All this is part and parcel of the Trump administration and Republican congressional majority’s efforts to erase all traces of the Biden presidency from existence. The Biden camp, as usual, claims there was nothing wrong and that Joe was sharp as a tack during his time in office. “This investigation into baseless claims has confirmed what has been clear from the start: President Biden made the decisions of his presidency,” a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. “There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, and no wrongdoing. Congressional Republicans should stop focusing on political retribution and instead work to end the government shutdown.”

    The most interesting and potentially damning elements of the Autopen Report involve Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s personal physician, who took the Fifth Amendment while testifying to the Oversight Committee earlier this year. The report calls O’Connor “a key figure in the coverup.”

    The report states, about O’Connor, “His refusal to answer questions about the execution of his duties as physician to the president – combined with testimony indicating that Dr. O’Connor may have succumbed to political pressure from the inner circle, influencing his medical decisions and aiding in the cover-up – legitimizes the public’s concerns that Dr. O’Connor was not forthright in carrying out his ultimate duties to the country.”

    Former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, currently having her head examined by the entire mainstream media over her ridiculous new memoir, refused to answer any questions about Biden’s mental faculties and said in February 2024 that Biden “passes a cognitive test every day.” This had me wondering what a “cognitive test” for a senior president might look like. Fortunately, we have Donald Trump to tell us.

    While on the plane to Asia, Trump told reporters that he’d had an MRI during his recent checkup at Walter Reed Medical Center, and that it was “perfect.” “Nobody has ever given you reports like I gave you, and if I didn’t think it was going to be good, either, I would let you know negatively,” Trump added. “I wouldn’t run, I’d do something. But the doctors said some of the best reports for the age, some of the best reports they’ve ever seen.”

    Trump also underwent an IQ test, which he said he passed with the highest possible score. That’s something that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett would never be able to do, he said.

    “Those are very hard – they’re really aptitude tests, I guess, in a certain way,” he said. “The first couple of questions are easy. A tiger, an elephant, a giraffe, you know. When you get up to about five or six, and then when you get up to 10 and 20 and 25, they couldn’t come close to answering any of those questions.”

    Crockett is 44 and AOC is in her thirties, so we have to assume they’d be able to pass the same mental aptitude test as Donald Trump and that Trump was just trolling them. Joe Biden is another story. When asked if the former president could identify a “tiger, an elephant, a giraffe,” his former staffers took the Fifth.

  • AOC and Hochul are crazy for Mamdani

    AOC and Hochul are crazy for Mamdani

    New York’s Kathy Hochul isn’t a good governor. But, like a particularly empathetic house pet, she’s finely attuned to any change in the weather. A huge crowd in a Queens stadium rallied last night for Zohran Mamdani and chanted “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” over and over again. So when Hochul said, “I hear you, I hear you,” you can be sure that she actually heard them, though today she said she thought they were saying “let’s go Bills.” Sure. Either way, she got to where she is by knowing how to back a winner. 

    The rich, meanwhile, are in the process of moving their family photos to the Palm Beach town home or shopping for McMansions in suburban Dallas. It’s obvious to all but the extremely deluded that New York is going to elect Mamdani mayor, and that he’s going to win big. “Elect Zohran,” Hochul said emphatically last night, “and we take back America!” Fat chance of that, but the Democratic Socialists are about to take control of America’s largest city.

    Any objective observer understands that the Mamdani administration will be a disaster, though the scope and contours of that disaster remain unclear. As for the tone of the vibe shift, let’s turn to Queens-representing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who bobbed back and forth onstage like a boxer. She excitedly sounded the clarion call of the people’s revolution.

    New York, she said, is “a city built by the sweat of immigrants, unionists and suffragists. From the Irish who fled famine, to the Italians who built our subways, the Jewish families who survived pogroms, the black communities who fought for every inch of freedom, the Latinos who harvest our food and care for our elders, the Asians who innovate in our labs and shops, and the indigenous peoples whose land this truly is – we are all here because New York has always been a beacon for the weary, the bold, and the unbreakable.”

    True, Italians did do a lot of labor on the subways, and I’m sure the Lenape, wherever they may now be, appreciate the land acknowledgment. The Jews who survived pogroms may soon find themselves surviving another; hopefully there’s nice housing for them in Orlando and Las Vegas. But one could also argue, as Republicans do, that New York as we know it was truly built by the likes of Robert Moses and Donald Trump. That might be AOC’s point, though. Capitalist development is exactly what she, and Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, are against.

    “We must remember,” AOC told the crowd last night, ”We are not the crazy ones, New York City. We are not the outlandish ones, New York City. They want us to think we are crazy. They gaslight us, they mock us, they call us socialists or worse. But we are sane. We are the ones seeing clearly.”

    I may be alone among my cohort but I don’t think AOC is crazy at all. If she is crazy, then she’s loco como un zorro. In fact, she’s quite clever, and knows exactly what she’s doing. For all the agitas that Mamdani (and AOC’s) New York is going to cause the building and finance class, it’s doing a service in some ways.

    As the likes of Kathy Hochul genuflect to the DSA, it’s clear that the old neoliberal Democratic party is on its final breaths. Last night’s rally was no Chuck Schumer chanting “we will win” and pounding his fists on the lectern like he’s demanding an extra pudding at the senior center. It was young, alive and done with the weak, sclerotic politics of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. At some point, progressives might find themselves turning to Mamdani and screaming, like Obi-Wan to Anakin, “you were the chosen one!!!”