The antisemitism and neo-nazism among the young Republicans is a huge problem. Here in Florida there have been news stories made of not one but two instances of young college Republicans going full Nazi, earlier at Florida International University (FIU) and more recently at the University of Florida.
Kent is part of that movement, along with folks like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
Does this just come with the territory? I am confused as to how this suddenly became cool and edgy with this crowd. Antisemitism is one of the oldest, tiredest and most worn out forms of bigotry out there and yet like a dog to its vomit.
They don't know how old antisemitism is. To them history began roughly when they were born. Nothing that happened before then has any relevance to them and probably isn't real to them...just some lies told by people they don't know or respect.
More like history began in 2000 to them. That said, when your entire world view is based on bitterness, grievance and hate, and you hate everybody, you eventually get around to hating the people who have been hated the longest.
Fun fact: some folks voting this fall in 2026 were born in 2008. So, I do think Max Skinner is probably right, there's adults voting in this election who see 9/11 as ancient history, kind of like how I thought of Vietnam or others might have thought of Pearl Harbor. And they also have only ever grown up in a world where a black man can be elected president. I remember how much race played into the lead up to the election of Obama in '08 and then afterward.
I genuinely fear for the future. In ten-fifteen years, my GenX generation will be retired, and these asshats will be running everything. An entire generation has been raised in an America where someone as objectively awful as Trump can be elected president,...twice, on two separate occasions (they witnessed Trump 1.0 and said, "yeah, give me more of THAT!"). And I'm not even passing judgement on the policies, just the man, his demeanor and his behavior. An entire generation of Americans has been raised in an America where you are allowed to say anything, to anybody, at any time, and there is no limitation imposed by decorum, politeness, or class. None.
It's one thing to think the way the MAGAs do. Americans have always thought that way, especially in the lower classes, but that used to be the quiet part that was never said out loud. Now, filters be damned, just spew all of your hatred, prejudices and grievances, and f*ck the other guys' feelings. What kind of country will that be to live in? I shudder to think.
Finally, we paid a VERY high price for Obama being elected before the country was truly ready for a black president. And, we were NOT ready in 2008 - the occupation in Iraq, the economic crash, and Hillary Clinton being the only other option was the witches' brew that made it possible. I'm not rendering judgement on whether or not it was worth it, but it was a high price, indeed. It led to the outing of racism we see now, and directly to the awful presidencies of Donald Trump (with Biden's disastrous term sandwiched in between).
As Charlie Sykes has pointed out, there has always been some fringe element like this in the Republican Party. What was once a small recessive gene has become larger and a lot less on the fringe.
Many of the statements made about the IDF, recently in Gaza and over the years, have had a strong resemblance to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff.
Except the IDF has committed war crimes in Gaza and lied about what their soldiers did, and had to change the story as more evidence came out — evidence they thought didn’t exist — most notably the attack and massacre of the paramedics and Red Crescent workers on 03/23/2025. This doesn’t make me confident I can trust what the IDF says about their conduct. But that isn’t antisemitism but rather the Israeli army not being honest about their conduct and worried more how that looks than accountability for what happened. Demanding accountability from Israel is not the veering into the Protocols of Zion.
There ought to be a way for people to voice criticism of the Israeli government's conduct of the war on Gaza. The destruction of so much infrastructure and the high civilian casualties in Gaza have been appalling.
Criticizing Israel for that is justified, I think.
The antisemitism shown by those college students is something darker and unacceptable.
Yes! I'm an American Jew who's been against Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing for decades. It's more than fine to be against Israeli governmental action. But it's not ok to turn it into hatred of the Jewish people, our religion, our traditions. You're correct! What's happening today is dark and unacceptable. It's dangerous for all of us, not just for Jewish people. Hatred like this is cancerous.
Americans have no idea what it’s like to fight an enemy as insidious as Hamas and the other terrorist organizations that inhabit places like Gaza. Judging Israel and the IDF tactics by our sanitized American, or even western standards is unfair. We didn’t go through October 7th. Israel knows how to deal with the monsters hiding in the shadows in Gaza, and a lot of “innocent” Gazens harbor and at least sympathize with Hamas.
At some point in time the story of how Netanyahu aided, abetted Hamas and turned a blind eye to the money funding them will be fully fleshed out. Netanyahu saw Hamas as a way of stymying Fatah and the development of a Palestinian state which he has never wanted, and if that meant supporting Hamas in Gaza then so be it. No one’s hands are clean.
I don't, think "sympathies" quite gets it, but willing human shields and medical staff who are also Hamas might. Look at Al Sharfa hospital. Look at clearly fake stats from "Gaza Health authorities."
Quite frankly, the more you and others conflate criticism of Israel and antisemitism, the more claims of antisemitism ring hollow and people learn to ignore them. Please read the story of the boy who cried wolf. Claims of antisemitism related to Israel are already to the point where I and many others begin with a strong presumption that they are made in bad faith.
That presumption has rarely been shown to be wrong.
To a Jewish person who has lived experience as a Jew it is rational to question whether criticism is just the stated rationale or if there is an additional, unspoken basis for it. Antisemitism is a very old, very deep set form of bigotry.
In writing that the IDF has been the subject of antisemitic propaganda, I did not claim absolute purity for them in Gaza. I have read more than once that the IDF is a professionally run as US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have been accused of all sorts of crimes, including genocide, but to my knowledge the only charge that has struck is withholding food and electricity from the entire population in order to withhold them from Hamas--who, it must be noted, committed a war crime by interspersing themselves with civilians in the first place. Do you have a reference for the conclusion the the 3/23 tragedy was in fact a deliberate attack on non-combatants?
There are multiple accounts of the attack and subsequent massacre with the bodies all buried in a shallow grave. There are also accounts of the changing Israeli story which was disproven by cell phone evidence from one of the paramedics which was found at the site and continued recording during the attack. There was also a survivor who was taken and held by the Israelis after the attack — he survived because he spoke to them in Hebrew which made them pause and ultimately not kill him — he was ultimately released due to international pressure after being tortured. Wikipedia has a page on the incident if that is a place you want to start with, but there are multiple accounts of what happened. There are many other credible accounts of war crimes but this is one has some of the best evidence. There are also accounts from physicians treating victims under the age of 10 with single bullet wounds to the head — many of the physicians worked in other war zones and commented they had never seen children targeted the same way. The Israeli army is differently structured from the US military with local commanders having much more discretion than ours do over how their troops behave and what and how targets are selected.
If it were only the Republicans. The antisemitism is coming from all areas, I think. But yes, these young college clubs of rich kids get a lot of press for their reprehensible views. I somehow suspect the poor kids aren't doing much better.
Tucker Carlson. What do we do if he's our next POTUS? Things can get worse. I mean, I try to remind myself that good things can happen. But with Tucker Carlson in charge? Nope, no they can't.
Tucker for President would present a humorous conundrum for Faux News - once one of their own who became its sacrificial lamb - if it ever started to look like he could win the GOP primary - oh lordy....
I think this war opens up the very real possibility that Carlson campaigns for president on an anti-war platform, ha ha ha ha ha giddy laughter ... what is happening here?
I had those same doubts about just about every single elected Republican, and yet there they are, trying to cancel measles vaccines and kissing Putin's ass and somehow not being ridden out of town on a rail.
Nah. Not electable. His maniacal cackle is worse than Ms. Harris's chuckle was, and that laugh was a big reason she was unelectable. No worries. ( /s )
(Okay, typed in sarcastic font but it occurs to me that many American voters might really choose candidates based on personal mannerisms rather than experience, ideology, or policy proposals - so who knows at this point. )
Her laugh was nowhere near a reason she was unelectable. She was unelectable because a majority of Americans could never imagined her as president. Some of this was gender and race, but most of it was because she had been defined as inarticulate, vapid, and incompetent. Even if someone is in that minuscule minority who truly in their heart of hearts believes those things aren’t true, they can’t deny that is how she was effectively defined.
exactly why I used sarcasm font - so many digs at her chuckle, as proxy for everything else that resulted in too many voters either staying home or voting for Trump.
At one time people laughed about Donald Trump. Then he is elected twice. Carlson is such a low possibility but given American voters lately, it can't be dismissed.
Imagine A25 pushing Trump out giving us Vance as POTUS. Who would he pick as a VP? Tucker? There is no respite except drawing out the next couple of years into a legal challenge gridlock.
Neither are the grown-ups alright. In the '30s, Heinrich Himmler maintained a slush fund. Corporations, including American corporations, were required to contribute on a regular basis as a condition of doing business in Germany. The money was used to fund the SS. Currently, Trump appears to be working on a scheme in which companies wishing for favor use Trump's stablecoin, USD1, to do business. US dollars are what makes stable coins stable, and the issuer of stable coins must hold the real money until and unless someone wants to redeem. While the cash is held, it is invested in US Treasuries, or similar. In just a year, USD1 has gone from nothing to holding more than $5 billion, which earns the owners of the fund hundreds of millions per year in interest. Chengpeng Zhao, of Binance, and the UAE have already been beneficiaries. It is reported that the nation Pakistan has pledged to use USD1 for all foreign transfers.
Holy moly. I had no idea. What a wake up call regarding the dangers of crypto, particularly as it seeks to become more legit. At the moment, the Trumps are ready to legitimize _anything_, for the right price, and the Trump and Witkoff kids are happy to grift right out in the open. But it's easy to overlook in the rush of events, so thanks for the info!!
Your post inspired me to dig a little, starting with the Pakistan angle; here's a non-paywalled article from January in case others want a head start:
There’s nothing new here. Antisemitism is a tried and true centuries old tradition among people looking for a scapegoat for their self sabotaged lives.
Tom Lehrer put it this way over 60 years ago:
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews
Does anyone think that we’re in the times we’re in because people are mentally and emotionally healthier??
The Jews have been hated for millennia, first for their mono-theistic religious beliefs. Then they crucified Jesus, and the hatred ramped up to a million, when Christianity eventually became the dominant religion in the world.
You are technically correct that Pilot and the Romans pronounced and carried out the sentence. But, the bible details how the crucifixion was instigated by the Jews, and Pilot wanted to set Jesus free after his initial interrogation, because he couldn’t find a Roman crime to accuse him of. In fact, the Jews chose Barabas for clemency over Jesus. It wasn’t the Romans who paid Judas.
And I’m not antisemitic or anti Israel at all. I’m a total supporter of Israel in virtually every action they take, including Gaza. I was merely pointing out that Christians have blamed Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion for millennia, and that’s one major reason Jews have been persecuted by everyone in the western world ever since.
Thank you for that clarification. My apologies. You are correct that Jesus was considered a political danger by the elite in Judea at that time, so they did what they could to silence him, and deliver him to the Romans to finish the job.
The other reason that Jews have been persecuted is that killing them was an excellent way for a ruler to cancel a debt to another ruler, without paying that debt.
This had to do with Church prohibitions regarding usury. Since Jews were going to hell anyway, for being Jews, they could handle financial transactions that Christians were forbidden to do, such as making loans for profit.
When prince "A" needed money to fund a war, the money could be lent by prince "B", using Jews to handle the loan. Jews from different countries shared common languages, Aramaic, Hebrew, and later Yiddish and Ladino, so they could handle negotiations that their ruler could not.
If prince "A" decided that paying the loan was undesirable, starting a blood libel, such as Jews using the blood of Christian babies to make their matzo, and stirring the populace into a murderous frenzy, would kill off the participants. Loan payment cancelled. This is also the origin for the "Jew Banker" trope.
It’s sad. AIPAC is in bed with the leadership, but the young guns are all Full throated Nazi’s on Crack. It should be interesting watching as this movement self implodes!
What’s the adage: “Beware of what you wish for”……:)
Just wait, this is just cover for more white supremacy action against the 'browns and blacks'. Even browns and blacks have their anti Semitic adherents. This reminds me of when the GOP used anti abortion rhetoric as a more acceptable moral issue to rally around as cover for their real issue, maintaining segregated private schools. The Klan was also anti semitic, but Jews were never the real target.
As bad as the last ten years have been, the next ten years could be worse, as the current crop of young Republicans are very online, they're almost all men, and their entire political experience has been in a post-Trump world. And all day they marinate in gamergate-style edgelord nihilism, where it's a perpetual contest to see who can be the most antisemitic, racist, and misogynist. The GOP of the future is going to be even crazier.
Some group will wind up confronting them physically. I remember growing up in the 1980s and the kind of talk amongst my pretty large family was universally something like, “The only way to handle Nazis is to punch them in the face.” The First Amendment offers no protection from fellow citizens.
"If only Trump had read this paragraph before launching his hubristic war."
If only trump could read. As we know, he even has difficulty with the teleprompter. Even if he could read, he wouldn't understand. Even if he understood, as is increasingly evident, he wouldn't remember. Even if he remembered, there is little reason to think that it would shape his actions. Those all emanate from his (ample) gut.
I am unable to determine if frump is a 10-year-old spoiled brat or a 79-year-old mentally ill evil man or the combination. I am so confused why the media ignores the obvious decline with vocabulary, memory, and obvious physical declines including sleeping in public.
I think that is why we get so much explanation that he was going with his gut and he will know it when he thinks it.
He does not do the deep consideration of all that he has in front of him to make a decision. That has been confirmed by most everyone that has been in his White House.
Decisions are made on what he wants to happen, specifically what will make him look good, richer and more powerful.
Agree. Reading Churchill's elegant, concise and inspiring prose -then hearing or reading Trump's latest bleat, tweet or blurt or belch is just sickening by comparison.
If you mentioned Winston Churchill to Trump, he wouldn't know who he was, except that he must be a very very bad person fancy woke show-off using big words and complete sentences that are not even in praise Of our dear Donald. What a loser!
It shows how far America has gone in what Karl Popper,in his 1946 book "The Open Society and It's Enemies", called the "revolt against reason".
He was writing about Germany in the 1930's and warning democracies that it could all happen again if they didn't learn from the past. We didn't, and it will.
Our current president now lives totally in his own fantasy world. He has constructed his own version of history in which he never lost an election, he never knew Epstein, NATO never came to our aid, and he carefully planned the war in Iran and was prepared for every possible response. He presents a fantasy present, that he are about to finish the war, take over Cuba, and fight the war in Iran until they.... do something he will decide on soon. His view of the future is that he will be president forever and own all the oil reserves in the world. Anyone who questions these fantasies will be threatened with. the loss of their job, public humiliation, and perhaps bodily harm, but that won't be his fault.
Wouldn’t those be lovely attributes for our president to have?
There have happily been wins in the courts lately - thank God for this!
But just think of the zillions of dollars and human energy spent under this administration. They do bad things, illegal things resulting in nearly everything being dragged and redragged through our legal system.
The idiot does love him some lawsuits, doesn’t he?
What an incredible near criminal waste of time energy and money.
RE: The NYT report of "the second-biggest four-week [gas price] increase in at least 30 years" with only "Hurricane Katrina [hitting] prices harder during that span."
I guess we should actually count ourselves at least a *little bit* lucky at this point, considering the severity of the continuous, unrelenting and unpredictable gusts from the Category 5 blowhard that's been back in the Oval Office for a little over a year now.
But sadly, I'm guessing FEMA will be of little use at all in helping to clean up the mess after this latest disaster.
It doesn't end with the economic or political ramifications. I'm certain somewhere in the middle east someone(s) are coming together to start planning new waves of terrorist attacks here in the US - probably years from fruition, but I'm certain we've fed the beast.
I had a great laugh when Irish Taoiseach, Michael Martin was defending a British Prime Minister on Saint Patrick's Day against Trump's foolish rants. I guess I wasn't too surprised that Trump didn't know the President of Ireland (a primarily ceremonial post) is a woman. He's lucky that President Catherine Connolly wasn't there. She doesn't suffer fools gladly.
Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch had a long, excellent piece on the Joe Kent resignation. The following are the concluding paragraphs:
Is Stewart Rhodes an earnest postliberal chud? Indubitably. But I think he also senses that soon there’ll be more political juice to be squeezed from the postliberal right by being anti-Israel than by being pro-Trump. The same goes for Joe Kent, who’s never had as much clout as he has now—so much so, I think, that if and when “America Firsters” start sniffing around for a candidate to challenge Vance from the right in 2028, he’ll be an obvious alternative if Carlson refuses to do it.
Especially if this already unpopular war goes bad. Kent is shrewdly pulling the ripcord at a moment when Trump is poised to use ground troops to end the regime’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz; deploying infantry polled terribly when it was hypothetical and will poll catastrophically if it ends with American soldiers being killed. The more dangerous this conflict gets for the United States, the more prescient and defensible Kent’s resignation will seem to many in hindsight. Even to some Republicans who are backing Trump for now.
And honestly, as a matter of basic political calculation, which sounds better? Sticking around as counterterrorism chief for a president whom you know will blame you if Iran manages to pull off a terror attack on U.S. soil? Or bailing out now and having endless bouquets thrown at you by Israel’s many Americans critics for demagoguing the Jewish state so unapologetically?
In a party dominated by postliberal chuds, there’s really no downside to what Kent did. I’m sure his interview with Tucker is already booked.
Nick has seen the MAGA crackup coming for some time. It helps that he's more cynical than JVL when it comes to the moral poverty of the GOP and its voters.
The Dispatch drives me crazy, but if they were all more like Nick Catoggio, I'd probably subscribe as they'd drive me crazy much less. They've grown on me this year, I don't know exactly why. They seem less fascist-curious under Trump II.
I subbed for a year, and every time I read anything that wasn't Nick, I was yelling at my screen. They are the epitome of the anti-anti heads up their own asses, sniffing their own farts cohort. it was just infuriating to read any of them.
Part of it's KDW's (Williamson's) willingness to mince even fewer words than he used to.
Though he had a reputation for not mincing words before, writing for a readership inevitably depends somewhat on what the readership is willing to hear. Someone relatively willing to broach tough truths about a coalition to those in the coalition may still mince words to do it. (Back when I read NR with any regularity, I had supposed the readership might be ready to hear some of the warnings KDW was already giving. Apparently a lot less ready than I had expected!) He's mincing less now.
I used to read The Dispatch, but they seemed too wanly anti-Trump for me. Sarah Isgur seemed like she thought Trump was just a speed bump which conservatism would soon get over. Maybe Trump 2.0 has wised them up,
Well my Costco Phoenix gas station went from $2.75 four weeks ago to $4.29 this morning, and that’s the lowest price according to Gas Buddy, at least in my area of Phoenix. So that’s up $1.54 in less than a month. CNBC reported a sharp rise in the producer price index this morning, and this did not include the full effects of energy price increases. This would never have happened if Trump was President. Joe Biden is destroying the economy.
Don’t forget it was also Hillary, Kamala & Barrack HUSSEIN Obama! It’s all the weak democrats fault. And somehow, these accusations are embraced by the ship of fools led by the Orange ‘very stable’ genius
Andrew: "Trump, he wrote, had been “deceived” by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” into abandoning his antiwar instincts and charging into an unwinnable conflict in Iran."
Someone should ask Kent what evidence is there that Trump had antiwar instincts to begin with. After all, Trump's the same guy that threatened to take Greenland by force and is the same guy that attacked Iran last summer. If Trump were antiwar, why is Canada running scenarios of a US attack? Trump *ran* on being antiwar, but like everything else, you can't believe a word coming out of his mouth.
The thing that I've always found amusing about guys like Kent is they believe we can't draw our own informed conclusions about how Trump behaves.
Kent, like so many, can’t simply say “the President was wrong.” It’s always “bad advice.” But if DJT is the mega-genius strategist, bad advice wouldn’t matter. These deflections just make DJT look weak and easily manipulated—which is probably true, but not what Kent is trying to say.
I think this is spot-on, but the sad truth is that the Trumpista segment of MAGA appears utterly incapable of recognizing that Trump is an easily-led moron.
So while the dictator-president being led around by a variety of sycophants and charlatans looks weak to us, the people who we've somewhat Quixotically wished would "wake up" will never see it.
The usefulness of this break-up will depend on whether the isolationist MAGAs will stick to their guns, or if they'll just throw in with the Trumpistas in supporting Trump III, or whoever becomes the annointed successor, when the isolationist wing loses in the primary--or vice versa.
Remember the "country club Republicans" who despised Trump but threw in with him in the end because "nothing could be worse than Hillary" (or Biden, or a woman of color, or whatever they're busy hating today)...among whom I count a lot of former friends.
Yair Rosenberg at the Atlantic wrote about this in his newsletter this morning. Trump is very obviously pro-war, always has been, and he's especially belligerent to Iran. Rosenberg went back to the 1980s to show that Trump has been drooling for war since then. I mean, it's a shame nobody did this during the election season, but also, do we have to spoon feed people information when they're the damn director of the National Counterterrorism Center? That's a guy who can't read?
"If only Trump had read this paragraph before launching his hubristic war. If only Pete Hegseth had read it before boasting about our inevitable success. I suppose it’s out of the question that either would have done so. But is it out of the question to look forward to a day when we will once again have leaders who might not only know the name Churchill, but have learned from him?"
Bill, come on. You know that to read, and more importantly, understand Churchill one needs more than third grade reading and comprehension skills, while learning from him is at least Junior High School (and I mean no disrespect to third graders or Junior High School students).
Probably all Trump knows about Churchill is that he is revered as a great leader. He has no idea that that leadership was employed in the defeat of men like him.
I think that Trump, in his frighteningly simplistic understanding of history, believes he is the reverse Churchill, since he (as Churchill) is now asking Sterner ( as Roosevelt) for British help in a war. Roosevelt did as much as he could to help, but was limited by a strong “America First movement. Somebody on his staff forgot to remind Trump that we didn’t enter the war until we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. Or, maybe, Trump just said the first thing that popped into his head. Nine times out of ten, that’s the reason he says anything.
Trump says Starmer's no Churchill because Kier's never been played by Gary Oldman in a major motion picture. Nor will he ever be anything on-screen other than an inspiration for a minor character played by some C-Lister you've never heard of. Trump, OTOH, was the STAR of a long-running TV show so successful no one's ever seen anything like it. So, to be honest, Churchill's no Trump either, and he looked like a dog, and America had to bail him out anyway, so it wasn't like HE beat the Nazis. (Trump has heard from the most reliable source that Stalin really deserves the credit, because he was very very tough.) Still, for a Brit, Winston was pretty good... for a Brit. Not Sir Oswald good on the politics, but he did well enough in the ratings.
Since Ireland was mentioned, I wanted to give a tariff story. I had not purchased sweaters in years so went to the Irish Store a website that sells woolen goods made in Ireland.
These are a specialty and they sell particularly to Americans and Canadians of Irish descent.
The wool from Ireland is exceptional for these warm sweaters. The knitting is an Irish specialty - often a home craft, even now.
There is no American equivalent, nor should there be. But I had to pay "duties" just because a crazy person thinks it helps.
It does not. I can afford the duties for these wonderful woolens but... why the tariff?
in any case, this does not represent a career path for Americans. We don't have the sheep with heavy coats of wool to protect from the cold and damp, and we don't have legions of persons who grew up learning the various stitches for the wonderful designs. And the shipping is done by Fed Ex which has a branch located almost next door to the Irish store - so an American shipper carries the freight. It is absurd.
We visited Belfast and the wall that separated the Protestant and catholics.( I told this story once before but it gives me laughs).At a particular stop, our tourist guide gave us all sharpies so we could write a message on the wall. My part of the wall had quite a few messages with expletives about DJT. So in my snarkastic, smart ass attitude I wrote just above them: Pete Buttigieg for President in 2028!
I'm a knitter - not an economist - and the U.S. had little to no wool infrastructure, last I looked. We have some sheep, and a bunch of small business that spin and dye specialty yarn, but I think we're missing a ton of the processing in the middle. I think there are a few all U.S. sheep to skein places (and they run jenky to extremely spendy) but I'm assuming the tariffs just absolutely wiped out a ton of small American companies that depended on other counties for part of their production.
There's been a lot of work the last few decades to try and help, but going to yarn shops and seeing empty shelves and skyrocking prices has made it too depressing for me to look into. We *can* produce absolutely beautiful wool (I've knit yarn from many countries, including Ireland) but it's just complicated and expensive to do in bulk.
For those interested in wool, the author Clara Parkes did an amazing series in 2012 where she crowd funded a 676 lb bale of merino wool and followed it from raw to the finished yarn, documenting the production and the decline of American manufacturing (if memory serves.)
in any case unlike where the US could saw we lost our making to steel to... whomever, the Irish Sweaters and scarves were never something the USA even attempted. Even when textiles were important, it was cotton as the most important and ... well no one made Irish fisherman's sweaters. (or Fair Isle sweaters or Scotland)
"Yesterday, a Washington Post report on the vibe shift among the right-wing youth of D.C. contained this interesting quote: “What is cool now is being brave enough to critique the administration for not fulfilling their campaign promises.”"
AH HA HA HA HA remember when the Post used to be a newspaper?
I wish there was a contest for the dumbest line ever printed by a newspaper because this has got to win, hands down. If only the Post was as cool as the cool kids who ... critique administrations? Yeah, that's a coolness the Post will never understand, even though they helped invent it. Sad, really. But also darkly funny in a gallows sort of way. Especially since I know a few Zoomers and they and their friends critique the administration by calling them racist pedophiles. But the Post missed that elephant, yet again.
Do the cool kids read Marc Thiessen and or the current Editorial Board blather? WAPO continues to shed subscribers, I keep my sub only because after multiple attempts at cancellation it is too cheap to ignore the observation of decline.
At $1 a month, I find their original reporting valuble, and it is still the local paper that's still somewhat useful for local news. But I'm willing to pay more for the Bulwark than the Post, which is a strange state of affairs.
I don’t get your critique. Read the comment section at The Free Press: it’s full of people who remain ardently pro-Trump. Same at the WSJ (although there is also a critical group, unlike TFP).
I found it ironic that a newspaper would call critiquing an administration bravery. As if they were amazed someone could be "brave enough" to "critique the administration for not fulfilling campaign promises." That's not bravery, that's having eyes and ears. Is that brave to them? A Newspaper? The Post?
"Is it out of the question to look forward to a day when we will once again have leaders who might not only know the name Churchill, but have learned from him?"
More important question: Can we peer far enough into the future to imagine a public with the wisdom and fortitude to elect and support such leaders? I regret to say that my old eyes cannot.
If Trump had been part of the UK Conservative Party in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, during Churchill’s wilderness years, he would have said “I don’t know the guy.”
Bondi's supposed appearance by subpoena is, sadly, irrelevant. Swearing the oath to be truthful is irrelevant to the supporters of the orange narcissist-felon. Comer will lob soft balls, Bondi will evade and obfuscate vs. every question she finds contrary to her self-interest--serving the orange narcissist-felon slavishly.
I picked the word 'slavishly' with care. The army of sycophant-enablers--the GOP members of 'congress,' the 'supreme' court, every other significant administrative activity--is in thrall to the orange narcissist-felon. Nothing will sway them in their position, regardless of the facts about the ill-advised war, the economy, inflation . . . the gamut of misery foisted on us, the people, by the fleeting whims of a man whose hypnotic influence is changing the world, for the worse.
Bondi has been far more aggressive in hearings, equipped with her pre-written barbs directed at various House members. Noem didn't seem to have that sort of aggression and somehow lost the bravado she once had. Perhaps she already knew she was on the White House's bad list.
The cries about anti-semitism in the colleges and universities were a ploy and it worked.
But Jews are much safer in an Ivy League campus than they are in the heartland. Yes there is genuine anti-Israel sentiment among young progressives - and much comes from the general thrust of anti-colonialism. But the anti semitism that is really pervasive and will outlast the recent wars, well it is not centered in universities.
Sadly, even if the Mad King and Kegsbreath read the passage you offer from Winnie, they would not understand the implications.
Both are acutely uninsightful living a superficial existence with bizarre concepts of life.
BTW, growing up watching NYC's St. Patrick's Day Parade with my Irish immigrant grandmother, I never heard or experienced being pinched for not wearing green.
The antisemitism and neo-nazism among the young Republicans is a huge problem. Here in Florida there have been news stories made of not one but two instances of young college Republicans going full Nazi, earlier at Florida International University (FIU) and more recently at the University of Florida.
Kent is part of that movement, along with folks like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
The kids are not alright.
Does this just come with the territory? I am confused as to how this suddenly became cool and edgy with this crowd. Antisemitism is one of the oldest, tiredest and most worn out forms of bigotry out there and yet like a dog to its vomit.
Every conspiracy theory leads here, and the podcasters have been bragging about how cool their conspiracy theories are for a decade.
Indeed. Once you start down that conspiracy theory rabbit hole, it always gets to the Jews. 100% of the time.
Yes. They have been railing against George Soros for a long time as an example.
They don't know how old antisemitism is. To them history began roughly when they were born. Nothing that happened before then has any relevance to them and probably isn't real to them...just some lies told by people they don't know or respect.
More like history began in 2000 to them. That said, when your entire world view is based on bitterness, grievance and hate, and you hate everybody, you eventually get around to hating the people who have been hated the longest.
Fun fact: some folks voting this fall in 2026 were born in 2008. So, I do think Max Skinner is probably right, there's adults voting in this election who see 9/11 as ancient history, kind of like how I thought of Vietnam or others might have thought of Pearl Harbor. And they also have only ever grown up in a world where a black man can be elected president. I remember how much race played into the lead up to the election of Obama in '08 and then afterward.
I genuinely fear for the future. In ten-fifteen years, my GenX generation will be retired, and these asshats will be running everything. An entire generation has been raised in an America where someone as objectively awful as Trump can be elected president,...twice, on two separate occasions (they witnessed Trump 1.0 and said, "yeah, give me more of THAT!"). And I'm not even passing judgement on the policies, just the man, his demeanor and his behavior. An entire generation of Americans has been raised in an America where you are allowed to say anything, to anybody, at any time, and there is no limitation imposed by decorum, politeness, or class. None.
It's one thing to think the way the MAGAs do. Americans have always thought that way, especially in the lower classes, but that used to be the quiet part that was never said out loud. Now, filters be damned, just spew all of your hatred, prejudices and grievances, and f*ck the other guys' feelings. What kind of country will that be to live in? I shudder to think.
Finally, we paid a VERY high price for Obama being elected before the country was truly ready for a black president. And, we were NOT ready in 2008 - the occupation in Iraq, the economic crash, and Hillary Clinton being the only other option was the witches' brew that made it possible. I'm not rendering judgement on whether or not it was worth it, but it was a high price, indeed. It led to the outing of racism we see now, and directly to the awful presidencies of Donald Trump (with Biden's disastrous term sandwiched in between).
As Charlie Sykes has pointed out, there has always been some fringe element like this in the Republican Party. What was once a small recessive gene has become larger and a lot less on the fringe.
"Impeach Earl Warren." The Koch's old man was a founder of the John Birch Society, which even Barry Goldwater and WF Buckey regarded as over the top.
Many of the statements made about the IDF, recently in Gaza and over the years, have had a strong resemblance to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff.
Except the IDF has committed war crimes in Gaza and lied about what their soldiers did, and had to change the story as more evidence came out — evidence they thought didn’t exist — most notably the attack and massacre of the paramedics and Red Crescent workers on 03/23/2025. This doesn’t make me confident I can trust what the IDF says about their conduct. But that isn’t antisemitism but rather the Israeli army not being honest about their conduct and worried more how that looks than accountability for what happened. Demanding accountability from Israel is not the veering into the Protocols of Zion.
There ought to be a way for people to voice criticism of the Israeli government's conduct of the war on Gaza. The destruction of so much infrastructure and the high civilian casualties in Gaza have been appalling.
Criticizing Israel for that is justified, I think.
The antisemitism shown by those college students is something darker and unacceptable.
Yes! I'm an American Jew who's been against Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing for decades. It's more than fine to be against Israeli governmental action. But it's not ok to turn it into hatred of the Jewish people, our religion, our traditions. You're correct! What's happening today is dark and unacceptable. It's dangerous for all of us, not just for Jewish people. Hatred like this is cancerous.
Be aware that Hamas digging in under homes, schools, hospitals and mosques was itself a war crime.
Americans have no idea what it’s like to fight an enemy as insidious as Hamas and the other terrorist organizations that inhabit places like Gaza. Judging Israel and the IDF tactics by our sanitized American, or even western standards is unfair. We didn’t go through October 7th. Israel knows how to deal with the monsters hiding in the shadows in Gaza, and a lot of “innocent” Gazens harbor and at least sympathize with Hamas.
At some point in time the story of how Netanyahu aided, abetted Hamas and turned a blind eye to the money funding them will be fully fleshed out. Netanyahu saw Hamas as a way of stymying Fatah and the development of a Palestinian state which he has never wanted, and if that meant supporting Hamas in Gaza then so be it. No one’s hands are clean.
I don't, think "sympathies" quite gets it, but willing human shields and medical staff who are also Hamas might. Look at Al Sharfa hospital. Look at clearly fake stats from "Gaza Health authorities."
Quite frankly, the more you and others conflate criticism of Israel and antisemitism, the more claims of antisemitism ring hollow and people learn to ignore them. Please read the story of the boy who cried wolf. Claims of antisemitism related to Israel are already to the point where I and many others begin with a strong presumption that they are made in bad faith.
That presumption has rarely been shown to be wrong.
To a Jewish person who has lived experience as a Jew it is rational to question whether criticism is just the stated rationale or if there is an additional, unspoken basis for it. Antisemitism is a very old, very deep set form of bigotry.
In writing that the IDF has been the subject of antisemitic propaganda, I did not claim absolute purity for them in Gaza. I have read more than once that the IDF is a professionally run as US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have been accused of all sorts of crimes, including genocide, but to my knowledge the only charge that has struck is withholding food and electricity from the entire population in order to withhold them from Hamas--who, it must be noted, committed a war crime by interspersing themselves with civilians in the first place. Do you have a reference for the conclusion the the 3/23 tragedy was in fact a deliberate attack on non-combatants?
There are multiple accounts of the attack and subsequent massacre with the bodies all buried in a shallow grave. There are also accounts of the changing Israeli story which was disproven by cell phone evidence from one of the paramedics which was found at the site and continued recording during the attack. There was also a survivor who was taken and held by the Israelis after the attack — he survived because he spoke to them in Hebrew which made them pause and ultimately not kill him — he was ultimately released due to international pressure after being tortured. Wikipedia has a page on the incident if that is a place you want to start with, but there are multiple accounts of what happened. There are many other credible accounts of war crimes but this is one has some of the best evidence. There are also accounts from physicians treating victims under the age of 10 with single bullet wounds to the head — many of the physicians worked in other war zones and commented they had never seen children targeted the same way. The Israeli army is differently structured from the US military with local commanders having much more discretion than ours do over how their troops behave and what and how targets are selected.
It's been over 5000 years of history. Jews continue to be considered easy targets still. But we persist.
If it were only the Republicans. The antisemitism is coming from all areas, I think. But yes, these young college clubs of rich kids get a lot of press for their reprehensible views. I somehow suspect the poor kids aren't doing much better.
Tucker Carlson. What do we do if he's our next POTUS? Things can get worse. I mean, I try to remind myself that good things can happen. But with Tucker Carlson in charge? Nope, no they can't.
Tucker Carlson President? No way. Won’t happen. Next thing you’ll be telling me is Donald Trump could be President. Get real.
Tucker for President would present a humorous conundrum for Faux News - once one of their own who became its sacrificial lamb - if it ever started to look like he could win the GOP primary - oh lordy....
I think this war opens up the very real possibility that Carlson campaigns for president on an anti-war platform, ha ha ha ha ha giddy laughter ... what is happening here?
Is Carlson electable? I have my doubts!
I had those same doubts about just about every single elected Republican, and yet there they are, trying to cancel measles vaccines and kissing Putin's ass and somehow not being ridden out of town on a rail.
He's as electable as Trump
And take everybody seriously, not dismissively.
Nah. Not electable. His maniacal cackle is worse than Ms. Harris's chuckle was, and that laugh was a big reason she was unelectable. No worries. ( /s )
(Okay, typed in sarcastic font but it occurs to me that many American voters might really choose candidates based on personal mannerisms rather than experience, ideology, or policy proposals - so who knows at this point. )
Actually I think Mr. Carlson IS electable. :-/
Her laugh was nowhere near a reason she was unelectable. She was unelectable because a majority of Americans could never imagined her as president. Some of this was gender and race, but most of it was because she had been defined as inarticulate, vapid, and incompetent. Even if someone is in that minuscule minority who truly in their heart of hearts believes those things aren’t true, they can’t deny that is how she was effectively defined.
exactly why I used sarcasm font - so many digs at her chuckle, as proxy for everything else that resulted in too many voters either staying home or voting for Trump.
At one time people laughed about Donald Trump. Then he is elected twice. Carlson is such a low possibility but given American voters lately, it can't be dismissed.
Imagine A25 pushing Trump out giving us Vance as POTUS. Who would he pick as a VP? Tucker? There is no respite except drawing out the next couple of years into a legal challenge gridlock.
Neither are the grown-ups alright. In the '30s, Heinrich Himmler maintained a slush fund. Corporations, including American corporations, were required to contribute on a regular basis as a condition of doing business in Germany. The money was used to fund the SS. Currently, Trump appears to be working on a scheme in which companies wishing for favor use Trump's stablecoin, USD1, to do business. US dollars are what makes stable coins stable, and the issuer of stable coins must hold the real money until and unless someone wants to redeem. While the cash is held, it is invested in US Treasuries, or similar. In just a year, USD1 has gone from nothing to holding more than $5 billion, which earns the owners of the fund hundreds of millions per year in interest. Chengpeng Zhao, of Binance, and the UAE have already been beneficiaries. It is reported that the nation Pakistan has pledged to use USD1 for all foreign transfers.
Holy moly. I had no idea. What a wake up call regarding the dangers of crypto, particularly as it seeks to become more legit. At the moment, the Trumps are ready to legitimize _anything_, for the right price, and the Trump and Witkoff kids are happy to grift right out in the open. But it's easy to overlook in the rush of events, so thanks for the info!!
Your post inspired me to dig a little, starting with the Pakistan angle; here's a non-paywalled article from January in case others want a head start:
> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-backed-wlfi-usd1-stablecoin-104715883.html
Not to mention the meme coins put out by World Liberty Financial,the Trump mother company of USD1. $Trump, $Melania... .
There’s nothing new here. Antisemitism is a tried and true centuries old tradition among people looking for a scapegoat for their self sabotaged lives.
Tom Lehrer put it this way over 60 years ago:
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews
Does anyone think that we’re in the times we’re in because people are mentally and emotionally healthier??
also cue up Kingston Trio Merry Minuet. Writer Sheldon Harnick didn't specifically mention Jews as a target but might be between the lines?
The Jews have been hated for millennia, first for their mono-theistic religious beliefs. Then they crucified Jesus, and the hatred ramped up to a million, when Christianity eventually became the dominant religion in the world.
Actually, it was Roman soldiers under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who crucified Jesus.
That said, your answer in it's wrongful, blind, ignorance, very usefully points out part of what fuels centuries of antisemitic insanity.
You are technically correct that Pilot and the Romans pronounced and carried out the sentence. But, the bible details how the crucifixion was instigated by the Jews, and Pilot wanted to set Jesus free after his initial interrogation, because he couldn’t find a Roman crime to accuse him of. In fact, the Jews chose Barabas for clemency over Jesus. It wasn’t the Romans who paid Judas.
And I’m not antisemitic or anti Israel at all. I’m a total supporter of Israel in virtually every action they take, including Gaza. I was merely pointing out that Christians have blamed Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion for millennia, and that’s one major reason Jews have been persecuted by everyone in the western world ever since.
Thank you for that clarification. My apologies. You are correct that Jesus was considered a political danger by the elite in Judea at that time, so they did what they could to silence him, and deliver him to the Romans to finish the job.
The other reason that Jews have been persecuted is that killing them was an excellent way for a ruler to cancel a debt to another ruler, without paying that debt.
This had to do with Church prohibitions regarding usury. Since Jews were going to hell anyway, for being Jews, they could handle financial transactions that Christians were forbidden to do, such as making loans for profit.
When prince "A" needed money to fund a war, the money could be lent by prince "B", using Jews to handle the loan. Jews from different countries shared common languages, Aramaic, Hebrew, and later Yiddish and Ladino, so they could handle negotiations that their ruler could not.
If prince "A" decided that paying the loan was undesirable, starting a blood libel, such as Jews using the blood of Christian babies to make their matzo, and stirring the populace into a murderous frenzy, would kill off the participants. Loan payment cancelled. This is also the origin for the "Jew Banker" trope.
Interesting.
Then again, I guess the Medici and the other Florentine renaissance bankers weren’t very Christian. They made a lot of profit from loaning money. 😉
It’s sad. AIPAC is in bed with the leadership, but the young guns are all Full throated Nazi’s on Crack. It should be interesting watching as this movement self implodes!
What’s the adage: “Beware of what you wish for”……:)
Just wait, this is just cover for more white supremacy action against the 'browns and blacks'. Even browns and blacks have their anti Semitic adherents. This reminds me of when the GOP used anti abortion rhetoric as a more acceptable moral issue to rally around as cover for their real issue, maintaining segregated private schools. The Klan was also anti semitic, but Jews were never the real target.
The hunger of the boot is never satiated. It will consume everyone and everything in it's path and then consume itself.
True the antisemitism is what gets talked about, but really that sometimes masks the iceberg floating beneath.
"First they came for..."
We have all been labelled the Enemy Within. Order of coming for TBA.
Typo? At all bright?
The scary thing is the antisemitic youth movement in the GOP shows quite a bit of low cunning
Low cunning is what a belly-crawling fox trying to score in a poorly guarded hen house might exhibit. Not necessarily something to emulate.
In Lake Woebegone, the children are all above-average.
And the woman good looking.
The GOP is returning to its 1920s-1930s incarnation, when it was virulently nativist and sympathetic to fascism.
And isolationist.
As bad as the last ten years have been, the next ten years could be worse, as the current crop of young Republicans are very online, they're almost all men, and their entire political experience has been in a post-Trump world. And all day they marinate in gamergate-style edgelord nihilism, where it's a perpetual contest to see who can be the most antisemitic, racist, and misogynist. The GOP of the future is going to be even crazier.
Some group will wind up confronting them physically. I remember growing up in the 1980s and the kind of talk amongst my pretty large family was universally something like, “The only way to handle Nazis is to punch them in the face.” The First Amendment offers no protection from fellow citizens.
"If only Trump had read this paragraph before launching his hubristic war."
If only trump could read. As we know, he even has difficulty with the teleprompter. Even if he could read, he wouldn't understand. Even if he understood, as is increasingly evident, he wouldn't remember. Even if he remembered, there is little reason to think that it would shape his actions. Those all emanate from his (ample) gut.
I am unable to determine if frump is a 10-year-old spoiled brat or a 79-year-old mentally ill evil man or the combination. I am so confused why the media ignores the obvious decline with vocabulary, memory, and obvious physical declines including sleeping in public.
I love what you did there! Kind of like below, except there was actual method to the old lady's madness!
"There was an old lady that swallowed a dog;
What a hog to swallow a dog!
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!"
Needed that
I think that is why we get so much explanation that he was going with his gut and he will know it when he thinks it.
He does not do the deep consideration of all that he has in front of him to make a decision. That has been confirmed by most everyone that has been in his White House.
Decisions are made on what he wants to happen, specifically what will make him look good, richer and more powerful.
That’s much easier analysis.
Follow the money!
Agree. Reading Churchill's elegant, concise and inspiring prose -then hearing or reading Trump's latest bleat, tweet or blurt or belch is just sickening by comparison.
If you mentioned Winston Churchill to Trump, he wouldn't know who he was, except that he must be a very very bad person fancy woke show-off using big words and complete sentences that are not even in praise Of our dear Donald. What a loser!
It shows how far America has gone in what Karl Popper,in his 1946 book "The Open Society and It's Enemies", called the "revolt against reason".
He was writing about Germany in the 1930's and warning democracies that it could all happen again if they didn't learn from the past. We didn't, and it will.
That is assuming he can read which I have my doubts. Remember his Presidential briefings are done in graphics to hold his attention.
Our current president now lives totally in his own fantasy world. He has constructed his own version of history in which he never lost an election, he never knew Epstein, NATO never came to our aid, and he carefully planned the war in Iran and was prepared for every possible response. He presents a fantasy present, that he are about to finish the war, take over Cuba, and fight the war in Iran until they.... do something he will decide on soon. His view of the future is that he will be president forever and own all the oil reserves in the world. Anyone who questions these fantasies will be threatened with. the loss of their job, public humiliation, and perhaps bodily harm, but that won't be his fault.
Yes, if only the idiot could read!
And had any cognitive skills.
And had any integrity or decency.
Wouldn’t those be lovely attributes for our president to have?
There have happily been wins in the courts lately - thank God for this!
But just think of the zillions of dollars and human energy spent under this administration. They do bad things, illegal things resulting in nearly everything being dragged and redragged through our legal system.
The idiot does love him some lawsuits, doesn’t he?
What an incredible near criminal waste of time energy and money.
Or per a few days ago, his bones…..
More likely his bone spurs....
He'll get to it as soon as he's finished Mein Kampf.
RE: The NYT report of "the second-biggest four-week [gas price] increase in at least 30 years" with only "Hurricane Katrina [hitting] prices harder during that span."
I guess we should actually count ourselves at least a *little bit* lucky at this point, considering the severity of the continuous, unrelenting and unpredictable gusts from the Category 5 blowhard that's been back in the Oval Office for a little over a year now.
But sadly, I'm guessing FEMA will be of little use at all in helping to clean up the mess after this latest disaster.
...so this is Trump's Katrina? Wow, another way he's copying Dubya!
It doesn't end with the economic or political ramifications. I'm certain somewhere in the middle east someone(s) are coming together to start planning new waves of terrorist attacks here in the US - probably years from fruition, but I'm certain we've fed the beast.
Drill baby drill! :(
I had a great laugh when Irish Taoiseach, Michael Martin was defending a British Prime Minister on Saint Patrick's Day against Trump's foolish rants. I guess I wasn't too surprised that Trump didn't know the President of Ireland (a primarily ceremonial post) is a woman. He's lucky that President Catherine Connolly wasn't there. She doesn't suffer fools gladly.
DJT seems to be having trouble keeping his genders straight. He calls the President of Ireland he and the woman President of Venezuela, he.
Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch had a long, excellent piece on the Joe Kent resignation. The following are the concluding paragraphs:
Is Stewart Rhodes an earnest postliberal chud? Indubitably. But I think he also senses that soon there’ll be more political juice to be squeezed from the postliberal right by being anti-Israel than by being pro-Trump. The same goes for Joe Kent, who’s never had as much clout as he has now—so much so, I think, that if and when “America Firsters” start sniffing around for a candidate to challenge Vance from the right in 2028, he’ll be an obvious alternative if Carlson refuses to do it.
Especially if this already unpopular war goes bad. Kent is shrewdly pulling the ripcord at a moment when Trump is poised to use ground troops to end the regime’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz; deploying infantry polled terribly when it was hypothetical and will poll catastrophically if it ends with American soldiers being killed. The more dangerous this conflict gets for the United States, the more prescient and defensible Kent’s resignation will seem to many in hindsight. Even to some Republicans who are backing Trump for now.
And honestly, as a matter of basic political calculation, which sounds better? Sticking around as counterterrorism chief for a president whom you know will blame you if Iran manages to pull off a terror attack on U.S. soil? Or bailing out now and having endless bouquets thrown at you by Israel’s many Americans critics for demagoguing the Jewish state so unapologetically?
In a party dominated by postliberal chuds, there’s really no downside to what Kent did. I’m sure his interview with Tucker is already booked.
Nick has seen the MAGA crackup coming for some time. It helps that he's more cynical than JVL when it comes to the moral poverty of the GOP and its voters.
The Dispatch drives me crazy, but if they were all more like Nick Catoggio, I'd probably subscribe as they'd drive me crazy much less. They've grown on me this year, I don't know exactly why. They seem less fascist-curious under Trump II.
I subbed for a year, and every time I read anything that wasn't Nick, I was yelling at my screen. They are the epitome of the anti-anti heads up their own asses, sniffing their own farts cohort. it was just infuriating to read any of them.
Part of it's KDW's (Williamson's) willingness to mince even fewer words than he used to.
Though he had a reputation for not mincing words before, writing for a readership inevitably depends somewhat on what the readership is willing to hear. Someone relatively willing to broach tough truths about a coalition to those in the coalition may still mince words to do it. (Back when I read NR with any regularity, I had supposed the readership might be ready to hear some of the warnings KDW was already giving. Apparently a lot less ready than I had expected!) He's mincing less now.
I used to read The Dispatch, but they seemed too wanly anti-Trump for me. Sarah Isgur seemed like she thought Trump was just a speed bump which conservatism would soon get over. Maybe Trump 2.0 has wised them up,
Well my Costco Phoenix gas station went from $2.75 four weeks ago to $4.29 this morning, and that’s the lowest price according to Gas Buddy, at least in my area of Phoenix. So that’s up $1.54 in less than a month. CNBC reported a sharp rise in the producer price index this morning, and this did not include the full effects of energy price increases. This would never have happened if Trump was President. Joe Biden is destroying the economy.
Lol. Pop quiz for the nation: Who was president in 2020?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Don’t forget it was also Hillary, Kamala & Barrack HUSSEIN Obama! It’s all the weak democrats fault. And somehow, these accusations are embraced by the ship of fools led by the Orange ‘very stable’ genius
Oh but Trumpster says gas prices will come down quickly!
And Hassert says consumers getting hurt are "really the last of our concerns right now". https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/economy/last-of-our-concerns-trump-economic-adviser-dismisses-consumer-concerns-on-gas-price-hike/ar-AA1YRhpZ Attention, Democrats! The Cabinet Quacks are writing your ad campaigns.
Nice campaign ads; suitable for framing!
Andrew: "Trump, he wrote, had been “deceived” by “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” into abandoning his antiwar instincts and charging into an unwinnable conflict in Iran."
Someone should ask Kent what evidence is there that Trump had antiwar instincts to begin with. After all, Trump's the same guy that threatened to take Greenland by force and is the same guy that attacked Iran last summer. If Trump were antiwar, why is Canada running scenarios of a US attack? Trump *ran* on being antiwar, but like everything else, you can't believe a word coming out of his mouth.
The thing that I've always found amusing about guys like Kent is they believe we can't draw our own informed conclusions about how Trump behaves.
Kent, like so many, can’t simply say “the President was wrong.” It’s always “bad advice.” But if DJT is the mega-genius strategist, bad advice wouldn’t matter. These deflections just make DJT look weak and easily manipulated—which is probably true, but not what Kent is trying to say.
I think this is spot-on, but the sad truth is that the Trumpista segment of MAGA appears utterly incapable of recognizing that Trump is an easily-led moron.
So while the dictator-president being led around by a variety of sycophants and charlatans looks weak to us, the people who we've somewhat Quixotically wished would "wake up" will never see it.
The usefulness of this break-up will depend on whether the isolationist MAGAs will stick to their guns, or if they'll just throw in with the Trumpistas in supporting Trump III, or whoever becomes the annointed successor, when the isolationist wing loses in the primary--or vice versa.
Remember the "country club Republicans" who despised Trump but threw in with him in the end because "nothing could be worse than Hillary" (or Biden, or a woman of color, or whatever they're busy hating today)...among whom I count a lot of former friends.
Yair Rosenberg at the Atlantic wrote about this in his newsletter this morning. Trump is very obviously pro-war, always has been, and he's especially belligerent to Iran. Rosenberg went back to the 1980s to show that Trump has been drooling for war since then. I mean, it's a shame nobody did this during the election season, but also, do we have to spoon feed people information when they're the damn director of the National Counterterrorism Center? That's a guy who can't read?
Thank you for putting the fadas in Micheál Martin's name. A lot of media just skip them. But it means a lot to those of us who speak Irish.
"If only Trump had read this paragraph before launching his hubristic war. If only Pete Hegseth had read it before boasting about our inevitable success. I suppose it’s out of the question that either would have done so. But is it out of the question to look forward to a day when we will once again have leaders who might not only know the name Churchill, but have learned from him?"
Bill, come on. You know that to read, and more importantly, understand Churchill one needs more than third grade reading and comprehension skills, while learning from him is at least Junior High School (and I mean no disrespect to third graders or Junior High School students).
Probably all Trump knows about Churchill is that he is revered as a great leader. He has no idea that that leadership was employed in the defeat of men like him.
After all, Trumpster once asked who the good countries were in WW1 and WW11
I think that Trump, in his frighteningly simplistic understanding of history, believes he is the reverse Churchill, since he (as Churchill) is now asking Sterner ( as Roosevelt) for British help in a war. Roosevelt did as much as he could to help, but was limited by a strong “America First movement. Somebody on his staff forgot to remind Trump that we didn’t enter the war until we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. Or, maybe, Trump just said the first thing that popped into his head. Nine times out of ten, that’s the reason he says anything.
I understand your effort to make sense of the Felon's "weave", aka adult dementia, but your penultimate sentence is closer to the mark, in my opinion.
I can’t believe Trump has read history, although perhaps he picked up some on TV.
Trump says Starmer's no Churchill because Kier's never been played by Gary Oldman in a major motion picture. Nor will he ever be anything on-screen other than an inspiration for a minor character played by some C-Lister you've never heard of. Trump, OTOH, was the STAR of a long-running TV show so successful no one's ever seen anything like it. So, to be honest, Churchill's no Trump either, and he looked like a dog, and America had to bail him out anyway, so it wasn't like HE beat the Nazis. (Trump has heard from the most reliable source that Stalin really deserves the credit, because he was very very tough.) Still, for a Brit, Winston was pretty good... for a Brit. Not Sir Oswald good on the politics, but he did well enough in the ratings.
Since Ireland was mentioned, I wanted to give a tariff story. I had not purchased sweaters in years so went to the Irish Store a website that sells woolen goods made in Ireland.
These are a specialty and they sell particularly to Americans and Canadians of Irish descent.
The wool from Ireland is exceptional for these warm sweaters. The knitting is an Irish specialty - often a home craft, even now.
There is no American equivalent, nor should there be. But I had to pay "duties" just because a crazy person thinks it helps.
It does not. I can afford the duties for these wonderful woolens but... why the tariff?
To protect the American sheep that follow the Orange Shepard
I was in Northern Ireland last year. Heard about those sweaters!
in any case, this does not represent a career path for Americans. We don't have the sheep with heavy coats of wool to protect from the cold and damp, and we don't have legions of persons who grew up learning the various stitches for the wonderful designs. And the shipping is done by Fed Ex which has a branch located almost next door to the Irish store - so an American shipper carries the freight. It is absurd.
We visited Belfast and the wall that separated the Protestant and catholics.( I told this story once before but it gives me laughs).At a particular stop, our tourist guide gave us all sharpies so we could write a message on the wall. My part of the wall had quite a few messages with expletives about DJT. So in my snarkastic, smart ass attitude I wrote just above them: Pete Buttigieg for President in 2028!
I'm a knitter - not an economist - and the U.S. had little to no wool infrastructure, last I looked. We have some sheep, and a bunch of small business that spin and dye specialty yarn, but I think we're missing a ton of the processing in the middle. I think there are a few all U.S. sheep to skein places (and they run jenky to extremely spendy) but I'm assuming the tariffs just absolutely wiped out a ton of small American companies that depended on other counties for part of their production.
There's been a lot of work the last few decades to try and help, but going to yarn shops and seeing empty shelves and skyrocking prices has made it too depressing for me to look into. We *can* produce absolutely beautiful wool (I've knit yarn from many countries, including Ireland) but it's just complicated and expensive to do in bulk.
For those interested in wool, the author Clara Parkes did an amazing series in 2012 where she crowd funded a 676 lb bale of merino wool and followed it from raw to the finished yarn, documenting the production and the decline of American manufacturing (if memory serves.)
in any case unlike where the US could saw we lost our making to steel to... whomever, the Irish Sweaters and scarves were never something the USA even attempted. Even when textiles were important, it was cotton as the most important and ... well no one made Irish fisherman's sweaters. (or Fair Isle sweaters or Scotland)
The tariffs are to raise revenue and sometimes to bully other nations. That’s 100% of their purpose for Trump.
OMG the Footnotes.
"Yesterday, a Washington Post report on the vibe shift among the right-wing youth of D.C. contained this interesting quote: “What is cool now is being brave enough to critique the administration for not fulfilling their campaign promises.”"
AH HA HA HA HA remember when the Post used to be a newspaper?
I wish there was a contest for the dumbest line ever printed by a newspaper because this has got to win, hands down. If only the Post was as cool as the cool kids who ... critique administrations? Yeah, that's a coolness the Post will never understand, even though they helped invent it. Sad, really. But also darkly funny in a gallows sort of way. Especially since I know a few Zoomers and they and their friends critique the administration by calling them racist pedophiles. But the Post missed that elephant, yet again.
Do the cool kids read Marc Thiessen and or the current Editorial Board blather? WAPO continues to shed subscribers, I keep my sub only because after multiple attempts at cancellation it is too cheap to ignore the observation of decline.
At $1 a month, I find their original reporting valuble, and it is still the local paper that's still somewhat useful for local news. But I'm willing to pay more for the Bulwark than the Post, which is a strange state of affairs.
I need to cancel again! I am $4 a month!
I don’t get your critique. Read the comment section at The Free Press: it’s full of people who remain ardently pro-Trump. Same at the WSJ (although there is also a critical group, unlike TFP).
I found it ironic that a newspaper would call critiquing an administration bravery. As if they were amazed someone could be "brave enough" to "critique the administration for not fulfilling campaign promises." That's not bravery, that's having eyes and ears. Is that brave to them? A Newspaper? The Post?
I thought you were saying that Trump had no more supporters.
"Is it out of the question to look forward to a day when we will once again have leaders who might not only know the name Churchill, but have learned from him?"
More important question: Can we peer far enough into the future to imagine a public with the wisdom and fortitude to elect and support such leaders? I regret to say that my old eyes cannot.
If Trump had been part of the UK Conservative Party in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, during Churchill’s wilderness years, he would have said “I don’t know the guy.”
Trump would have been leading the Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, with Musk, Thiel, and Miller saluting at his side!
In court divorce filings, Ivana said that “The Donald” kept a copy of Mein Kampf at his bedside! And here we are!..:)
A volume of Hitler's speeches is what was alleged, not Mein Kampf, but that's not exactly any better.
I stand corrected; thank you, but as you’ve so eloquently stated, “six of one….”…:)
Bondi's supposed appearance by subpoena is, sadly, irrelevant. Swearing the oath to be truthful is irrelevant to the supporters of the orange narcissist-felon. Comer will lob soft balls, Bondi will evade and obfuscate vs. every question she finds contrary to her self-interest--serving the orange narcissist-felon slavishly.
I picked the word 'slavishly' with care. The army of sycophant-enablers--the GOP members of 'congress,' the 'supreme' court, every other significant administrative activity--is in thrall to the orange narcissist-felon. Nothing will sway them in their position, regardless of the facts about the ill-advised war, the economy, inflation . . . the gamut of misery foisted on us, the people, by the fleeting whims of a man whose hypnotic influence is changing the world, for the worse.
Wish i could disagree by even one minuscule point. But - i cannot
Comer will, but others on the committee will be harsher. Noem was fine until she wasn’t. Perhaps a staffer has been able to turn over some rocks.
(One can hope. Though I’m sure the next atty general would be worse, if that’s possible.)
Bondi has been far more aggressive in hearings, equipped with her pre-written barbs directed at various House members. Noem didn't seem to have that sort of aggression and somehow lost the bravado she once had. Perhaps she already knew she was on the White House's bad list.
Depress me summore, why dontcha? The brainwashed followers of the orange narcissist-felon will not be moved (until they are).
Oh great! Another Pam Bondi shriek fest! I can hardly wait!
The cries about anti-semitism in the colleges and universities were a ploy and it worked.
But Jews are much safer in an Ivy League campus than they are in the heartland. Yes there is genuine anti-Israel sentiment among young progressives - and much comes from the general thrust of anti-colonialism. But the anti semitism that is really pervasive and will outlast the recent wars, well it is not centered in universities.
Well said!
Bill,
Thanks for reference to Churchill today.
Sadly, even if the Mad King and Kegsbreath read the passage you offer from Winnie, they would not understand the implications.
Both are acutely uninsightful living a superficial existence with bizarre concepts of life.
BTW, growing up watching NYC's St. Patrick's Day Parade with my Irish immigrant grandmother, I never heard or experienced being pinched for not wearing green.