When it was revealed that Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, joked in text messages about shooting a Republican lawmaker, Democrats didn’t rush to condemn him. They scolded the comments, sure. But they didn’t demand he drop out. That hesitation tells you everything about the new Democratic mindset: they don’t see this as hypocrisy. They see it as adaptation.
For years, Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump changed American politics – that he shattered the old civility and made rage fashionable. Now they’re quietly admitting that rage works. They’re not abandoning their moral high ground; they’re repaving it with something harder and sharper. In their eyes, the game changed – and if the only way to win is to play by Trump’s rules, so be it.
Trump has said and done outrageous things, no honest conservative would deny it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Democrats have grown addicted to the very aggression they once claimed to despise. They just market it differently. Republicans call it “fighting back.” Democrats call it “meeting the moment.” Either way, the temperature keeps rising – and both sides pretend they’re only reacting.
Jones’s texts weren’t vague or flippant. He name-dropped a Republican House speaker, fantasized about shooting him, and even joked about desecrating Republican graves. Then came the apology tour: “I’m embarrassed, ashamed and sorry.” But the Democratic Party’s response has been careful – too careful. Condemnation without consequence.
That’s not cowardice. It’s calculation. Democrats know the old etiquette of politics – the days of “when they go low, we go high” – died sometime around 2016. They believe their voters want fighters, not philosophers. So, as one strategist put it off the record, “you don’t disarm yourself while the other side is armed to the teeth.” In other words, the rhetoric might be ugly, but so is the world Trump built – and Democrats think they’re just learning to survive in it.
It’s a seductive logic: that moral restraint is weakness, that power justifies posture. But it’s also the same logic that Democrats once accused Republicans of using. The Jones story doesn’t just expose one man’s lapse; it exposes a cultural conversion. The party of “norms and decency” has decided those luxuries can wait until after the next election.
The most revealing part of this scandal isn’t what Jones said – it’s what Democrats didn’t say afterward. No leading Democrat has publicly called for him to step down. No one wants to be the first to demand accountability in an election season. Instead, they offer the usual script: “We reject violence in all forms.” Then they pivot to whataboutism – Trump’s language, MAGA threats, January 6 – as if pointing to the other side’s sins somehow cleanses their own.
But moral credibility doesn’t work that way. You can’t condemn the fire while holding a lighter behind your back. The Jones controversy shows how both parties have lost the ability to be embarrassed by themselves. It’s not that Democrats no longer see rhetoric as dangerous – it’s that they’ve convinced themselves it’s necessary. In this new order, politics isn’t about persuasion anymore. It’s about dominance.
Here’s where conservatives have to be careful. It’s tempting to gloat – to treat every Democratic scandal as proof of hypocrisy. But that’s not enough. The goal shouldn’t be to meet Democratic aggression with equal fury. The goal should be to model the discipline they’ve abandoned.
If Democrats are determined to sound like the revolution, conservatives must sound like civilization. Strength isn’t shouting louder; it’s refusing to let outrage define your argument. Conservatives win not by matching the moral chaos, but by outlasting it – by showing voters that reason and restraint are still forms of power.
We’re told this is just politics as usual, but it’s really a culture war over tone – over how far a person can go to prove they “care.” The louder and angrier the rhetoric, the more “authentic” it sounds to the base. But that kind of politics is self-consuming. It rewards fury, not vision. It mistakes destruction for passion.
Jay Jones may survive his scandal. But Democrats won’t survive the culture that excuses it. Once you start believing you must become what you hate to beat what you hate, you’ve already lost something more important than an election – you’ve lost the moral language that made your cause worth fighting for.
So let’s be clear: the danger isn’t that Trump made Democrats meaner. The danger is that Democrats now think meanness is a virtue. And if that’s the new rulebook of American politics, we should all be terrified at who’s keeping score.
Tag: Democrats
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The Democrat who fantasized about killing a Republican
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The Democratic establishment has fallen
For nigh on two decades in Washington, the political right has envied the ability of the left to control its ranks and silence its extremists. As Republican consultants and donors groused about the irascible “jihadi wing” of their coalition through the Tea Party and MAGA eras, the Democrats exercised control over their far-left cohort using a combination of bribery and fear.
The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media, has lost control
Given how often the pens of Washington observers hailed the masterful ability of Nancy Pelosi to herd cats, you’d think she had aspirations of transitioning from America’s best investor to the next Andrew Lloyd Webber. What was often left out of the equation was any recognition of how the fealty of the far left was achieved: through a series of gatekeeping institutions owned or funded by Democratic donors and ideologically sympathetic corporations known to the public as the media. They were the ones whose coverage could guide and determine the limits of what the party should abide, rejecting the extremes as unacceptable to the country’s voters, tolerating their fairy tales and underpants-gnome strategies to a degree of op-ed page blather – only to stomp them whenever elections got serious. There is still only one Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only exists in the public eye because she snuck up and ambushed an out of touch ten-term boomer.
It has been hard, very hard to break through the Democratic gatekeepers, who still wield power on a completely different scale than anyone on the right – but there were signs it could be done. The left’s volunteer army of socialist aspirants who were denied their hopes in 2016, 2020 and again in 2024 – when the Democratic-media complex cleared the path for Hillary, for Joe and then (shockingly) for Kamala – are finally seeing their work come to fruition. The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media which entertained extreme racial politics and environmental doomerism (so long as it didn’t hurt their bottom line) has lost control. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the experience of America’s largest and most important city.
The Democratic voters of New York rejecting a Cuomo, even one with as troubled a history as Andrew, for Zohran Mamdani, an honest-to-goodness Democratic Socialists of America member, would have been laughable under the old regime. In the run-up to his primary victory, nearly every corporate media outlet of significance spoke out against Mamdani’s brand of hammer and sickle policies – the Atlantic warned “Zohran Mamdani Won’t Make Groceries Cheaper,” CNN fretted “Do Democrats have a Zohran Mamdani problem?” and the New York Times editorial board said that, given his extreme views and lack of experience, they “do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” All for naught. The 33-year-old failed rapper, whose big idea is a network of city-run grocery stores, triumphed in the ranked-choice system.
Cuomo and the scandal-ridden incumbent Eric Adams (who eventually dropped out of the race entirely) were forced to turn to other policy positions to retain their chances. And almost as soon as Mamdani won, the Democratic establishment lost interest in his calls to “globalize the intifada” and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes the next time he came to the United Nations, and started to accentuate the positives. Condé Nast publications went full throttle with their glowingly soft coverage of the mayoral aspirant.
The New Yorker followed Mamdani’s Instagram-fueled glad-handing with fans at the US Open (“Zohran Talks Love and Deuce With New Friends”), Bon Appetit talked to him about the challenge of eating with his hands (“For Zohran Mamdani, Food Is Personal, Political, and Powerful”), and Vanity Fair gave him the cover treatment and compared him to JFK (“The Legend of ZOHRAN”).
Media concerns about Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky promises vanished overnight. Having failed to stop his rise, the party organs had a different job to fulfill: whitewashing his defects for a credulous public while reassuring themselves that things would still be OK. Kathryn Wylde, a spokesman for the largest corporations in her role as president of the Partnership for New York, said on CNBC that the city has proven resilient enough to survive bad mayors in the past. How much could those grocery stores cost taxpayers, anyway?
Yet this attitude presumes that Mamdani is a one-off, a fluke brought on by scandal-spattered opponents and the far left’s backlash against Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In reality, it’s far more likely that this energetic young socialist represents a future where the old-guard institutions of the left, including their most prominent leaders, no longer exercise determinative power over the direction of their coalition. Pelosi is no longer the cat-wrangler, and the two most powerful Democrats on paper, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, could do nothing to prevent Mamdani’s ascent – despite both being from New York. It’s possible that the last great hurrah of the Democrat-media complex was clearing the path for Kamala Harris, whose flameout was so gigantic it brought the whole system down with her.
A sign that this dynamic is potentially a permanent reality for the left is that the media outlets in question are no longer attracting the eyeballs they once did. In the past, the deployment of mass opposition to a fringe leftist by the guardians of the party’s political hopes could have worked. But the younger leftist electorate is not consuming media as their parents did. Mamdani’s rise was fueled by the massed power of TikTok, Instagram and social media combined with an existing volunteer structure built out of the city’s active DSA community.
Social media’s influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to
Combined, their influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to. Instead, the magazines and cable news shows and even the podcasts of the Obama-era establishment figures (who once bucked the party leadership with similar online fervor) are taking their lead from the trends they see dominating social media, not the other way around. That’s why you see one billionaire-owned entity after another bowing to the musings of a candidate who says “I don’t think we should have billionaires” – and in the case of some of them, donating money to fund his efforts directly. It’s the cost of staying relevant, even if it requires you to resemble the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.
A leaderless Democratic party now risks being taken over entirely by radicals who cannot be controlled or guided by any sense of a need to appeal to the mainstream. Even the great neoliberal hope of 2028, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is smart enough to see the shift. His latent campaign, which seems largely based on his ability to swear a lot, is an attempt to model the attitude of an aggressive progressive rather than the Fox News-watching Clintonian centrist he once aspired to be. The inevitable walkback of his comments that policies around trans people playing single-sex sports are “deeply unfair,” made in his first podcast interview with the late Charlie Kirk, will be something to behold. Perhaps he can make up for it by calling for government-owned franchises of the French Laundry.
What Democrats are currently experiencing is the inevitable danger of failing to incorporate and subsume the party’s extremes into a negotiated arrangement where the socialists remain content with a slim piece of the party’s agenda. But that was based on a misunderstanding: the Marxists were always going to demand control once the opportunity presented itself. They were not going to be kept down by the people who made peace with corporate powers and deployed a compliant media to maintain their hold on the reins. And the political pablum dished out by Democrats hoping for a palatable centrist – an Andy Beshear, a Josh Shapiro, a Wes Moore – will not be enough to satisfy the crew that can’t get enough of the Zohran.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.
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The sombrero memes will continue until morale improves
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is shocked, shocked, that President Taco Bowl is using memes online to mock his comportment during the government shutdown. Jeffries calls the memes, which depict Jeffries and Chuck Schumer wearing sombreros and sporting handlebar mustaches “racist” and has tough-guyed Trump to “say it to my face.”
Cockburn enjoys a good troll-meme and suddenly finds himself in a world where Republicans are the ones with a sense of humor. House Speaker Mike Johnson told “my friend Hakeem” to “just ignore it.”
“These are sideshows. People are getting caught up in – in battles over social media memes,” Johnson said in the Hill. “This is not a game. We’ve got to keep the government open for the people. I don’t know why this is so complicated.”
Johnson mentioned that Gavin Newsom, who plays the Twitter troll game on Trump’s level, depicted him as a minion from Despicable Me. “He painted me yellow with big glasses and overalls. And I thought it was hilarious. You don’t respond to it. Don’t respond to it.”
But Jeffries can’t help it, and Democrats have been complaining all day and all night about the memes on MSNBC and CNN, like big dumb pond fish who can’t resist a juicy worm. They are simpering nerds, who simply don’t understand the world in which they now reside, getting destroyed by frat pranks.
Vice President J.D. Vance, the most memed-person on X this year, thinks it’s great. “The President’s joking, and we’re having a good time,” Vance said. “You can negotiate in good faith while also poking a little bit of fun at some of the absurdities of the Democrats’ positions.” He added that the memes will stop when the Democrats help reopen the government. In other words, the sombreros will continue until morale improves.
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Why have Democrats mainstreamed a terrorist?
On September 26, the Chicago Teachers Union, representing all of the teachers in America’s second largest city, posted on X upon the death of “Assata Shakur” AKA Joanne Chesimard, that “The life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”
That would be one way to describe Shakur.
Another way to describe her would be as a woman convicted of the murder of New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, a former FBI most wanted terrorist who was broken out of jail by armed comrades and eventually escaped to Communist Cuba, where she lived under the protection of the totalitarian Communist Castro regime for the remainder of her life.
And Foerster’s murder was far from the only serious crime Shakur was charged with or accused of involvement in. In another instance, she was identified by John Powis (a politically progressive priest) as part of a group of people who robbed his church and threatened to “blow his head off” if he did not cough up $1,800 that had been earmarked for the poor from church funds.
That one of America’s largest teachers’ unions, fattened by millions of taxpayer dollars, would choose Shakur as a figure to lionize reveals much about the modern left. While the union celebrates radicalism, the most recent test scores for Chicago Public Schools show fewer than one in three students can read at grade level. Fewer than one in five can do math at grade level. Chicago does this while spending almost $20,000 per student, almost two thirds more per student than is spent in my “affluent” school district in Montana. As is so often the case with the left, radicalism goes hand-in-hand with the collapse of basic governance and competence.
There is no meaningful political differences on these questions between Democrat unions, political activists, the media and academia and many Democrat politicians. All heads of the same leftist hydra. The AP described Shakur as a “black liberation activist” on X – as if this was why she was punished rather than for her crimes. The Washington Post praised her “near mythical status” while USA Today noted her as a “potent political symbol, representing for some a valiant soldier in the war against an oppressive and racist police state.” At least three Democratic Congresswomen, none of them marginal figures, went online to praise her after her death.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley also honored Shakur both online and on X. Pressley, whose district is just 20 percent African American, represents most of Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Harvard University, the pinnacle of the elite left-wing establishment. She could make her statement fully confident in her warm reception in the hallowed halls of academia. After all, Angela Davis, an African-American radical whose guns were used by the brother of her then boyfriend to kill a judge and several others in a courthouse (landing her on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list), was eventually fully rehabilitated by the establishment, serving for decades as a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz and receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge University this year, all while declining to repudiate her radical past.
Other politicians praising Shakur included Congresswoman Yvette Clarke (head of the Congressional Black Caucus) and Summer Lee, who represents Pittsburgh in Congress. Clarke Tweeted that “If there is a single truth in the world it is that Assata died a free woman. May she rest in power and paradise for all eternity.” Clarke had no thoughts at all, of course, as to the victims of her terror campaign.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America announced “Rest in Power, Assata Shakur. The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades,” praising the “solidarity” and “loyalty” of the totalitarian Cuban regime that kept her from justice. Zohran Mamdani, the likely next mayor of New York City, is a DSA member who declined to condemn the stance when pressed by the New York Post.
What we see with the Chicago teachers is the normalization of radicalism on the American left, where there is increasingly no real and meaningful gap between the establishment and the extremists. All political movements have dangerous fringe figures, but the Democrat media, academia and political establishments have embraced some of their worst and most violent ones.
There were a few honorable exceptions, of course, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called the celebration of Shakur “shameful and depraved.” But Murphy a 68-year-old white male former investment banker, does not likely represent the future of the Democratic Party. The people celebrating Shakur do.
And that should frighten us all. -
Why the left wants you to be weak
For much of my life, fitness wasn’t optional. I was held to very specific standards and tested to confirm that I was adhering to those standards. I was a hockey player. In college, and briefly, in the minor pros. Most seasons began the same way: a searing battery of strength and conditioning tests – on-ice sprints, off-ice endurance runs, bench press, squats, pull-ups, all to termination. Scores aggregated and ranked, from first to last. Personal value was assigned to the scores. Coaches took notice. I trained accordingly and drew a portion of my self-worth from being fit.
That mindset would serve me well after school, when I joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee. I was medically discharged before commissioning, but while I was in, fitness wasn’t optional. Meeting minimums was required to stay in the program, to keep my shot at serving.
I never saw a problem with any of this. And I certainly never detected anything political about maintaining high fitness. The first inkling I had, of something shifting culturally, was during a relationship I had in my 20s. I was dating an art school graduate from Denver. She didn’t understand why I worked out every day. I was training to meet Air Force standards. But she suspected vanity. She put me in a position I’d never been in before: justifying my fitness.
That seed of fitness-skepticism I sensed in my girlfriend ten years ago caught me off guard. But it was a harbinger of a wider trend, which blossomed fully during the pandemic, entrenching itself as a bona fide leftist worldview in which fitness is held to signal vanity, privilege, ableism or even conservatism.
Where did this worldview maligning fitness come from? The inception point likely begins with the body positivity movement. The movement wasn’t without merits, promoting confidence in a wider variety of body types, suggesting that desire and worth could be attributed to those whose physiques fell beyond the parameters of Kate Moss or Arnold Schwarzenegger. But body positivity went too far, embracing obesity, an oftentimes fatal condition, and fueling the skepticism I detected in my then-girlfriend.
If body positivity was the inception point, the pandemic marked the crystallization. A line was drawn in the sand. Conservatives wanted to bullheadedly forge through Covid. Liberals meanwhile committed wholeheartedly to safetyism, policies that prioritized physical safety at all costs (social distancing, masking, vaccinations), and embraced a broader suspicion of physical risk and exertion altogether.
But the point isn’t who was right about Covid – it’s that one political tribe embraced policies that promoted physical strength while another tribe, almost reflexively, embraced policies that dwelled in physical fragility.
Perspectives towards fitness have sorted along the same ideological faultline. Conservatives embrace fitness, whereas a cultural current on the left, already suspicious of several fit cultures (soldiers, survivalists, jocks) increasingly reject fitness.
Obviously, the divide isn’t universal. The left has its yoga teachers and thru-hikers with single-digit body fat, just as the right has sedentary pre-diabetics. But when fitness is assigned political value, the left skews toward unfitness, the right toward fitness.
And that’s not to say conservatives have taken a universally admirable approach. Gym bros. CrossFit cultists. Roid ragers. The whole MMA thing. The right’s embrace of a performative, macho brand of fitness alienates large portions of the population, myself included. But when you strip away the tastelessness a core fact remains: to be fit is better than to be unfit, no matter the culture through which the fitness was attained.
On most things, reasonable people can disagree. But not fitness. It leads to lower healthcare costs, to crisis response preparedness, to national readiness. Fitness extends lives and keeps people sane. To spurn fitness is to spurn a biological imperative, something no political framework can rationalize.
Through much of human history, in most places and societies on Earth, fitness wasn’t negotiable, it was a survival mechanism. And being weak wasn’t a political position – it was a prospective death sentence. Ironically, the left suggests that fitness is a form of privilege.
But to be unfit is the privileged position, to disdain fitness is only possible when danger and physical hardship seem far away – luxuries much of the world’s population cannot relate to.
Yet, increasingly, the progressive left’s view on fitness is consistent with the progressive left’s wider worldview in which citizens are deemed too weak to do anything. Indeed, the embrace of weakness just seems to be the physical extension of a worldview in which every individual shortcoming is ascribed to an inherent and unavoidable weakness, which society at large must then accommodate. In this world view, weakness isn’t just tolerated – it’s a creed.
And in the contemporary left, helplessness itself has social value. Being perceived to be disadvantaged confers currency. Increasingly, that same logic is being applied to the physical body, whereby weakness becomes a form of virtue, while strength is treated with suspicion. The trend here is plainly self-defeating: to build a society around weakness, physical or otherwise, is to build a society to fail.
The downstream effects of embracing physical weakness are more profound than love handles or shortness of breath. People are dying. Obesity is an epidemic. The healthcare system is collapsing. Citizens are losing their resilience. Children are softening. The civilian-military gap is widening. National readiness is reduced. These are medical, cultural, and strategic failures – the root of which a portion of the leftist population has embraced.
Fitness is a biological maximization that unlocks health, wellbeing, and happiness. We can argue about tax rates, foreign policy, and gun control. But there is no rational debate over whether strength is more desirable than weakness. The idea that general fitness is a vanity project, or a conservative ideal, needs to be dismissed wholesale. Our collective aim should be to field citizens who live healthier and happier. Who require less health care. Who are resilient and who raise their children to be resilient. Who, if required, could defend the nation. These are the ideals of a functional society, north star ideals for much of human history – and they require the acceptance of fitness as a civic virtue.
I’m in my late 30s now. No hockey coaches or military recruiters yelling at me to do another pullup. The external incentives to keep pushing myself are less obvious. But I still wake up at four am to skate hard with my friends. I still sprint stairs and grind the stationary bike. I do it because I’m a better version of myself when I’m fit – not just a better hockey player but a better husband, father, and citizen. And there’s nothing political about that.
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Did Ilhan Omar marry her brother?
In as Trumpian a fashion as it gets, the president has rekindled the years-long debate: Did progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) marry her brother?
Shortly after conservative icon Charlie Kirk was assassinated in cold blood by a deranged leftist, Omar reposted a video on X that called Kirk a “reprehensible human being” who was “spewing racist dog whistles” in his “last, dying words.” Republican lawmakers saw an opportunity to censure the “Squad” member and remove her committee assignments. The motion failed by a 214-213 vote.
Nevertheless, some conservatives are demanding Omar’s denaturalization and deportation to Somalia. Denaturalization is allowed in cases of “concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.” To be clear, Omar will not be denaturalized, nor deported.
But amid Omar-gate, President Trump fumed that she was “SCUM,” derided her “Country of Somalia,” and asked, “Wasn’t she the one that married her brother in order to gain citizenship???”
The accusation is nearly a decade old, prompted in part by court filings and a trail of murkier evidence.
Public records show that Omar entered a religious marriage with a man named Ahmed Hirsi in 2002, separated in 2008, and then legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009. Elmi, a British citizen who
The marriage with Elmi ended in 2011, but they did not obtain a legal divorce until 2017. In that same period, Omar reconciled with Hirsi, had another child with him, and even filed joint tax returns with him in 2014 and 2015, despite still being legally married to her alleged brother.
In 2020, the Daily Mail quoted an old friend of Omar, Abdihakim Osman, who claimed Omar herself had described Elmi as her brother – and admitted she married him to get the papers he needed to study in the US. Osman claimed Elmi was introduced around Minneapolis as family, and that Omar told him explicitly she was helping her brother get student loans. Omar has flatly denied this, dismissing the story as “baseless,” but has refused to provide documentary evidence to settle the matter.
In 2018, one conservative outlet discovered archived Instagram posts from 2012 that appear to show Ahmed Elmi calling Ilhan Omar’s daughter his “niece.” In 2015, photos from a London trip placed Omar alongside Elmi and relatives, all appearing under the shared surname “Elmi.” But these posts are no longer available and cannot be independently verified.
The Star Tribune tried to confirm Elmi’s identity but ran into the same problem: Somali records are difficult to obtain, and Omar herself declined to clarify.
While this scavenger hunt remains incomplete, what is beyond doubt is that Omar’s life today bears little resemblance to the humble origins she once invoked.
Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu in 1982, the youngest of seven children. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a colonel in the Somali army who brought the family to a Kenyan refugee camp before they eventually resettled in Minneapolis, where Omar grew up in public housing and later entered politics.
She built her brand as the daughter of refugees, a progressive outsider weighed down by student debt – the antithesis of a silver spoon Congressman. But her most recent financial disclosure revealed a net worth as high as $30 million — a staggering increase of 3,500 percent in a single year.
The source of that fortune is her most recent husband, Tim Mynett. His venture capital firm, Rose Lake Capital, ballooned from under $1,000 in 2023 to as much as $25 million by the end of 2024. The firm’s board is stacked with powerful names, including former senator and ambassador to China Max Baucus.
Rose Lake Capital’s website once bragged about structuring “legislation” before that word was quietly removed. It now claims $60 billion in assets under management. Around the same time Rose Lake took off, Mynett’s California winery, eStCru, jumped from being worth just $50,000 to as much as $5 million. Both companies have faced lawsuits alleging fraud, which have since been settled.
The overlap with Omar’s official role is clear. After the launch of Rose Lake, Omar formed a congressional US-Africa Policy Working Group. She and Mynett have since appeared at events promoting investment in Africa – exactly the kind of opportunity Rose Lake now pursues. At face value the arrangement is indistinguishable from influence-peddling.
The same Omar who has scorned politicians for leveraging their office for gain now appears to be doing it herself, handsomely. In America, the socialists have a funny way of always cashing in.
So, back to Trump’s accusation. Did Ilhan Omar marry her brother? As it stands, it’s impossible to say one way or the other. Omar continues to deny the allegation as baseless.
What is certain is that Omar has prospered enormously in America, moving from refugee housing to the halls of Congress to a personal fortune worth tens of millions.
That story is perhaps the greater indictment. The congresswoman who speaks endlessly of justice and equity appears to have mastered the very Washington tricks she pretends to loathe. -
Kamala blames race when it suits her
When Kamala Harris sat across from Joy Behar on The View, the exchange revealed more than just political spin. Behar insisted Harris’ struggles on the campaign trail were largely about racism and sexism – that she “really lost” because of prejudice, not performance. Harris replied, “I’m not naive; race and gender do play a factor… I have never run as a woman or as a person of color. I have run because I believe I am the best to do the job.”
That answer might sound polished, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Harris has built her career on identity politics. She was polling below four percent in the Democratic primaries in 2019 – a campaign so weak it collapsed before a single vote was cast. Yet when Joe Biden pledged to select a woman as his running mate, the Democratic Party base and the media made clear that race and gender would be central factors in the choice. Harris ultimately benefited from that push for representation – her candidacy revived not because she was leading in the primaries, but because she fit the historic profile many Democrats wanted to showcase.”
Let’s be honest: without Biden’s pledge, Harris would not be vice president today. She was not propelled to the ticket because she outperformed the competition, but because the Democratic Party wanted to showcase representation. Identity was wielded as power. That’s the plain truth.
And that is what makes her The View comments so hollow. Harris cannot run on her race and gender when it benefits her – and then dismiss questions about competence by claiming she never used identity in the first place. Voters remember the reality. They saw a campaign that leaned heavily on being the “first” – first woman, first black woman, first South Asian woman – without ever answering the more pressing question: first in what vision for America?
The tired refrain from Democrats that every failed candidate was the victim of racism, sexism, or some combination of both has worn thin. Hillary Clinton blamed misogyny in 2016. Stacey Abrams has repeatedly blamed voter suppression for her gubernatorial losses. Now Joy Behar and Biden himself float racism and sexism as the reasons Harris couldn’t break through nationally. But at some point, the question must be asked: why can’t Democratic leaders admit when a candidate simply ran a poor campaign?
Harris’ 2020 run faltered not because America is irredeemably bigoted, but because she never offered voters a clear or compelling reason to support her. Her positions shifted constantly – leftward on criminal justice, back toward the middle on health care, then left again on the Green New Deal. She struggled to define herself, and voters noticed. That isn’t prejudice; that’s politics.
What makes this cycle especially insulting is the implicit message it sends to the electorate. If voters reject a candidate of color or a female candidate, Democrats too often suggest it must be because of bias. But that robs voters of agency. It tells them their decisions weren’t thoughtful or principled – just hateful. And it shields candidates like Harris from honest self-reflection about why they fail to connect.
The irony is thick. Harris’ defenders weaponize race and gender as a shield against criticism. Yet Harris herself has never hesitated to display her identity as a credential when convenient. She has used it as her elevator to higher office. When it no longer works, she suddenly insists it was never about race or gender at all. That is not only disingenuous, it is corrosive to public trust.
Black conservatives have been sounding this alarm for years. We understand that tying our worth to identity politics doesn’t elevate us – it reduces us. It reduces the black experience to a talking point, the female experience to a checkbox, and every election outcome to a morality play about prejudice. Booker T. Washington warned against leaning on grievance instead of competence. Shelby Steele has written powerfully about how white guilt sustains this very cycle. Yet Democrats remain stuck in it, because it offers them a convenient excuse for failure and a convenient tool for power.
Kamala Harris wants it both ways: to be celebrated for breaking barriers, and excused for her failures by blaming the barriers. But leadership requires something deeper. It requires being judged on results, not optics. On merit, not identity. And on vision, not victimhood.
In the end, what voters want is not complicated. They want candidates who are competent, steady, and clear about what they stand for. They want policies that keep their families safe, grow the economy, and restore trust in institutions. What they don’t want is another lecture that their skepticism of a weak candidate must be rooted in prejudice.
Kamala Harris’ rhetoric isn’t just old and tired – it’s insulting. It tells the very people she claims to represent that their only role is to cheer her identity, not to question her record. That’s not empowerment. That’s manipulation. And voters are wise to it.
If Harris truly believes she is “the best to do the job,” then let her prove it on the merits. Stop blaming racism and sexism for every political misstep. Stop reducing voters to bigots for exercising their judgment. Because at the end of the day, America deserves leaders who rise on vision, not excuses. -
How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved
A well-known writer in the 1930s – I think John Dos Passos – compared Southern California to the lower-left corner of a board that has been tipped in that direction and into which everything in the rest of the country that is not nailed down slides. In the 21st century the mental, cultural and ideological equivalent of that geographic locality is a venerable and once mighty institution, the national Democratic party, whose name is synonymous with it.
Throughout the 20th century, the party maintained a strong and consistent identity which accurately and effectively represented its constituency – an alliance that included the working classes, the labor unions, the small farmers, black people, the public educational establishment, colleges and universities, the arts and bohemia. Since, roughly speaking, Barack Obama’s first administration, it has grown steadily less identified with practical interests and concrete policies and more with feelings, attitudes, identities and states of mind, nearly all of them “progressive” or frankly revolutionary. In fact, the most bizarre have no political content or substance at all, being in essence purely existential.
Today, the Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical, the delusional, the irrational, the unchurched, the metaphysically uncentered, the unattached and childless, the anti-social, the resentful, the failures and the congenitally rebellious – all those not nailed down or secured to anything, beginning with themselves. They are the product, or rather the detritus, of an anti-traditional, aggressively secular, excessively technological, overly connected, trivialized and wholly commercialized and urbanized society divorced from nature and the direct experience of it that had been basic to human existence until a couple of hundred years ago.
I have read that the most unhappy people in America today are white, educated, upper-middle-class, liberal women, having in common so many of the characteristics enumerated above. Of course, it would be absurd to suppose that they are the sole cohort in western societies who, in their mental and emotional confusion, imagine that their misery, and that of the world, is plausibly attributable to such abstract historical bogeys as “imperialism,” “slavery,” “bourgeois capitalist society,” “religion,” “the patriarchy” and “sexism,” “men” and “white people.” In fact, were it possible to identify any single agency as the party responsible for what Sigmund Freud (in a wholly different context) called the “discontents” of modern civilization, it would be liberals and liberalism itself – though even that would be a gross historical and human generalization, never mind that liberals have been chiefly responsible for the modern tendency to think in abstract, generalized and completely ahistorical terms.
The Democratic party’s electorate, like its leadership, is heavily comprised of people who can never be happy and satisfied and who are consequently a danger to society, to the political system and to themselves. They are not, however, a majority of the voting citizens of this country; most likely, they never will be, however closely national elections in the United States continue to be run. Nonetheless, the party continues to be critically influential among the sort of people who are best positioned to amplify and extend its power through non- or anti-democratic institutions and organizations that give it a strength a good deal greater than is justified by its support among voters.
The Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical
The imbalance between popularity and power is most obvious among the western democratic nations in Great Britain, which would partially account for the recent assertion (if true) of a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph that Americans view her as being on the path to extinction. To a greater extent even than the US, the UK is ruled, not by representative government, but by lawyers, quangos, NGOs, bureaucracies and the loosely assorted cranks and fanatics whom George Orwell, in the 1930s, described in shorthand as the sandal-wearers and fruit-juice drinkers in the capital city and elsewhere. Such people, as I say, can never be happy anywhere save in the next world (in which they don’t believe), and so they will continue until the crack of doom to agitate, to organize, to demonstrate, to dream up and advocate dangerously absurd legislation, and in other ways make life miserable for the sane democratic majority they hold in contempt and despise.
On the other side of the Atlantic it is the Democratic party, not the US, that is headed for extinction unless it discovers – and quickly – the means to reimagine, redefine, repurpose and reintroduce itself for the whole of the American public. Failing that, it will go the way of the Whigs in the antebellum era, the Progressive party before the Great War and the Liberal party in Britain immediately following it.
To judge from accounts of the convocation of the Democratic National Committee in Minnesota at the end of last month, where the committee chairman raged against the “king with swollen ankles” in the White House and another party official spoke of “fascism in a red tie,” it is nowhere close to identifying that means. I think it was the most recently failed former candidate for US vice-president who made reference to “that thing in the White House.”
The Democrats remain convinced that they lost the election last year not on account of the caliber of their candidates or the content of their policies, but rather through the clumsy presentation of them. Even if they were right about that, they haven’t corrected their “message” yet – and show no signs of understanding how to do so. Critics have called them tone deaf. The truth is, the Democrats are stone deaf, their hearing destroyed by their own high-decibel shouts and screams against the Great Sauron in the White House.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.
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Is the Democratic party over the hill?
Call it a dilemma, quandary, or Catch-22 – just pray the aging Democratic party doesn’t pull a muscle trying to argue that it is in anything other than an unenviable position.
Eighty-eight-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.’s longtime representative in Congress, has repeatedly stated that she will seek yet another term in office. The only trouble is that every time she does, her staff scrambles to assure the world that isn’t actually the case.
One must sympathize with their impulse. Norton has been absent from her day job even as the district dominates national headlines, and struggled through what few public appearances she’s made. The situation is dire enough that Norton’s self-described “dear friend” Donna Brazile took to The Washington Post to urge her to step aside.
“There are a lot of talented Democrats in D.C.,” wrote Brazile. “If Norton decides not to run for reelection, there will be a very competitive race for the seat.”
And besides, the stakes are low should Norton ride off into the sunset, given the fact that Democrats have a stranglehold on her seat.
But Norton is no outlier. Across the country, the party is staring down the barrel of a much more difficult choice between aged incompetence and unpopular extremism.
The divide between these two factions – a stale establishment and radical insurgency – was only deepened by Joe Biden’s failed presidency, and the ongoing debate over who ought to bear the blame for it. On the one hand, Biden, then 78-year-old, was the most conservative viable Democrat to run in 2020. On the other, he governed far to the left of where he campaigned; and Vice President Kamala Harris lost her bid to succeed him in large part thanks to the unpopular, progressive positions she staked out in 2020.
The story of how the party came to be stuck between a rock and a hard place begins, ironically enough, begins with the presidential campaign of geriatric socialist Bernie Sanders.
In 2016, Sanders’s overperformance in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the general election, and Donald Trump’s presidency all inspired a leftward shift – or sprint – within the party. And in the years since, progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani have risen to prominence.
After Mamdani defeated establishment scion Andrew Cuomo in the Democrats’ Big Apple mayoral primary, the left turned the pressure up on party leadership to endorse Mamdani, who will face off against Cuomo once again come November.
Axios recently reported that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is facing a “revolt” over his failure to throw his weight behind the upstart.
The Democratic Party is plagued by two afflictions exemplified by each of its competing cohorts. One need only watch a half-minute of a Jeffries or Chuck Schumer speech to agree with their critics’ evaluation of them. Their plodding, low-energy delivery – occasionally interrupted by shrill outbursts – underlines their lack of conviction. The pair represent a kind of empty suit, go-along-to-get-along politics that voters have emphatically rejected in both parties for the better part of a decade now.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that this wing is quite literally dying out. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) passed away in May after beating out Ocasio-Cortez to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee just a few months prior. He was the eighth federal legislator to expire in office since November 2022; all eight were Democrats.
Biden is long gone. Schumer is 74 years old. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the 85-year-old who made Biden king back in 2020, finally left House leadership this year. He endorsed Cuomo in the NYC primary, but has since come around and endorsed Mamdani in the general. The symbolism isn’t all that difficult to wrap one’s head around.
But then again, there’s little evidence that the far-left can find its footing outside of insular enclaves. Sanders came the closest to building a national movement in his mold, but his grumpy, grandfatherly affect has always softened the blow of his policy agenda. No one else is a proven entity anywhere but in large, ideologically uniform cities.
And for good reason. While Democratic voters are making googly eyes at socialism, it’s still a dirty word with the rest of the electorate. Among the former group, it boasts a +36 percent net approval rating; among the latter, it stands at a dismal -18 percent, according to Gallup.
Biden already test-drove the radicals’ laissez-faire immigration policy, while Harris took their social policies for a spin. They both ended up in the dustbin of American history, at once national jokes and villains.
The grass, at least for the elderly Democrat party, may not be greener on the other side. -
Crimes that aren’t crimes in New York
There were lots of shocked people when state terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione – the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – were dismissed on Tuesday. I wasn’t one of them.
As the partner of a homicide victim and an advocate for victims for more than 20 years, I’ve seen firsthand how New York’s penal code is a disaster. It doesn’t just fail victims; it rewards predators. It protects the violent. It gives them loopholes and light slaps on the wrist. And then we all act surprised when killers like Mangione benefit.
Here’s a reality check that most people don’t know: punching someone in the face is not considered assault in New York. It’s classified as “harassment” – not even aggravated harassment. Stabbing someone isn’t attempted murder. It’s “assault.” Let that sink in. A fist to your face? Harassment. A knife in your gut? Assault. The absurdity writes itself.
And the list goes on.
Take strangulation and choking – one of the clearest predictors of homicide in domestic violence cases. For years, choking someone unconscious was only a misdemeanor unless there was visible injury. Bruises fade, but the trauma is permanent. New York eventually patched this embarrassment with a strangulation statute, but prosecutors still find ways to plead it down.
Child abuse is just as bad. Kids with broken bones, brain injuries, or who are beaten within an inch of their lives often see their abusers charged with misdemeanors – unless the child dies. So in New York, a dead child finally gets justice. A brutalized but living child? Sorry, that’s not serious enough.
And let’s not forget sexual assault. For decades, New York required proof of “forcible compulsion.” Translation: if you were too drunk, drugged, or coerced to fight back, your rape didn’t “count.” Prosecutors would downgrade or toss cases because the victim couldn’t prove physical force. That isn’t justice. That’s state-sanctioned humiliation.
This is the real problem. Instead of lawmakers fixing these grotesque loopholes and making charges fit the crime, we’ve spent the last decade on so-called “social justice reforms.” What do these reforms actually do? They close prisons, release violent repeat offenders, and unleash the hell George Soros envisions upon society. They put the rights of criminals before the lives of victims.
And don’t expect this to change under one-party Democrat rule in New York. Why would it? These are the same “progressives” who can’t bring themselves to stand with victims, who bend over backwards to excuse predators, and who look the other way when mobs of New Yorkers actually protest in support of Mangione and donate millions to his legal defense. Yes, you read that right: in today’s upside-down culture, terrorists and murderers get sympathy marches while grieving families are told to move on.
Raise the Age. Bail Reform. HALT (Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act). Less Is More. Each of these social justice experiments has one thing in common: they serve offenders, not the innocent. The victims – people like me, like Brian Thompson’s family, like countless others – are an afterthought.
This is a depraved indifference to human life.
But here’s the good news: all hope is not lost. Thank God federal charges are in play. Thank God President Trump’s Department of Justice still believes in protecting the innocent and fighting for real justice. If it were left to Albany, Mangione would be treated like a misunderstood soul rather than a cold-blooded killer.
The path forward is obvious. Lawmakers need to stop writing laws that coddle predators and start rewriting penal codes and sentencing guidelines. That’s exactly what our Victims Rights Reform Agenda calls for: charges that fit the crime, penalties that fit the damage done, and a justice system that remembers its purpose is to defend the innocent, not excuse the guilty.
New Yorkers are living in a nightmare created by their own politicians. The only question is: how many more families have to be destroyed before voters wake up and demand justice? And is there any hope of that happening when crowds are actually protesting to free Mangione and pouring millions into his legal defense?