Stark was the contrast between the selfless heroism and unity of purpose on and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the nation’s reaction to the events of September 10, 2025.
In abundantly obvious respects, the two days differed. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, his wife, their two children, and the rest of his loved ones were the only immediate victims of his assassination on September 10.
In contrast, Osama bin Laden’s hell-bound errand boys murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, saddled thousands more with diseases that later claimed their lives, and altered New York City’s skyline forever on September 11. America went to war afterwards.
But the two tragedies, though they varied in scale, shared one key similarity that a disturbingly small proportion of the country has acknowledged: they both represented attacks on the very idea of the United States as a tolerant, pluralistic democracy whose citizens enjoy freedoms unknown to most of human history – including, and perhaps most importantly, the freedom to disagree.
Kirk traveled to college campuses to try to persuade young men and women to adopt his worldview. For that crime, a madman sentenced him to death.
The correct reaction to this horrifying act of vigilante injustice was modeled on the far-left by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who delivered a masterclass in how to honor his political opponents – and their shared country – in an admirably unqualified manner.
“I want to say a few words regarding the terrible murder yesterday of Charlie Kirk, someone who I strongly disagreed with on almost every issue, but who was clearly a very smart and effective communicator and organizer, and someone unafraid to get out into the world and engage the public,” began Sanders. “Freedom and democracy is not about political violence. It is not about assassinating public officials. It is not about trying to intimidate people who speak out on an issue. Political violence, in fact, is political cowardice. It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.”
There was no “But” in Sanders’s condemnation of Kirk’s assassination, no self-righteous enumeration of his countless – and doubtlessly vehement – disagreements with Kirk, and no attempt to put political points on the board. Only a sincere expression of condolences and articulation of unifying principles. All was as it should be.
Sadly, Sanders’s words were made all the more moving by their loneliness. To be sure, an overwhelming majority of public figures, including on the left, condemned Kirk’s murder. But far fewer reckoned with the gravity of what happened in Utah last Wednesday, or responded to it with the gravitas the crisis demands.
While the “rats” – vocal ghouls who celebrated the murder of an innocent countryman – are not a critical mass of Democratic voters, or activists, or even congressmen, that is not to excuse the behavior of some particularly shameful members of the party. Though they may not have popped any champagne after Kirk’s death, they betrayed their apathy toward it in other ways.
The day after Kirk fell, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) joined Mehdi Hasan for a session in which they – among other indignities – mocked the self-evident truth that Kirk believed in the power of civil debate. Reps. Dave Min (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA), meanwhile, glibly attempted to make a political profit off of Kirk’s murder by misleading the public about the perpetrator.
“Now that the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA, I’m sure Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the insane GOP politicians who called for retribution against the ‘RADICAL LEFT’ will now shift their focus to stopping the toxic violence of the RADICAL RIGHT,” mused Min.
“It doesn’t matter that Kirk’s killer was a straight white male. Or that he was from a Republican family that voted for Donald Trump. Violence has NEVER been the answer,” submitted Swalwell.
Let the reader understand: authorities have identified the alleged shooter as a man “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology” whose partner was transgender. Kirk was shot while discussing the phenomenon of transgender mass shooters.
While for understandable, if not entirely laudable reasons, some on the right have called for a figurative war effort in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. “Y’all caused this!” shouted Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) at her Democratic colleagues following a moment of silence for Kirk on the House floor.
It all amounts to a scathing self-critique of not the right or the left, but of a society so self-indulgent and siloed that hardly anyone inside of it can subordinate the interests of their faction after a national tragedy – not even for a week – to those of the wider country, or even to memorializing the man who died.
Twenty-four years ago, Americans came together to face a common enemy. Today, they’re coming together on opposing sides of a battlefield, tragically convinced that their enemies have lived next door all along.
Tag: Democrats
-
Where is America’s 9/11 spirit?
-
The bloodthirstiness of the left is not new
The savage assassination of Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point rally at Utah Valley University yesterday prompts me to wonder, as I have often wondered, what is the leading characteristic of the left? There are several candidates. Intolerance is one. A rancid and anchorless do-goodism – think of Dickens’s Mrs. Jelleby and her “telescopic philanthropy” – is another.
But on balance I think that the late Australian philosopher David Stove was right: the leading characteristic of the left it is bloodthirstiness. Behind all the emollient rhetoric about brotherhood and equality, bloodthirstiness is the left’s most reliable calling card.
That is one reason that the nearly instant emission by prominent Democrats of their opposition to violence rings so hollow. “Political violence has no place in America,” said Kamala Harris, Alex Padilla, Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams, Jasmine Crockett and others.
But this came after years of calling every Republican from George Bush and Mitt Romney to Donald Trump “literally Hitler.” When Trump was first elected, in 2016, Kathy Griffin and her ghoulish ISIS-by-proxy photo shoot depicted her holding a blood-soaked likeness of Donald Trump’s severed head. Around the same time, a New York of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, included a Donald Trump lookalike in the title role and lots and lots of stage blood spilled when we come to the Ides of March.
Then of course there was Butler, Pennsylvania, last July when Trump came within millimeters of having his head, not just the tip of his right ear, blown off. Weeks later, a second assassin was discovered at the last minute hiding with a gun in the foliage at one of Trump’s golf courses.
No sooner had Charlie’s murder been announced than social media erupted with leftists celebrating the event and proposing lists of other people who deserved to be assassinated.
What was Charlie’s tort? Why did the left hate him so? Charlie humiliated them. He did this not by design but by holding up a mirror to their depravity and hypocrisy. Charlie was castigated by the left as a far-right agitator. In fact, he was a classical liberal whose daily activity owed a lot to John Stuart Mill. Charlie talked. He argued for his point of view. He wanted to hear your point of view and discuss it. At Utah Valley College, Charlie was conducting an open-air discussion under the rubric “Prove Me Wrong.” Some 3,000 students gathered to witness Charlie’s back-and-forth with the audience. Charlie came with arguments to advance his opinions.
In this context, it is worth noting that the bloodthirstiness of the left is not new. It is a central part of the socialist impulse. What is socialism? In part, it is optimism translated into a political program. Until he took up gardening, Candide was a sort of proto-socialist; his mentor Pangloss could have been one of socialism’s founding philosophers.
Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom: the gratifying emotion of unselfishness, experienced alternately as resentment against others and titillating satisfaction with oneself.
The philosophy of Rousseau, which elevated what he called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue into a political imperative, is socialism in ovo. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously exclaimed, “but is everywhere in chains.”
That heart-stopping conundrum – too thrilling to be corrected by mere experience – is the fundamental motor of socialism. It is a motor fueled by this corollary: that the multitude unaccountably colludes in perpetuating its own bondage and must therefore be, in Rousseau’s ominous phrase, “forced to be free.”
This is where the “mundane” side of the totalitarian temptation comes in. The starry-eyed aspect of socialist thinking does not preclude a large element of steel. The French Revolution was the nursery of both sides of socialism. It was then that the philosophy of Rousseau emerged from the pages of tracts and manifestos to strut and fret across the bloody stage of history. The architects of the revolution invoked Rousseau early and often as they set about the task of “changing human nature,” of “altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”
This metamorphosis does not come easily. Human nature is a recalcitrant thing. It is embodied as much in persistent human institutions like the family and the church as in the human heart. All must be remade from the ground up if “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” are at last to be realized.
Since history (the revolutionaries thought) is little more than an accumulation of errors, history as hitherto known must be abolished. The past, a vast repository of injustice, is by definition the enemy. Accordingly, the revolutionaries in France tossed out the Gregorian calendar and started again at Year One. They replaced the Genesis-inspired seven-day week with a ten-day cycle and rebaptized the months with names reflecting their new cult of nature: Brumaire (fog), Thermidor (heat), Vendémiare (wind), etc. A new religion was born, as imperious as it was jealous.
It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God – an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than de trop: it is an impediment to perfection. (“Criticism of religion,” Marx said, “is the prelude to all criticism.”)
In 1793, the churches were closed to worship and ransacked for booty. The anti-clericalism that had been a prominent feature of revolutionary sentiment grew increasingly vicious. Hence the fashion for so-called “revolutionary marriages” in which priests and nuns were tied together naked and drowned.
Rousseau was always going on about establishing the “reign of virtue.” His far-seeing disciple Maximilien Robespierre spoke more frankly of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has always delivered a bloodier and more oppressive one.
Last April, Charlie tweeted that “Assassination culture is spreading on the left.” Alas, he was right. Requiescat in pace.
-
Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died for it
Charlie Kirk was shot on stage this afternoon, speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. The Turning Point USA co-founder was announced dead by the President of the United States. “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
While the President and millions of others pray for the Kirks, others aren’t hesitating to share horrible sentiments. The 31-year-old Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University, near Provo, a serene town in the foothills of Utah’s majestic mountains, when a gunman murdered him. Yet an early MSNBC pundit decided to suggest that the person who shot Charlie Kirk in the neck (the shooter, at time of writing, is still at large) might have been a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.” What?
This is a growing trend, in the wake of senseless violence: water it down. Or even defend it. A flurry of commentators on the left are not hesitant to express Schadenfreude over this act of pure violence, like they did when Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO, in cold blood. Kirk, they say, was a conservative activist, and that crime meant he deserved comeuppance for his various transgressions, including his support of gun rights.
Their malignant comments do not deserve repetition. If you must read their horrible takes, you can find them easily on BlueSky, by simply searching “top posts.”
Those who are feverishly reveling in the shooting, or at least tut-tutting about it, should think again. This was a soulless act, which has taken a young father’s life. To find any small glimmer of joy in that is to erode one’s own soul. If that happens to enough of us, the soul of the nation rots, too.
We should also pause before turning this unspeaking tragedy into a political talking point. Seizing on the shooting as a pretext for a wide crackdown on civil liberties, or to broadly lump together “these lunatics leftists,” as Laura Loomer put it, is also guaranteed to injure further an already injured nation. The spiral of loathing and delegitimization of other human beings must come to an end. No one wants to discover what happens if we go any further down this cesspit.
The last time America experienced a spate of political assassinations was during the 1960s, when the murder of President Kennedy was followed by those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These were atrocities that were supposed to be confined to history. But something is going terribly wrong again, which is clear in this particularly ominous killing of Kirk. It is once again not just the man, but the idea, that these killers are looking to take out. American campuses have not been immune to violence. But this was, more than likely, an act of political violence, one that could easily spread to think-tanks, journalists and academics: to anyone who speaks out. Debate is supposed to be the essence of the college experience, and the American experience. Today, it was cut short with a bullet.
As it happens, Kirk himself could not have appeared more vulnerable. He was wearing a white T-shirt while holding forth with several hundred students. Now his mission has come to an abrupt terminus. Kirk wanted to revive America, but now it is even less certain if the country can avoid a lurch into a fresh orgy of violence.
-
The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris
The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir “107 Days” this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is:
“blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”
In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank. But the most newsworthy portion of the excerpt comes earlier, when she discusses Joe Biden’s unwillingness to drop out of the 2024 race.
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
“Recklessness.” “Ego.” The remaining 12 loyalists in Bidenworld are going to be mad. Harris adds:
“Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired.”
Harris claims that she was more “loyal to my country” than she was to Joe Biden, but she held her tongue until the Party anointed her as successor and gave her free reign to completely botch her campaign against Trump. Anyone who read Fight, the excellent chronicle of the 2024 campaign that came out earlier this year, or even cursorily followed the narrative as it unfolded in real time, knows the contours of the story. Harris, handled an impossible task, managed to make a series of disastrous decisions, emboldened by her senior campaign staff imported from Barack Obama loyalists, who were both out of touch with reality and also didn’t like Harris much.
I don’t see any of that “bluntness” in this excerpt, which is also not slyly funny or occasionally profane. Unlike Fight, which was no Lost Illusions but still read like it had been written by actual humans with actual personalities, this excerpt of 107 Days reads very “as told to,” either to Harris’s extremely well-paid ghostwriter or to an AI chatbot, or to a ghostwriter who uses an AI chatbot. It may be unapologetic, but it’s also unapologetic sludge.
Harris, as the first female vice president, is an important historical figure, and she’s hardly the demon as painted by her opponents on the right. She’s also no great shakes. What we see in the memoir excerpt is what we saw of her in real life: marginal competence, extreme self-absorption, performative liberalism and laugh lines that fall dead to everyone but the most extreme paid loyalists. Let’s also keep in mind that it’s been less than a year since she’s lost, and even less time than that since she left office. This is a rehabilitation tour planned from the outset, and the whole thing feels fake, silly and manipulative.
Now we can sit back and wait for the recrimination cycle that may or may not come. There may be some ruffled feathers in Bidenworld. And Harris is, like it or not, going to be on our screens and in our feeds a lot in the next month or so. But there might also be less controversy than hoped for by people who love political gossip. Jeffrey Goldberg, invoking “my friend Kamala” just like Obama used to, may care about what’s in 107 Days, but the rest of the world has moved along.
-
Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare
A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.”
The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.
Donald Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history
We are supposed to deplore lawfare as a perversion or misapplication of the law. Which it is. But the temperature and asperity of public disapproval varies widely depending on who is directing the process. In part, it is a matter of political coloration. If you are on the side conducting the lawfare, you are likely to describe the process as a “no-one-is-above-the-law” form of accountability. If you are on the receiving end, you are likely to point out the partisan and selective nature of the assault. Given the political biases of our establishment culture, lawfare directed at Donald Trump and his allies earns an automatic quota of indulgence. It is excused, or half excused, as at least an attempt to pursue justice, to find “truth.”
Lawfare prosecuted by Trump and his allies, however, finds itself instantly saddled with morally charged obloquy. Two wrongs, you will have often heard, do not make a right. It was unseemly of Joe Biden & Co. to go after Trump and those in his orbit – but Trump’s response, we are told, is simply appalling. The swishing sound you hear in the background is the word “retribution” being dusted off and prepped for prime time.
Kimberley Strassel, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, provided one version of this line of argument. Trump “insisted that his ‘retribution’ would be through winning office and making ‘our country successful.’ Conservatives in particular were eager to see the President remove the Justice Department from the political sphere. That hope is out the window seven months in.”
I wonder whether the history of actual warfare might be more illuminating. When the Germans decided to start World War One, their plan of attack, formulated by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, called for them to mount a lightning assault against France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The plan called for the Germans to destroy the French army and occupy Paris within 40 days.
Then came the first battle of the Marne early in September 1914. “The Miracle on the Marne” halted the German advance. It also condemned Europe to four years of attritional warfare that left millions dead and large swaths of France in ruins.
The Democrats had their own Schlieffen plan to be used against Trump after 2020. They would conduct what amounted to a Blitzkrieg of total lawfare against him. Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, commanded one division. Alvin Bragg, District Attorney in New York City, commanded a second. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who went after Trump in Florida and in Washington, DC, commanded two others.
If the process is the punishment in legal proceedings, as we are often reminded, Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history. But it is worth remembering that the aim of the lawfare was not simply to punish Trump but to destroy him. It was a multi-front assault. Bankruptcy loomed on one front, jail on another. Then came at least two assassination attempts, not officially part of the lawfare, but spiritually adjacent.
The Kaiser miscalculated when he went to war in Europe. I think that the battalions of anti-Trump activists, in the media and our political establishment as well as in the law, miscalculated when they took up arms against Trump. His response has not been to dig trenches and hunker down. What he has done resembles the D-Day invasion of Normandy more than the pointless slaughter of the Somme or Verdun.
Anti-Trump commentators are up in arms because the President has stormed the beaches of the Deep State and overrun many of its defensive positions. They skirl hysterically when he fires a governor of the Federal Reserve (“But she’s the first black woman to hold the position!”). Trump removes Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris. “A petty, vindictive move from a small man,” quoth a group called “Republicans Against Trump.” But then it turns out that Harris enjoyed the posse longer than any former vice-president in history.
Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton wakes up to find his home and office raided by the FBI. “Retribution” screams the anti-Trump press. But then it turns out the FBI had been investigating Bolton at least since the Biden administration, which eventually shut down the inquiry – possibly, just possibly, because Bolton was such a vocal anti-Trump critic. Two separate magistrates, one in DC, one in Maryland, approved the FBI search warrants. Why? Because, as the New York Times grudgingly acknowledged, data gathered from the spy service of an “adversarial country” included “sensitive,” i.e., classified, information that Bolton, “while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system.”
The list goes on. The Dems perfected lawfare and unleashed it against Trump under the twin assumptions that it would succeed and that the Republicans would never retaliate in kind. Trump has upended both assumptions. Which is why I believe that what Trump is doing is not a matter of “retribution” or lawfare. It is a battle of liberation from the tyranny of lawfare.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
-
The Senator from Virginia vs. the Declaration of Independence
At a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia – Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate – decided to pick a fight not with the nominee before him so much with the American founding itself. In a remarkable four-minute speech, clips of which went viral, Kaine challenged the very idea of natural rights – that is, the belief that human beings possess fundamental freedoms simply by virtue of being human, not because government chooses to grant them.
His lecture was provoked by a seemingly uncontroversial statement. Riley Barnes, nominated as Assistant Secretary of State, quoted his presumptive future boss in his opening remarks: “We are a nation founded on a powerful principle, and that powerful principle is that all men are created equal, because our rights come from God our Creator – not from our laws, not from our governments.” He warned that when rights are untethered from that principle, “they can be easily manipulated by authoritarians and bad actors.”
As most American schoolchildren would recognize, this statement is taken nearly verbatim from the Declaration of Independence, which affirms that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” For nearly 250 years, this idea has been America’s mission statement. Yet Kaine reacted with indignation, calling the notion “extremely troubling” and insisting it should make Americans “very, very nervous.”
Kaine centered his argument on likening the principles in the Declaration to Iran’s theocracy: “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator – that’s what the Iranian government believes.” The comparison is absurd. The Islamic Republic of Iran has never positioned itself as a champion of natural rights. Its regime is built on repression, not liberty, and its Supreme Leader has openly sneered at human rights as a Western pretense. To liken Jefferson and Madison to clerical dictators in Tehran is simply dishonest.
And dishonesty, not ignorance, seems to be the basis for Kaine’s statements. He is an Ivy League graduate and a former governor of Virginia – the home state of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. He knows perfectly well what the Declaration says and what the Founders believed. If he pretends otherwise, it is because he wants to send a message.
That message became clearer as Kaine continued to protest that attributing rights to God would somehow “demean” government and law. “I would never try to demean the law,” he said. In other words: How dare anyone suggest that politicians are beneath God? Despite describing himself as a “devout” Catholic, Kaine is comfortable diminishing the divine but not the authority of lawmakers like himself.
Although Kaine claims that appealing to natural rights is something that just arose “suddenly, after 250 years,” in fact, it is the foundation of the American tradition. The Founders insisted that government was subordinate to natural rights, not the other way around Kaine warns that divine endowments are theocratic, when in reality they are the only safeguard against despotism. Without rights anchored in something higher than law, there is nothing to stop law from becoming mere power. Kaine’s argument is not only incorrect, it is dangerous.
Bishop Robert Barron, responding to Kaine’s remarks on social media, explained: “If government creates our rights, then government can take them away.” That was exactly the tyranny the Declaration was written to resist. And one need not be religious to see the danger. Secular thinkers have long defended natural rights on philosophical grounds. The point is not that every American must invoke God, but that human dignity does not hinge on the state’s permission. Yet Kaine will not even concede that. He suggests instead that rights exist only because government decrees them – a logic fit for authoritarians, not heirs of Jefferson.
Why would Kaine want to dismantle this philosophy? Because for today’s Democratic Party, natural rights are inconvenient. They are limits on government power, barriers that cannot be legislated away. Many progressives would prefer rights to be malleable—redefined, expanded, or rescinded at will, according to the agenda of the moment. Again and again, the left reveals it values power over principle.
Kaine’s remarks were not a stray gaffe. It was a glimpse of where his party is heading. The left’s constant attempts to delegitimize the Founding Fathers themselves, combined with the bogeyman of a supposed modern Christian nationalist movement, has become a tool to alienate Americans from the ideas that made the republic possible.
Without the concept of natural rights, individuals don’t have rights at all – only benefits and favors granted and withdrawn by the politicians in power. For politicians who want to be the source of your freedoms, God is a rival, our founding principles are obstacles, and natural rights in particular threaten to undermine their authority. In the hearing, Kaine said the quiet part out loud: In his vision, your rights belong to him and his party. And they can take them back whenever they please.
-
Cynthia Nixon and the battle for Broadway
When Representative Jerry Nadler announced his retirement this week, Democrats in New York instantly began preparing for a political drama worthy of its stage. Nadler’s district – the 12th, which covers the Upper West and Upper East Sides, Midtown, Times Square and the United Nations – is the geographic heart of Manhattan. It’s also one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. Whoever wins the primary will not only control a powerful perch in Congress, but also inherit a stage in the very center of America’s media capital.
That’s the problem. In New York’s 12th, politics isn’t about solving problems. It’s about performance.
For decades, Nadler played the part of Manhattan’s liberal lion. But in his later years, his work as a legislator was overshadowed by his role as a star of the Trump impeachment saga. Nadler’s most memorable moments in Congress weren’t about fixing housing costs, reducing crime, or dealing with New York’s collapsing infrastructure. They were about sitting in front of cameras, promising to “hold Trump accountable.” Even Nadler’s allies now admit his retirement marks the end of an era defined less by governance and more by political theater.
Enter the next cast of characters. Micah Lasher, a state assemblymember and former Nadler aide, is already being framed as the establishment’s choice. But this is Manhattan, which means Lasher won’t have the stage to himself. Expect a chorus of progressives, activists and democratic socialists eager to turn this district into their next soapbox. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who recently became the Democratic mayoral nominee, only narrowly beat Andrew Cuomo in June – but his upset has emboldened the left. His allies will see Nadler’s seat as a prime opportunity to push their agenda further.This is, after all, the district of liberal royalty and celebrity activism. Among those considering running is Cynthia Nixon, who ran for governor from its leafy streets. So too Molly Jong-Fast, the socialite-turned-MSNBC commentator, who tweets furiously from the Upper East Side. And of course, the Kennedy-Schlossberg clan still hovers around the neighborhood, auditioning themselves for future office. These are the “stars” of District 12 – figures who are repellent to mainstream America but perfectly at home in Manhattan’s bubble, where politics is just another performance art.
This race will be covered breathlessly by CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times not because the district’s voters face unique struggles, but because it provides the perfect script. In New York’s “Political Theater District,” the Democratic primary will be marketed as a battle for the soul of the party: Wall Street donors versus socialist insurgents. One candidate will claim the mantle of responsible governance; another will demand revolutionary change. The audience – journalists, Ivy League professors, and Upper East Side donors – will cheer from the sidelines.
Meanwhile, the actual constituents of NY-12 face real problems that will barely register in the debates. Manhattan is struggling with skyrocketing housing prices, public safety concerns, an overwhelmed shelter system, and an affordability crisis that is driving middle-class families out of the city altogether. Yet those issues will take a backseat to ideological pageantry. The candidates aren’t running to represent New Yorkers. They’re running to impress MSNBC bookers, national activist groups and wealthy donors who see New York as a testing ground for their preferred brand of politics.
It is telling that within hours of Nadler’s retirement announcement, Democratic clubs were already organizing candidate forums – not around issues like public safety or schools, but around how best to position the district as a national stage. In Manhattan, the applause of the crowd has become more important than the quality of governance.
This is the broader story of today’s Democratic Party. In cities across America, Democrats are more interested in performance than results. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson delivers speeches about equity while his city’s crime spirals. San Francisco officials declare their city a climate leader while families flee in record numbers. In Washington, House Democrats compete to see who can deliver the sharpest sound bite about Donald Trump, while ignoring the border crisis and inflation. Nadler’s district is simply the most glaring example because of where it sits: at the center of the world’s cameras.
The Democratic base in Manhattan doesn’t want a legislator. It wants a performer. The district’s voters have been conditioned to expect headlines, not solutions. That’s why Nadler’s fiercest defenders remember his role in the impeachment hearings, not any serious legislation he passed for New Yorkers. That’s why Lasher will be asked how well he can defend democracy on cable television, not how he plans to fix crime on the subways.
The irony is that even as Democrats cast themselves as the “serious party of governance,” their most coveted congressional district has become a caricature of everything wrong with modern politics: politics as performance art, driven by donors, activists and an elite media audience that rewards theatrics over substance.
As Nadler exits stage left, the show will go on. The candidates will fight over who can deliver the loudest applause line, who can attract the flashiest endorsements, and who can position themselves as the next national star. But don’t expect them to fix the problems that have made life in New York harder for ordinary families. The district is no longer about serving New Yorkers. It’s about serving as America’s most glamorous political theater.
For Democrats, New York’s 12th District is the most important congressional seat in the country. But for the rest of America, it’s just another reminder: when it comes to governance, the Democratic Party has forgotten its lines. -
How Democrats failed Minneapolis
What happens after an unspeakable tragedy? One that comes on an idyllic late August day in Minneapolis that signaled the end of a barefoot summer and the beginning of back-to-school activities, reacquainting with friends, and easing back into a school schedule? For two families, it is the end of any normal life they had known. For countless other families whose children attended Annunciation Catholic School in a peaceful, leafy-treed neighborhood of the city, it marks a new life of contradiction: of being blessed that they are reunited with their loved ones and overwhelming grief at an inhuman, violent targeting of innocent life at its most sacred – within the walls of a church while at prayer.
It’s been difficult seeing the place where you were born, raised and now have a family of your own appear in the news time and again because of terrible events. I live a stone’s throw from the home I grew up in – where my parents still live, close to the high school from which my husband and I graduated, near the ball fields and ice-cream shops, and the little library that still retains its distinct 1970 aura I take my kids to now. But despite halcyon thinking that a place can maintain its natural cohesiveness and unchanging innocence, events like the horror at Annunciation jar you into reality.
The reality is that over the course of a few decades, the state has decided to pick sides, playing favorites in a game of politics, public policy and, now, life itself.
You see, somewhere along the way to actual governance in a judicious, fair-minded, and properly normal, rational process, Minnesota’s ruling hammer – the Twin Cities – decided it is more important to honor the empathetic feelings of a certain white, progressive, eminent class over the basic standards of law and order, equality and sanity.
With the slimmest of legislative margins (34-33 after the 2022 elections), a blowhard governor and a feckless opposition party, the Democrats passed a series of radical policies that stifled any semblance of normalcy – from legalizing abortion up to birth, to being a “Trans refuge” state (with full support from Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan), and allowing illegal aliens in the state to acquire a driver’s license.
When you’re a hammer, everything that doesn’t go along with your radical agenda is a nail – including safety for school kids not attending one of the state’s failing public schools. And now we’re seeing the tragic consequences. A 2023 letter to the Walz administration, signed by Tim Benz of MINNDEPENDENT and Jason Adkins of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, pleading for funding expansion to nonpublic schools for safety measures went unanswered, even in the midst of a nearly $18 billion state budget surplus. This despite his campaigning on a “One Minnesota” message and making the state, “The best state in the nation for kids to grow up in. Today, we’re turning that vision into reality.” What Walz envisioned is now a nightmare for the families of Annunciation, especially those of the eight- and 10-year-old children who a transgender-identifying individual murdered.
The failure becomes painfully clear when Minneapolis’ Mayor Jacob Frey admonishes those who bear the weight of the sufferers by praying. “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying,” Frey said. The one thing that someone feeling helpless in a hopeless situation can take on is an appeal to love over fear and good over evil.
Frey used his appearance on CNN to double down from an earlier press conference to make sure the murderer’s “identity” wasn’t a target of attack. “Anybody that is going to use this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any community, has lost touch with a common humanity…We need to be standing up for every community, our Catholic community too, by the way.” Frey told interviewer Erin Burnett. It’s so generous of the mayor to think of the victims as an afterthought while minimizing the pattern of destructive violence from the person who has special protection in the state according to his identity.
As a lifelong Minnesotan and one who has passed over career opportunities, better cost-of-living standards and certainly better weather to stay in a state where my family is rooted, it is difficult to bear these constant struggles with tragedy being excused by civic leaders who have no interest in making this place – especially the Twin Cities – a home for families who don’t want to be scolded for their religious practices, politics or way of life. We can no longer afford to believe our government will afford the same protection for us as it does for its political agenda. This is the reality of Minneapolis and the wider metro area, much as it is in many blue cities across the nation: it is up to us to keep alive the ideals of the past in a radically progressive era. Know your neighbors, keep your children close, and do not rely on the promises or rhetoric of politicians who unabashedly choose winners and losers based on political or ideological dogma. Listen to what they say; they’ve been telling us all along who they really are. Life is too precious to ignore them.
-
Muriel Bowser’s praise for Donald Trump
Mayor Muriel Bowser has found herself in the middle of a political tightrope – and it’s one that many Democrats may soon have to walk. In response to rising crime and public unease, the Washington, DC Mayor acknowledged something few in her party dare to admit: that Donald Trump’s federal “surge” of law enforcement officers actually made the city safer.
“This federal surge has had a significant impact on crime in Washington, DC, and we greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference yesterday.
That single sentence captures the dilemma of the modern Democratic party. At a time when progressive leaders downplay crime concerns as either exaggerated or rooted in right-wing fear-mongering, Bowser’s comments cut against the grain. She gave credit where it was due – to Trump – while at the same time rejecting his proposal to send in the National Guard. It’s an approach that shows both independence and restraint, and it highlights the broader challenge facing Democrats: how to be tough enough on crime to reassure the public without conceding the narrative to their opponents.
The political class often gets stuck in a numbers game. In recent years, experts have pointed out that violent crime in DC has ebbed and flowed but is still lower than its early-1990s peak. Statistically, they’re right. But residents don’t live by long-term averages; they live by what they see on their block. In 2015, homicides in DC spiked by more than 50 percent compared to the year before. Robberies and assaults were also on the rise. You didn’t have to be a policy wonk to notice that the streets felt less safe.
Bowser recognized that reality. Her acknowledgment that the federal surge “had a significant impact” shows she understands that people want to feel safe – when they walk home from the Metro, when their kids play outside, when they close up shop at night. Leaders who dismiss those fears as paranoia are telling voters, in effect, not to trust their own eyes. That is a losing strategy.
At the same time, Bowser resisted Trump’s more heavy-handed solution: sending in the National Guard. On this point, she was absolutely right. Crime prevention is fundamentally a local responsibility. Residents expect their city officials and police department to take the lead, not the Pentagon. While a temporary boost from federal officers can help, relying on military deployment to patrol American streets sets a dangerous precedent. Conservatives, too, should be wary of normalizing that kind of federal overreach.
Bowser’s willingness to draw a line here is noteworthy. She didn’t fall into the trap of reflexive partisanship – she praised what worked, rejected what didn’t and staked out a nuanced position. That’s leadership, whether you agree with her politics or not.
Still, Bowser’s balancing act comes with risks. If residents continue to feel unsafe, they will credit Trump’s surge, not the mayor’s steady hand. Political perception mirrors public perception: voters reward whoever they believe made them safer, whether or not the data backs it up.
That means Bowser could find herself outflanked from both sides. Progressives may accuse her of caving to Trump, while conservatives will argue she only validated what they’ve been saying all along. But if she manages to keep crime under control without ceding local authority, she may point the way forward for Democrats in other cities who face the same dilemma.
The broader lesson is this: Democrats cannot afford to dismiss crime concerns as a manufactured talking point. Ordinary people don’t experience crime as an abstraction; they experience it as a daily reality that shapes their neighborhoods and their choices. If voters perceive that their leaders aren’t listening, they will turn to anyone who promises action – even if it’s a president they otherwise distrust.
Bowser deserves credit for not joining the reflexive chorus of her party that insists crime concerns are invented. She recognized both the value of additional officers and the danger of military overreach. In doing so, she threaded a needle that her fellow Democrats may eventually need to follow. -
The devastating cost of cashless bail
The President taking such decisive action to save lives this past week is bittersweet beyond words. For years, we begged and pleaded for help to stop the insanity that has spilled blood across our streets. We went to the media. We testified before Congress. We sat across from lawmakers, poured out our stories and prayed someone would care enough to act. But time and time again, our cries fell on deaf ears.
Now, finally, something is being done.
For those who have never stood in our shoes, it’s hard to explain what it feels like to bury someone you loved unnecessarily – to hold a folded flag or a photo instead of a spouse, child, sibling, or parent. We as victims went through the worst nightmare imaginable. And while we were trying to pick up the shattered pieces of our lives, politicians were busy patting themselves on the back for “social justice” reforms that only created more victims.
We watched New York Democrats ram through bail reform, stripping judges of discretion and unleashing chaos. We watched elected officials like Kathy Hochul stand proudly on a stage and thank the families of killers as she signed legislation written by them – with no mention of the victims whose blood had been spilled, no acknowledgment of the grief their families will carry for the rest of their lives. Imagine the cruelty of that moment: to glorify those who destroyed lives, while erasing the memory of the ones they destroyed.
Meanwhile, millions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into programs designed to support criminals – housing them, feeding them, offering them endless “second chances.” And what about us? The victims? We struggle day to day, financially and emotionally, often with no resources, no lifeline, no recognition. Families are left with empty chairs at the dinner table, mounting bills for funerals and therapy, and the haunting trauma that never goes away.
This is the bitter reality we have lived with.
And now, finally, there seems to be a light at the end of this dark, cold tunnel. President Trump’s executive order is a long-overdue acknowledgment that public safety must come first.
For years, those in power denied there was even a problem. They told us crime was “down” while body bags piled up. They dismissed our stories as “anecdotes,” as if our dead loved ones were just numbers on a page. But we know the truth. Somewhere around 700 lives have been lost in New York alone because of bail reform. That’s 700 families destroyed, 700 names added to a list that never should have existed in the first place. And that’s only counting bail reform. When you add parole reform, when you add the revolving door for so-called “youthful offenders,” the number climbs even higher. Every one of those lives mattered. Every one of them had dreams, families, futures stolen in the name of “equity.”
So yes, this moment is hopeful. But it is also painful. Because it never had to be this way.
Imagine if leaders had listened when we first raised alarms. Imagine if victims’ voices carried the same weight as those of criminal justice activists funded by billionaires. Imagine if the grief of a mother burying her child mattered as much as the rehabilitation of the person who pulled the trigger. How many lives would have been saved?
This executive order cannot bring back our loved ones. It cannot erase the trauma or fill the empty seats at holidays. But it can – and must – be the beginning of a long-overdue course correction. The vague language some critics point to could actually be its greatest strength, because it allows broad discretion to cut off taxpayer funding for any jurisdiction that uses it to release repeat offenders. Washington, D.C., for example, spent $88 million last year on programs that funneled offenders back onto the streets. That money should never have been spent on those who hurt our communities.
Let’s be clear: this is not about vengeance. This is about prevention. This is about making sure no more families have to endure the pain we live with every single day. Recidivism is the heart of the problem in New York and everywhere these programs have been implemented – offenders being released over and over until someone gets killed. If this executive order helps break that cycle, then it is a step in the right direction.
But let us never forget: every step forward comes too late for those we’ve already buried. Crime Victims are the only unwilling participants in the criminal justice system-everyone else chose their role, from Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement and of course the offender.
Yet nobody said pick me-pick me, I want to be a crime victim.
So it’s the least our system can do is to offer a semblance of fairness and balance to the only unwilling participants: Victims of Crime.
The victims are not here to thank the President, as grateful as our families are. They are not here to testify. They are not here to share their story. All we have are their names, their memories, and the responsibility to make sure their deaths were not in vain.
This is the bittersweet truth: we are finally being heard, but only after far too much blood has been spilled.