The Social World

Category: Politics

  • Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

    Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

    The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be “the end of the world”) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: “Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for” – or as I wrote here: “How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?”

    We get more set in our ways as we get older, though, so it’s unlikely that 82-year-old Robert De Niro will see the light and stop making a fool of himself over politics in general – and the Potus in particular – any time soon. He’s directed judgments such as “evil” and statements like “I can’t wait to see him in jail” at Donald Trump for more than a decade now; also deranged declamations such as: “He has no empathy. I don’t know where or what he is, but he’s an alien. It’s something deeply psychological in him, he wants to hurt people. He wants to hurt this country.” Not just the country but New York City specifically, for some reason: even though he grew up there, apparently enjoyed a swinging single life there and has lots of property there, “Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country and eventually he could destroy the world.”

    As far as De Niro is concerned, no plans are too sinister to ascribe to Trump, who’s just three years his junior at 79. “We cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House… we’ve had two and a half centuries of democracy… we fought in two world wars to preserve it. Now we have a would-be king who wants to take it away. King Donald the First. Fuck that. We’re rising up again… we’re all in this together, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

    This almost parasexual-seeming obsession goes back a long way, hilariously even to the 2016 incident during which De Niro said he wanted to “punch” the Republican presidential nominee “in the face”– in what was supposed to be a nonpartisan video encouraging people to vote. The excitable mummer added as an afterthought: “He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. He’s a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, doesn’t pay his taxes. He’s an idiot.” Come on, Bob, tell us what you really think!

    But is there more to this than the standard Trump Derangement Syndrome that the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell have displayed? Recent developments – in Manchester, England, of all the unlikely flash-points for this very American stand-off – might intriguingly suggest that it stems just as much from the envy of one mega-rich property developer for an even more successful one as it does from politics. De Niro’s business interests (while still holding on to the idea of himself as some sort of integrity laden “artiste”) are extraordinary, even in a profession in which Johnny Depp could spend $2 million a month – much of it on wine and yachts – and still portray himself as a rebel outsider.

    De Niro is thought to be worth around $500 million; with properties around Manhattan, he also has a 78-acre estate in Gardiner, New York, which serves as his primary residence. Since 1990, he has owned or co-owned the Tribeca Grill restaurant (which closed this year) and the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca, and has business interests in around 50 Nobu restaurants and 19 Nobu hotels. He is a stakeholder in Paradise Found Nobu Resort, a company building a hyper-luxury $250 million destination on the island of Barbuda, due to be completed next year. And now we in England are privileged to have him bless our own excellent city of Manchester with his benevolence.

    Last week De Niro took a whistlestop tour to this splendid northern powerhouse to promote the launch of the “Nobu Tower,” a 76-story edifice which aims to be the highest in the UK outside of London, comprising a 160-bedroom Nobu hotel, Nobu restaurant and 452 extremely expensive apartments. Looking somewhat baffled – was this Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester, Maryland or Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts? – he admitted that he “did not know much” about this rainier Manchester but has seen enough from his smoked glass car window to sense the “real character and creative passion” there. Furthermore, he claimed to be “proud to be part” of the “creative, passionate and strong” city and promised recklessly: “I look forward to coming back when it’s finished, if not before. I plan to be around… I think it will take six years so I will make sure I am around.” So far, so insultingly clichéd. But it was when he spoke the following words that he sounded very much like a certain other builder of fancy towers: “I haven’t seen the city yet but I’d like to come back. Everyone is very nice, we’re having a very nice time.”

    It could be Trump talking. Which got me thinking of the other similarities between them. De Niro has been married only twice to Trump’s thrice, but has seven children to Trump’s five, the latest of which he became a proud daddy to at a whopping 79, with his girlfriend Tiffany Chen being some 35 years younger than him. (The much-trumpeted difference between Trump and Melania is 24 years.) De Niro’s attitude to women can be somewhat less than respectful, as seen a few years back when his company had to pay more than a million dollars to his former assistant after a nasty court case over claims of “gender discrimination and retaliation.”

    In an amusing echo of the time he came out with a string of anti-Trump abuse while simply urging people to vote: “In two days on the witness stand, De Niro conceded he had occasionally berated her and raised his voice in her presence, but said that he ‘was never abusive, ever’. But in a dramatic outburst, he looked directly at her and shouted ‘Shame on you!’ across the courtroom.” When it comes to over-indulged man-babies with minimal self-control, De Niro totally outdoes Trump.

    In his strange obsession with Trump, and in De Niro’s own turbocharged greed (most of us agree that those who mistreat waiting staff are the lowest of the low; in 2009 Nobu paid $2.5 million to hundreds of workers who brought a court case claiming that their tips had been pilfered by management), we see a prime example of a man for whom chasing the almighty dollar has become far more of an obsession for him than it is for his nemesis. It is what they have in common that makes the actor hate the politician so and which has led to the hysterical “othering”: “He has littered our city with monuments to his ego,” said De Niro, now preparing to leave an indelible mark on beautiful Manchester, a city he had never seen. 

    It’s ironic that the supposedly righteous fury of the Hollywood Red Brigade is far more the envy of the multimillionaire for the billionaire than any sort of desire for social justice on behalf of the poor, who they pretty much view as irretrievable Deplorables. It’s amusing that the richest and most privileged public figures of our time are those most subject to the politics of envy – and in De Niro’s attacks on Trump, we see this in its most heightened and hilarious form.

  • Why Trump and Israel differ on Turkey’s involvement in Gaza

    Why Trump and Israel differ on Turkey’s involvement in Gaza

    As the Gaza ceasefire struggles into its second month, a significant difference between the position of Israel and that of its chief ally, the United States, on the way forward is emerging. This difference reflects broader gaps in perception in Jerusalem and Washington regarding the nature and motivations of the current forces engaged in the Middle East. The subject of that difference is Turkey. 

    The Turks have expressed a desire to play a role in the “international stabilization force” (ISF), which, according to President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, is supposed to take over ground security control of Gaza from the IDF (and Hamas) in the framework of the plan’s implementation. Ankara appears to have played a significant role in securing the 1October 10 ceasefire between Israel and the Gaza Islamists. Now, Turkey wants a major role in future arrangements on the ground in Gaza, in both the military and civilian sectors.  

    Israel is absolutely opposed to any Turkish role in future security arrangements in Gaza. Jerusalem appears to grudgingly accept Turkish civil involvement. Here also, however, given the background and orientation of the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Turkish IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, which is currently engaged in relief work in the Strip, there is extreme suspicion in Jerusalem. The IHH was the sponsor of the 2010 “flotilla” to Gaza, in which a number of Islamist activists and their allies sought unsuccessfully to break Israel’s naval blockade on the territory. But while a Turkish civil role is probably unavoidable, Israel draws the line at a Turkish troop presence. 

    This is because Israel identifies Turkey in its current form as something very close to an enemy state. The reasons aren’t mysterious. Jerusalem has alleged that Ankara allows Hamas to maintain a large office in Istanbul, from which they claim the organization has planned both military and terror activities and political and media campaigns.  

    Israel has also claimed that Turkey facilitates the unimpeded travel of Hamas officials across the Middle East by supplying them with Turkish passports. Turkish President Recep Tayipp Erdoğan has never condemned the massacres of October 7, 2023. Rather, the Turkish leader describes Hamas as “not a terrorist organization, it is a liberation group, ‘mujahideen’ waging a battle to protect its lands and people.”

    The Turkish leader is somewhat less complimentary in his view of Israel’s leaders. A few days ago, Ankara issued arrest warrants for alleged “genocide” against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 36 other Israeli officials.  

    In May 2024, against the background of the Gaza war, Erdoğan announced that “relations with Israel have been severed.” Later, it became clear that he had been referring specifically to trade relations. Still, the statement reflected that the state of affairs between Jerusalem and Ankara had reached their lowest ebb.  

    The Israeli system considers that Turkey’s consistent pattern of anti-Israel activities forms part of a larger, assertive and expansive regional strategy. It fits comfortably with Turkey’s military incursions into Iraq and Syria over the last half decade, its deployment of drones and proxy fighters in Azerbaijan and Libya in support of allies’ wars, its efforts to build influence in Lebanon, the West Bank and Jerusalem, its burgeoning alliance with Qatar, and its “mavi vatan” (blue homeland) strategy in the Mediterranean, in which it seeks to lay claim to expanded exclusive economic zones (EEZs) in the eastern Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Seas.  

    In all this, Israel sees a combination of political Islam and Neo-Ottoman revanchism, exemplified by a statement by Erdogan earlier this year that Turkey’s “spiritual geography” extends to “from Syria to Gaza, From Aleppo to Tabriz, From Mosul to Jerusalem.”

    Israel suspects that Turkey wishes to make use of the ISF in Gaza as a platform by which it can reinsert Turkish troops into the Israeli-Palestinian context and use their presence in turn to leverage influence, probably through tacit cooperation with its Hamas ally.  

    The Trump administration shares little or none of Israel’s perception of Turkey. Rather, it sees Ankara as a strong, stable and welcome partner, able and willing to play an important role in securing the region. President Trump describes Erdoğan as a “great leader.” The White House has rushed to embrace the new Sunni Islamist president of Syria. As Trump has noted, the victory of Ahmed al-Sharaa and his rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the Syrian civil war was equally an achievement for Turkey, which created the conditions for the Sunni Islamist fighters to prepare before they marched on Damascus late last year.  

    The administration appears to have taken Turkey as a kind of guide on regional matters, accepting the notion that Turkish power can guarantee Syria and continue to prevent an ISIS resurgence. In a recent briefing to the Middle East Forum think tank, Turkish researcher Sinan Ciddi also noted that, during his September visit to the White House, Erdogan committed to giving the US access to Turkey’s deposits of lithium and other critical mineral deposits in the country.  

    The combination of strong, authoritarian rule, an apparent ability to achieve goals and a willingness to make available natural resources appear to have won Trump’s favor. Turkey’s close alliance with Qatar, which similarly backs Sunni political Islam across the region, forms part of the same general orientation.  

    US Middle East envoy Tom Barrack on Thursday paid tribute to the Turkish role in Syria, describing “Turkey’s tireless role… a testament to the quiet, steadfast diplomacy that builds bridges where walls once stood.” In all this, one can detect Trump’s famously transactional view of relations with foreign powers. These are forces with power and money that can get things done. They claim to want stability. They offer potential tempting material inducements. What’s not to like?

    In this, there is a key difference between the US and its allies in Jerusalem. The view of Middle Eastern affairs diplomacy as a real estate deal so prevalent in Trump’s White House is programmed to regard such elements as politicized religion or nationalist revanchism as surely verbiage only, perhaps to be used to fire up the base, but hardly likely to motivate or direct behavior at the state level. Here is the gap in understanding. Prior to October 7, many in Israel also dismissed these elements, convinced that the shared motivation of self-interest would solidly undergird relations and that, therefore, for example, the Hamas leaders in Gaza could be bought off with money and material inducement.

    For now at least, in Israel, no one believes that any more. But that is the principle that appears to be underlying much of the current US orientation in the pivotal Middle East region. The problem is that the Middle East is notably different from the real estate world in a number of key details. Recent experience suggests that those who try to ignore this may eventually learn it through bitter experience.

  • Is South Korea bracing for a third Trump-Kim summit?

    Is South Korea bracing for a third Trump-Kim summit?

    Donald Trump’s meeting with President Xi was the standout moment of this month’s Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit in South Korea. Yet almost as much attention focused on the rumors that Trump’s gaze had turned once again to North Korea. Addressing suggestions he would meet Kim, the President told reporters, “I’d be open 100 percent. I get along very well with Kim Jong-un.” A meeting never materialized, but speculation – and tension – has only grown since. 

    Days after Trump’s departure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived as part of his own tour of Asia. In Seoul, he became the first defence secretary in nearly eight years to visit Panmunjeom, the border village within the Joint Security Area (JSA) of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). There, North and South Korean soldiers stand face to face, separated by a single line that cuts through a small blue hut – the same building where the 1953 armistice was signed and where Korean leaders last met in 2018, ahead of Trump’s first summit with Kim. 

    The visit’s symbolism was unmistakable. Panmunjeom had been closed for years after a rogue US serviceman fled across the border and only recently reopened to limited tourist groups in the weeks before Trump’s arrival. Hegseth’s trip was the first by a defense secretary since James Mattis in 2017 – a prelude, then, to Trump’s historic summits with Kim in Singapore and Hanoi. The timing has inevitably prompted speculation: could a third meeting be on the horizon?

    South Korea, too, has grown more receptive to another Trump-Kim summit – driven by two factors: a shift in domestic politics and a pragmatic reading of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

    South Korean politics has steadied after the turmoil of December 2024, when President Yoon Suk-yeol was impeached following his attempt to declare martial law. Yoon has claimed “pro-North Korean” forces were threatening democracy – a move that plunged the country into months of interim leadership. After fresh elections, President Lee Jae-myung took office in June and quickly set a new tone. Conservative governments such as those of Yoon’s People Power party (PPP) typically take a hard line on the North, boosting defense spending and rejecting inter-state cooperation. Progressive administrations, like that of Lee’s Democratic party of Korea (DPK), pursue dialogue and restraint instead. Although plans to reopen the JSA predated Lee’s victory, he made the same pledge during his failed 2022 presidential campaign.

    Lee’s presidency coincides with Trump’s second term – and with it, a US foreign policy team hawkish only really towards China. Officials such as Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, have urged allies from Europe to East Asia to shoulder more of their own defense burdens. South Korea is no exception. During his visit, Hegseth praised Lee’s commitment to boost defense spending – a pledge credited with securing US support for nuclear-powered submarines by 2030. With 25,000 American troops stationed in South Korea, Washington’s strategic priority is clear: focus those forces on the Taiwan threat, not the Korean peninsula. 

    Events moved quickly after Trump’s departure. Days later, artillery fire landed in the waters west of South Korea; soon after Hegseth’s visit, North Korea launched a short-range ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan. This drew international condemnation – though Russia defended Pyongyang’s “legitimate right” to act. Such displays are routine from the North, yet the South under Lee has taken quieter steps in the opposite direction: ordering propaganda loudspeakers that were in place across the border to be silenced, urging activists to halt leaflet drops, and reinstating a ministry for inter-Korean dialogue. The North, in turn, removed its own speakers. 

    These gestures may seem minor, but they allow Seoul to showcase goodwill while letting Pyongyang remind Washington of its potential menace. For centuries, Korea viewed itself as a ‘shrimp among whales’ – a posture that shifted only with its mid-20th century alliance with the United States. That legacy shapes today’s mixed reception for Trump: protests greeted his visit, but so did crowds waving US and South Korean flags, chanting, “we stand together.”

    Throughout 2025, nations have marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. In South Korea, those commemorations carry added meaning: the liberation from more than three decades of Japanese occupation. Yet another milestone – the 75th anniversary of the Korean War’s outbreak – passes with quieter reflection. Trump has renewed his attention on a peninsula where memories are long, but whether he meets Kim or not, Seoul seems satisfied that, for now, he still stands with them. 

  • A decade after Bataclan, France is more divided than ever

    A decade after Bataclan, France is more divided than ever

    Ten years ago on Thursday, Islamist terrorists massacred 130 people in a coordinated attack across Paris. It was the heaviest loss of life on French soil since World War Two, and those who perished – as well as the 350 who were wounded – were remembered yesterday in a series of commemorations. Emmanuel Macron visited the six sites where the terrorists struck, among them the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall, and the President inaugurated a memorial garden at Place Saint-Gervais, opposite Paris City Hall.

    According to the Élysée Palace ahead of proceedings, the day would be an opportunity for the nation “to honor the memory of those who lost their lives… and reaffirm its ongoing commitment to the fight against terrorism.” Since 2015 the DGSI have thwarted 80 Islamist terror plots but 50 attacks have been launched, 19 of which were fatal, nearly one every six months.

    The organizer of the day of remembrance is Thierry Reboul, who oversaw the opening ceremony of last year’s Paris Olympics. He said the commemorations would honor “the dead and the living, but also our culture, which was attacked that evening, with a moment of collective unity.”

    To bring France together is an admirable aim, but is it achievable? It has been tried before without success. A week after Islamists murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, schools in France held a minute’s silence in their memory. In over 200 establishments students refused to respect the silence. A similar request for silence was made in 2023, in memory of the teacher Dominique Bernard, who was fatally stabbed in the schoolyard by an Islamist. Some pupils in 350 schools chose not to comply.

    These acts of rebellion should surprise no-one. A comprehensive study published in 2021 reported that 65 percent of Muslim students in French schools consider Islamic law superior to Republican law.

    The figure wouldn’t have surprised François Hollande, who was president of the Republic in 2015. He described the assault on Paris as “an act of war.” The following year a book was published, A President should not say that, in which Hollande confided in two journalists. “It’s true that there is a problem with Islam,” he told them. “No one doubts that…we can’t continue to have migrants arriving unchecked, especially in the context of the attacks.”

    If vast numbers of migrants from Africa continue to arrive unchecked, Hollande warned, “how can we avoid partition? Because that’s what’s happening: partition.”

    Since Hollande made those observations, unchecked immigration into France has reached record levels, prompting other significant politicians to warn of partition. “Today we live side by side,” said interior minister Gerard Collomb in his resignation speech of November 2018, “but tomorrow I fear we will live face to face.”

    In the two years since Hamas attacked Israel, anti-Semitism in France has reached “alarming” levels and a recent poll disclosed that 31 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believed it acceptable to assault Jews because of the Gaza conflict.

    Synagogues have been burnt, Jews beaten up in the street and last week four pro-Palestinian protesters stormed a Paris concert hall, letting off flares and shouting threats as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra performed. 

    On Monday, a package bomb exploded in the Montlucon agency of the German financial services company, Allianz, injuring one employee. Days earlier, the Toulouse branch of the company had its windows smashed. An extreme-left group claimed responsibility for the Toulouse attack, justifying it on the grounds that Allianz insures an Israeli drone manufacturer.

    The intimidation of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra drew scant comment from far-left MPs. A minority, such as Thomas Portes of La France insoumise (LFI), celebrated the intrusion, declaring: “We must multiply these actions! We are on the right side.”

    “Islamo-Gauchisme” is now de rigueur among the far-left. Another LFI MP, Nathalie Oziol, stated earlier this year that it was wrong to blame the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020 on “a Muslim fanatic.” Rather, it was an issue of “resources, hierarchy, and how the government views national education.”

    In an op-ed in Tuesday’s Le Figaro, the academic and expert on Islamism, Gilles Kepel, expressed his fear that the Islamists were exploiting the left’s useful idiocy to win the “cultural battle.” Certainly they are winning the hearts and minds of a growing number of young French Muslims.

    The Islamist attack last week on the holiday island of Oleron overshadowed the revelation that three women aged 18, 19 and 21 were charged with plotting to bomb a concert venue “in homage to bin Laden.” This is not an isolated case. Nearly 70 percent of people arrested on suspicion of terrorism are under 21 and over half are motivated by a desire to avenge Gaza.

    There was grief, poignancy and dignity across France as millions paused to remember that horrific evening in Paris ten years ago. But there will also be delusion. Not among the people, three-quarters of whom told a recent poll that they expect more Islamist attacks in the future, but among the political elite.

    France is not united; it is divided. To deny this reality dishonors the dead and endangers the living.

  • Mini-Mamdani is (finally) new mayor of Seattle

    Mini-Mamdani is (finally) new mayor of Seattle

    Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.

    Even so, the news that 43-year-old Katie Wilson had defeated the incumbent Bruce Harrell to become Seattle’s next mayor came as something of a jolt. The result of the race was only made known on November 13, nine days after the polls closed. It took that long because Washington is one of the states where people vote exclusively by mail, and it apparently takes a week or more for the USPS to successfully convey a ballot from one side of town to the other. Each day at 4pm we were given the latest running count, at which point election officials went home again before beginning their next grueling six-hour shift the following morning, with time off for holidays and weekends. This is how we do business in our part of the world.

    For anyone not previously familiar with Mayor-elect Wilson, she’s the mini-Mamdani in these parts: against homelessness (is anyone in favor of it?), and having the police deal with ‘mental-health disturbances’, such as that occasioned by the raving lunatic who accosts you on the street; and all for something called news vouchers, which her campaign has said would extract another $9 million from Seattle taxpayers to create jobs for fifty new reporters to balance the well-known right-wing media bias in these parts. That works out at a salary of $180,000 per hack, so perhaps I should apply.

    Wilson was raised in Binghamton, New York, where her college-professor father David Sloan Wilson once wrote a book by the title of The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, and another one called Atlas Hugged, his riposte to Ayn Rand. One dimly begins to see the picture: a household steeped in the belief that human nature is essentially benign, and that all it takes is sufficient community goodwill to beat the corporate greedheads. Katie went off to read philosophy and physics at Oxford, but, displaying that whimsical spirit we may all yet come to know, chose to drop out six weeks before graduation. After that she drifted out to the west coast, married a fellow activist who supported himself by busking on the San Francisco light-rail system, and embarked with him on a Greyhound tour of the country to determine where they might start their new life together. Somehow unsurprisingly, they hit on Seattle. It’s traditionally the place where generations of the nation’s failed, felonious, or fed-up have gone to disappear, and, perhaps not coincidentally, where there hasn’t been a Republican mayor since the days of the LBJ administration.

    To make ends meet, Wilson painted boats, worked construction, and played her guitar around the Pike Place Market for spare change. A non-driver, she then started a group called the Seattle Transit Riders Union to improve services and lower fares on public transportation, paying herself a token $73,000 a year to keep the show on the road. Next it was campaigning for a payroll tax to subsidize low-income housing, one of several such initiatives to face the electorate each November. It’s a strange thing about the homelessness issue in these parts. The more politicians throw our money at the problem, the worse it gets. If you drive from my blue-collar suburb to downtown, as I do most days, it’s as if you leave a Norman Rockwell painting and abruptly enter one by Hieronymus Bosch. There’s an authentic touch of Dunkirk about the final stretch of the journey as you pass by bedraggled-looking campers hunched together around braziers or stretched out on army-surplus cots. It’s a dreadful prospect, on a number of levels, and one’s heart naturally goes out to the public-compassion zealots who display yard signs that read: ‘In this town we believe Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights are Human Rights, no Human is illegal’, and whose essential solution to the homelessness epidemic is, like our new mayor’s, for all of us to continue to spend much, much more on community-outreach services.

    We’re always told that the outcome to each election is of “existential” significance, but perhaps Katie Wilson truly did have an opportunity for change during her recent campaign. She could have argued, for instance, that devoting more taxpayers’ money to Seattle’s destitution crisis is a snake-oil remedy that shows no signs of actually solving the problem. She might have added that pressing for a higher minimum hourly wage is good as far as it goes, but that someone has to pay for this munificence, and that the hardworking Seattle resident already faces the nation’s highest chain-restaurant prices and the second-highest gas prices, behind only California. She might even have found it in her heart to note that the city currently boasts a violent crime rate of 775 per 100,000 residents, which is more than double the national average of 359, and that one possible solution to this state of affairs might be to significantly enhance the local police force, instead of further defunding it, as she’s loudly proposed in the past.

    Back in the mid-1970s, a couple of local real-estate agents paid to erect a huge billboard in downtown Seattle, in response to the city’s Boeing-led economic nosedive. ‘Will the last person to leave town turn out the lights?’ the slogan read. Fifty years later, its time may have come again.

  • The attack on the Heritage Foundation is an attack on MAGA

    It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with another attack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute. 

    I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.  

    The more the mob rages, however, the more I suspect that – to adapt a famous saying of Saul Alinsky– the issue is not the issue. It’s not really Tucker Carlson and his curious ideas about chem trails, Area 51, the baddies in World II, or the state of Israel. It’s not even Nick Fuentes, the hectoring twenty-seven-year-old anti-Semite and political performance artist whom Carlson recently treated to a long and pillow-plump interview.  

    The key that unlocks the agenda in this controversy is contained in the phrase “proxy war.” The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

    This is something that John Daniel Davidson touches on in a recent column in The Federalist. “Genuine concern about anti-Semitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J.D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”

    Oh, for the days of George Bush and Mitt Romney! Can we get them back?  Only a few days ago, it was reported that Mike Pence is tanned, rested, and ready for 2028. 

    We can draw a veil over that particular farce. Rest assured, Mike Pence will not be moralizing from the White House. But what entities like The Wall Street Journal long for is a return to a Pence-like “normality” and “Conservative, Inc.” The deep state missed taking down Trump when he ran in 2016. He was supposed to be toast, but somehow he prevailed. Then the Russia Collusion delusion was supposed to destroy him but failed. Then, when the 2024 election lumbered into sight, the establishment thought it had mounted a devastating first strike against Trump and his populist agenda. Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fanny Willis, ninety-something indictments partisan judges and lawfare as far as the eye could see. Amazingly, it didn’t work.

    Now those forces are piggy-backing on the campaign against anti-Semitism to take more shots against MAGA. The ironies abound.  For one thing, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts has been close to a model citizen. You haven’t heard that in the many attacks on Roberts, but it is true. The case was well put by Victoria Coates, a Heritage scholar and national security expert, in a letter the WSJ deigned to publish on November 6 under the title “Heritage Always Stands Against Anti-Semitism.”  

    The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

    “In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel,” Coates notes, “Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant anti-Semitism it unleashed.”

    “Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

    In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat anti-Semitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing anti-Semitism poses to America’s Jews and the US… The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.”

    Coates, I should add, is the author of The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win, which I recently published at Encounter Books.  

    There is a certain grubby pleasure in identifying a candidate for ostracism and then joining the crowd in shouting an approved list of imprecations. This is especially true when an adjacent issue provides moral cover, as the charge of antisemitism does here. 

    Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the growth of anti-Semitism in a society is always a bad sign, a canary in the mine of social and political comity. The oddity in this case is that Kevin Roberts, far from approving or abetting anti-Semitism, has been exemplary in attacking it. 

  • How much did Trump really know about Epstein?

    How much did Trump really know about Epstein?

    The main thing that has made the Epstein files seem politically (as opposed to morally) significant is that Donald Trump remains obsessed with preventing them from seeing the light of day. He thus devoted much of Wednesday to importuning Republicans such as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert not to back their release. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican,” Trump declared, “would fall into that trap.”

    But senior Republicans, as Politico reported, are expecting mass vote defections in the coming week as legislators prepare to vote for a disclosure bill sponsored by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says that releasing the files is “not only the right thing to do for the victims but it’s also the right thing to do for the country.” While the current batch of emails that are being released comes from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, the treasure trove rests in the Department of Justice, where Trump already had hundreds of government agents pore over them for mentions of his name.

    For now, the emails that are being released are already further tarring the President. Others are implicated as well. According to former Time magazine correspondent Nina Burleigh: “There is amazing stuff in those emails. Jared Kushner is in there quite a bit. A lot of high profile, powerful people are not having a good night. You can see how enmeshed Jeffrey Epstein is in the power structures here and abroad.”

    If the House overwhelmingly passes the bill to force the release of the Epstein files, then the Senate will face severe pressure to pass it as well. Trump would almost surely veto it. But vetoing the bill would be tantamount to an admission of guilt that might look worse than anything that’s actually in the files. Had Trump simply released the files at the outset of his new presidential term, he wouldn’t be in this predicament.

    So far, the emails that have been released are suggestive but not dispositive. In one email Epstein observes, “I know how dirty Donald is.” Presumably, he was not alluding to Trump’s personal hygiene. In another he wrote, “I have met some very bad people. None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.” Worse: “Of course he knew about the girls.”

    The surprising thing, of course, would be if the President had not known about Epstein’s child sex ring. Trump was spending oodles of time with Epstein, who was his best, maybe only, buddy. As late as 2017, he was apparently celebrating Thanksgiving together with Epstein. Put bluntly, the two had a bromance going. To believe that he would have been unaware of Epstein’s principal preoccupation stretches credulity.

    White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that these stories are all a manufactured attempt to divert attention from the weighty affairs of government that Trump is focused on addressing. “These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments,” she said, “and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”

    Trump, a tabloid president, as Sam Tanenhaus once put it, has repeatedly been dogged by sexual scandals. But this one goes beyond mere prurience. Russia and Israel all figure in the files. Whether the documents will do more than further singe the President’s already equivocal reputation is an open question. If nothing else, Trump’s frantic behavior suggests that they will.

  • 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 new Epstein Files are no smoking gun

    The new Epstein Files are no smoking gun

    The House Oversight Committee released some Jeffrey Epstein emails this morning, and, sure enough, Donald Trump is in the Epstein Files. Like a malignant ghost that haunts the President’s dreams, Epstein has risen from the great beyond to point his bony finger at Donald Trump, saying, “it was you all along.” Or has he?

    In an April 2, 2011 message to his associate and fixer Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.” Then, the word VICTIM appears in a black box, followed by “he has never once been mentioned. police chief, etc. im 75% there.”

    Never mind that the late financier who didn’t kill himself never seemed to use punctuation or capitals in his personal communication. This message does appear to be damning, if kind of vague. “I have been thinking about that…” Maxwell said, but what, exactly, remains unclear.

    The VICTIM in the note is Virginia Giuffre, who earlier this year said Trump had committed no improprieties for her. And The White House, naturally, has issued a blanket denial. “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including {Virginia} Giuffre,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement to the press. “These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”

    Also in play now is the Master of Whisperers, the journalist Michael Wolff, who in 2015 warned Epstein, before a Presidential campaign debate that CNN was “planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.” “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein responded.

    “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff said. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable P.R. and political currency.”

    Like the rest of you, Cockburn finds this very juicy. But he also doesn’t necessarily see these emails as some sort of smoking gun that reveals the President to be a malignant pedo.

    They’re a trickle, not a torrent, and are really more revealing of the power dynamics behind Trump’s first election than they are of any shenanigans at Mar-a-Lago or on Epstein Island.

    As Wolff told Epstein, “of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”

    “Political correctness” is now called “woke,” but that’s very prescient. “Democrats continue to carelessly cherry-pick documents to generate click-bait that is not grounded in the facts,” said a Republican on the House Oversight Committee. In last year’s interview with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, Maxwell said of Trump that she “she never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.” Angel Trump or Devil Trump? Cockburn honestly can’t guess anymore. Only the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein knows for sure.

  • The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

    The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

    Under Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation is unraveling the remarkable legacy Edwin Feulner built. Once known as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Heritage’s moral and philosophical clarity has yielded to confusion, populism and personality-driven politics. The damage to Heritage’s mission and credibility is becoming irreparable.

    Much of the recent outcry focuses on Roberts’s decision to maintain Heritage’s partnership with Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. During that exchange, Carlson ridiculed Christians who affirm the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, sneering that figures such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz were “seized by this brain virus.” He derided Christian Zionism as “heresy” and declared, “I dislike them more than anybody.” Carlson even proposed stripping US citizenship from young Americans serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

    The record is long and damning. In March 2025, Carlson hosted Qatar’s prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who defended his regime’s financial support for Hamas as a “mediation tool.” Carlson offered virtually no challenge. In February 2024, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, allowing the Russian dictator to justify his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO expansion and to describe Ukraine as “an artificial state.” Carlson listened approvingly. In July 2025, he sat down with Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, who denied nuclear ambitions and whitewashed his regime’s repression.Rather than condemn Carlson’s antisemitic tirades, Roberts chose to defend him – blaming “the globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington” for supposedly forcing conservatives to “reflexively support” Israel. He dismissed those alarmed by Carlson’s anti-Semitic rhetoric as part of a “venomous coalition.” This is not an isolated misstep. For years, Roberts has aligned Heritage with Carlson even as the broadcaster has platformed dictators, historical revisionists and antisemites hostile to American interests and values.

    Equally revealing is Roberts’s claim that he doesn’t keep up with Carlson’s content because of his sports-viewing habits – as if ignorance excused negligence. A CEO who neglected developments in his own industry would be dismissed. The Heritage board’s duty of care requires ensuring that its president is informed and aligned with the organization’s founding principles.

    This builds on other troubling decisions by Roberts threatening the reputation of the institution. Its sprawling “Project 2025” document places pro-market and interventionist ideas side by side, creating ideological confusion rather than clarity. Even more troubling, Roberts has weaponized Heritage’s “one-voice” policy to pressure fellows to remove social-media posts defending capitalism or criticizing unconstitutional executive overreach. In doing so, he has effectively “canceled” Heritage’s own scholars.

    Under Roberts, Heritage has abandoned much of the philosophical fusionism that once defined modern conservatism: the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, social conservatism and a strong national defense. Roberts’s Heritage now flirts with tariffs, industrial policy and even capital controls – positions antithetical to economic freedom. He condemned tariff critics as “globalist elites” and celebrated Trump-era protectionism as a “tool of statecraft.” That is a sharp break from the tradition that rightfully regards economic liberty as inseparable from political liberty. Roberts threatens to replace Reagan conservatism with Buchanan’s nativism, protectionism, isolationism and central planning.

    The exodus of respected experts on free trade, financial regulation and macroeconomics, international relations and first principles speaks volumes. Their departures symbolize not only a collapse of institutional expertise but the silencing of the intellectual backbone that once made Heritage formidable. Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts hired Mario Enzler, who was forced to resign as Dean of the St. Augustine Business School after the university became aware of multiple falsified academic degrees. Roberts also hired Mark Meador, a critic of both the “consumer-welfare” antitrust standard and the esteemed Judge Robert Bork who championed it.

    Roberts proudly claims he “does not take direction from members or donors.” In the corporate world, a CEO with such arrogance would face swift action from the board and shareholders. Roberts’ alliances and rhetoric have damaged Heritage’s reputation and alienated its donor base. He is using Heritage as a personal platform for ideological experimentation and personal self-aggrandizement.

    Donors have entrusted Heritage with hundreds of millions of dollars, often through endowments meant to safeguard Western civilization and the US-Israel alliance. Those intentions deserve respect, not betrayal.

    A continued institutional alliance between Heritage and Tucker Carlson normalizes the antisemitism promoted weekly on Tucker’s show. It’s for this reason leading members of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (NTFCA) publicly announced their departures from this Heritage project including Combat Antisemitism Movement, Young Jewish Conservatives, Coalition of Jewish Values, ZOA and the Israel Innovation Fund. The loss of the organization’s moral and intellectual capital under Kevin Roberts is increasingly clear.

    The Heritage Foundation once stood as a bulwark of principled conservatism by confronting Soviet tyranny, championing tax reform and deregulation, and defending the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization. Today, Kevin Roberts aligns Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. In so doing, Roberts is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building.