How ‘Israeli’ Came to Mean ‘Jewish’ in the American Press

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

New York Magazine’s new issue gives new meaning to the term “food Nazi.” The latest edition is dedicated to the proposition that Jews can never fully belong, that they are always visitors to society but never at home. The magazine uses food as the specific lens through which to view this blood-and-soil worldview.

 

The line getting the most attention is the magazine’s description of the State of Israel as “the land mass currently called Israel,” a declaration that New York Magazine doesn’t recognize the Jewish state. And that indeed is quite newsy. But the publication’s discussion of Jews in New York itself makes the story package not just geopolitical gobbledygook but a direct attack on Jews anywhere.

 

The conceit behind the story package is the emergence of a restaurant and cultural scene referred to as SWANA, which stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa. Jewish Israelis, while geographically part of SWANA, are not included, “given the political framework” of the term.

 

Much of the writing in this story package tries to dance around that particular point, but every so often it comes through: “Israelis,” in the context of this new progressive dogma, means “Jews.” An Arab who lives in “the land mass currently called Israel” is obviously not being excluded from this club. Indeed, the “political framework” of the category would elevate what the magazine terms a “Palestinian from the pre-1948 borders” as first among equals.

 

There is of course much irony in the fact that, before 1948, “Palestinian from the pre-1948 borders” would have meant Jews, especially during the portion of the Mandate when Arabs in the Holy Land still considered themselves part of a Syrian polity. But I digress.

 

Let’s take another example from the package: “The Israeli chefs Daniel Soskolne and Loren Abramovitch don’t own a restaurant, nor do they want to; they cook independently under the name LEV, hosting regular pop-ups at an event space in Bed-Stuy where they could be described as the chefs in residence.… In 2021, as their profile was rising, they were called out by the Palestinian artist Amanny Ahmad, who posted on Instagram that LEV ‘made a career out of cooking Palestinian food (under any name but that).’”

 

This was a particularly telling accusation, because as Soskolne says, “We never nationalized our food.” That is, they never claimed it was Israeli or Palestinian or Swamalandian or from the moon. Instead, Soskolne said: “We have so much influence from all over the world. Some of it is Jewish, some of it is not.”

 

You can see in this comment that Soskolne understands the problem from a pro-Palestinian perspective. He was born in Israel, and he cooks some food with Jewish influences, so he should not be allowed to make dishes that are popular among anti-Semites who call Israel by a different name.

 

Again, were Soskolne and Abramovitch “Palestinians from the pre-1948 borders” they would not be protested by this Palestinian racist who told them to stop making falafel.

 

There is a farcical quality to some of this. A person modifying Syrian cooking and calling it Palestinian and then telling a Jew he may not also cook the dish is reminiscent of the line from the Princess Bride in which Vizzini accuses the Man in Black of “trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen.”

 

Abramovitch and Soskolne are an interesting team for progressives to villainize, considering the fact that they have built their careers on coexistence. In the village where Abramovitch grew up, a Jewish Food Society profile from 2021 tells us, Shabbat and holiday meals were occasions for communal dining, giving Abramovitch the Jewish part of the tradition. A few miles away were his Arab friends who he’d watch cook labneh and from whom he learned “a particularly warm approach to hospitality.”

 

It was a combination that became known as “Jewish Palestinian” cuisine. A February 2023 Surface Magazine article about the duo enthuses: “Pairing the culinary traditions of the global Jewish diaspora with Palestinian influences, the duo’s melting-pot cuisine has earned them a devoted following.”

 

The two chefs abide by progressive orthodoxy: They offer ritual denunciations of Israel and accuse it of committing genocide. But is that enough to be SWANA? Probably not, New York informs us: “After October 7, as Israel began its retaliation against Gaza, Abramovitch persuaded Soskolne that they should post about what was going on. On November 9, they wrote on Instagram that they and their friends and family in Israel were ‘suffering from the horrific and brutal acts on Oct 7th’ and ‘suffering from the massive killing in Gaza, the killing of so many innocent people must stop.’”

 

Ah, they recognized the humanity of both Jews and Arabs. And how are the duo trying to make up for this cardinal sin? They are, New York explains, “avoiding cooking falafel.”

Quality Control

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 12,2026

 

Last night was a rough one at the polls for socialists. In both parties.

 

The socialist in chief is forever boasting about the power of his endorsements, but he took an embarrassing “L” in one major race and scored an ominously underwhelming victory in another. The defeat came courtesy of former pillow maven Mike Lindell, who stepped down as CEO of his company last week to focus on becoming governor of Minnesota. Which is a bit like a middle-aged accountant quitting his job to focus on trying out for the NFL.

 

Lindell is one of Trumpworld’s most hallucinatory “rigged election” cranks and Minnesota is a reliably blue state, especially in a national environment as anti-Republican as the present one. His realistic best-case scenario was winning his party’s nomination before getting annihilated in the general election; in the end, GOP primary voters chose to put him out of his misery early, handing him a double-digit defeat. “Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Lindell” is beneath the dignity of even the deeply undignified modern right, it seems.

 

The candidate is processing the people’s verdict just as you’d expect.

 

The president had better luck in South Carolina, where Sen. Darline Graham “won” the race to replace her late brother as the GOP’s nominee for Senate this fall. But as wins go, it wasn’t much of one: Despite Trump’s backing and public sympathy for the Graham family, she took less than 33 percent against a crowded field of conservatives that included former Gov. Mark Sanford, Rep. Russell Fry, and Rep. Ralph Norman, whom she’ll face in a runoff in two weeks.

 

Most of the two-thirds of Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to support Graham are likely to favor Norman in the next round, one would think. (“The long and short of it, she’s got a pretty low ceiling,” one operative told Politico before the vote.) If she loses, it’ll be the second time in two months that a Trump endorsee was defeated in a statewide primary runoff in South Carolina—and the second time in August alone that a Trump endorsee was beaten in a key primary in the deep-red South.

 

I’m too much of a pessimist to believe that the president has “lost his touch” or that Republican voters have begun to practice quality control toward weak candidates after 10 years of brainworm “slopulism.” But if you want to tell yourself a story about the fading influence of a very old, very unpopular president based on the primary results of late, it isn’t hard.

 

The most one can say for Trump’s defeats last night is that both were inconsequential. Republicans were doomed in Minnesota this fall no matter whom they nominated, especially against an opponent as formidable as Amy Klobuchar. And Ralph Norman will serve the president’s agenda in the Senate as faithfully as Darline Graham will.

 

The truly consequential defeat on Tuesday was inflicted on left-wing socialists in Wisconsin, where progressive Francesca Hong shockingly blew a 20-point lead in polling over David Crowley, a guy who dropped out of the race a month ago before re-entering at the Democratic establishment’s behest. Combine that with Abdul El-Sayed’s unexpectedly narrow victory in last week’s Senate primary in Michigan, and we now have a clear trend of “normie” Democratic voters successfully—or almost successfully, in El-Sayed’s case—practicing quality control against questionably electable far-left candidates in important Midwestern battlegrounds.

 

Hong’s defeat is a heavy blow to the supposedly ascendant Democratic Socialists of America. Isn’t it?

 

Winning by losing.

 

Hong spent most of the race dishing out boilerplate left-wing economic populism about universal healthcare and taxing the rich. What turned her into a national figure was coverage of her recently resurfaced musings on abolishing prisons, canceling Thanksgiving, and the “proximity to whiteness” that her biracial son has given her—positions so toxic that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez glibly dismissed them on grounds that “Woke 1 was crazy.”

 

The candidate wasn’t smooth about cleaning up after herself, either. Asked recently by CNN whether she still holds the same views on Thanksgiving, Hong equivocated before lamenting,“Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

 

Essentially, her “Woke 2” campaign against oligarchy and the high cost of living was rebranded in the home stretch as a “Woke 1” campaign of cultural radicalism. And Wisconsin Democrats weren’t going to gamble their party’s chances in a tough gubernatorial race, with a Trumpist election denier waiting on the other side, on a candidate like that. Woke 1 was crazy, they seemed to say last night—and “crazy” wasn’t worth the risk in a general election.

 

Is it really a loss for the DSA, though, that its banner won’t be carried this fall by someone who’s already become a laughingstock for her “Woke 1” positions?

 

Consider that Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the two most prominent socialists in the country, declined to endorse Hong. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren dismissively said “I don’t know her” when asked if she’d support the Wisconsinite.) Sources close to Sanders whispered to Politico that “Hong is less vetted and not as sharp on some of her messaging than other candidates,” in the publication’s words, and noted that the senator didn’t want to be involved in another electoral fiasco after the Graham Platner mess.

 

“Francesca Hong’s loss is the best imaginable result for progressives, because this was the left-wing Doug Mastriano: a completely unelectable candidate with no ability to fundraise,” pollster Lakshya Jain observed last night. Mastriano was such a weak, fringy opponent that Democrats ended up spending money to help him win Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary in 2022; the same happened in reverse this year in Wisconsin, with right-wing groups spending money to help Hong. Had she prevailed yesterday, democratic socialists would have been staring down the barrel of a brutal “DSA candidate fumbles winnable swing state to ‘Stop the Steal’ freak” headline in November, the last thing they need as they try to gain influence within their party. They’ve now been spared that.

 

They’ve also been spared an inevitable national Republican ad campaign aimed at tying all Democratic candidates—but especially progressives—to Hong’s nuttery. Before Tuesday, I saw theories kicking around online that it would be good for other DSA-adjacent candidates like El-Sayed if she won her primary because she’d end up as a lightning rod or “heat shield” for them from right-wing criticism. That strikes me as far-fetched: More likely is that “socialists hate Thanksgiving” talking points would have seeped into other races, scaring off undecideds who already suspect “Woke 2” Democrats of remaining ardently “Woke 1” behind closed doors.

 

I’m particularly skeptical of the “heat shield” logic with respect to El-Sayed, an out-of-central casting bogeyman for nationalists by dint of his radicalism, his brashness, and his Muslim faith. He’s the villain that Republicans thought they were getting in Zohran Mamdani, whose geniality and outreach to Trump has made him harder for them to hate. Hong’s clownishness would not have obscured El-Sayed’s villainy in Republican messaging this fall.

 

Besides, El-Sayed has plenty of “Woke 1” culture-war clownishness in his own Very Online archives for the GOP to exploit. Among other things that CNN recently discovered after sifting through his old YouTube videos (many of which have now been quietly deleted) is an episode in which he “questioned whether football could be ‘ethical’ or ‘safe’ and linked the sport’s ‘ethos’ to narratives used to justify slavery and westward expansion.” This guy is running in Michigan.

 

All told, a Hong victory in the primary would have gained the DSA little or nothing and probably cost it much. It won by losing. And then, across the border in Minnesota, it won by winning: Peggy Flanagan, the state’s lieutenant governor and a staunch progressive endorsed by Sanders, crushed centrist Rep. Angie Craig in the Democratic primary for Senate by nearly 20 points. Flanagan will cruise to victory again in November, assuring the far left of having a fellow traveler in that seat.

 

Shedding the hated “Woke 1” socialists while advancing the “Woke 2” strain seems like a decent outcome for the DSA to me. But it leaves us with two questions. How the hell did Francesca Hong blow a 20-point lead, anyway? And why did she fall short in her race while El-Sayed managed to hang on in his?

 

Woke 2 versus Woke 1.

 

The irresistible answer to the first question is another question. Did she ever really have a 20-point lead in this race?

 

Yeah, yeah, I know what the polls said. But the polls also said that El-Sayed led Rep. Haley Stevens by something like 15 points in Michigan before he eked out a 1-point victory. The polls say a lot of things. The fact that they’ve now missed the outcome in two key Midwestern Democratic primaries by Grand Canyon-sized margins means there’s obviously some sort of systemic methodological error afoot.

 

The most likely culprit is nonresponse bias. In surveying Wisconsin and Michigan, pollsters may have gotten high response rates from stereotypical pro-Hong and pro-El-Sayed progressives—white, college-educated, politically engaged, and very eager to share their opinions. Whereas stereotypical pro-Crowley and pro-Stevens normies—nonwhite, less educated, too busy with work and life to sit through political surveys—were less likely to pick up the phone. The result: Wildly mistaken blowout forecasts in both races.

 

One wonders whether El-Sayed would have pulled it out in Michigan if the polling there hadn’t signaled to Stevens supporters that there was really no point in bothering to turn out for her.

 

There’s another possibility, though: Maybe last night’s upset was less a matter of methodological error than sharp movement in the race after the final polls were taken.

 

There was a lot going in the Wisconsin primary in the home stretch. Hong was getting blown up in the media over her “Woke 1” pensees; meanwhile, Crowley was back in the race after two other Democratic candidates dropped out, elevating him as the last best hope of Thanksgiving enthusiasts. And he got a huge assist from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who joined him on a last-minute barnstorming tour of the state to try to save the party from a looming electoral disaster. Evers pulled no punches on the trail too, warning Democratic voters frankly that Hong would probably lose to the GOP this fall.

 

Undecideds and late-deciders were taking all of this in. Then El-Sayed won his primary while conspicuously underperforming his polling, further spooking Democrats who worry about the electability of socialist candidates. On the day after the Michigan race, former Biden operative Dan Kanninen read the tea leaves in Wisconsin and presciently explained why he thought Hong’s grip on the race wasn’t as tight as the polls suggested. Beat for beat, the reasoning he laid out anticipated what happened last night.

 

In the end, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel noted, neither Hong nor El-Sayed underperformed expectations. She received more than 300,000 votes, which would have won any other Wisconsin gubernatorial primary this century. He received nearly 750,000, a landslide total by the standards of Michigan’s 2018 primary. Hong lost, and El-Sayed nearly lost, because “pollsters are just not catching these armies of quieter Dems (and some crossover indies) cannonballing into the polling booth,” as Weigel put it. The normies in the party showed up in unexpected droves to try to do quality control.

 

Why didn’t both candidates lose, though? What was the secret sauce that got El-Sayed over the hump but not Hong?

 

Any answer to that will necessarily be speculative, but there are some important differences between the two. One, as I alluded to earlier, involves endorsements. The same triumvirate of Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez that withheld support from Hong in Wisconsin backed El-Sayed in Michigan, which is to say that the progressive movement was invested in his success to a degree that it wasn’t in hers. Even if those endorsements were only marginally useful in drumming up extra turnout for him, margins were everything in these two races. El-Sayed ended up winning by fewer than 16,000 votes; Hong ended up losing by fewer than 4,000 to the Evers-endorsed Crowley.

 

Another difference is demographics. Michigan has a small but influential bloc of Arab and Muslim voters, and El-Sayed cleaned up with them, taking nearly 80 percent of the vote in Dearborn and earning more ballots there than Kamala Harris did in the 2024 presidential election. Maybe that’s due to his outspoken criticism of Israel, maybe it’s due to his historic significance as a potential U.S. senator who’s both Arab and Muslim himself, maybe a bit of both. But dominating with that constituency may have been decisive to his statewide margin. Hong didn’t have the same advantage.

 

A third is simple charisma. El-Sayed is sufficiently talented as a speaker that none other than Bill Clinton allegedly encouraged him to run for office someday after listening to his commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2007. He’s also a “fighter” by temperament in the obnoxious populist sense of the term: Passionate about his causes and disdainful of his opponents, he scratches an itch for combativeness that’s common among his party’s grassroots after nearly two years of being steamrolled by Trump.

 

Hong is none of that. She’s soft-spoken, seemed unsure of herself in interviews, and lacked the native belligerence that modern populists crave. In the age of Trump, if you’re going to come for Thanksgiving, come hard.

 

Ultimately, though, I think the key difference is that El-Sayed gave Democratic voters a reason to look past any discomfort they may have felt about his radicalism, whereas Hong never did.

 

That was also true in Minnesota of Peggy Flanagan, a leftist but a known political quantity. “Flanagan and Hong were both the progressive candidates in their race, but Flanagan [is] also very much an ‘establishment’ figure (the incumbent [lieutenant governor]!) who obviously everyone is broadly comfortable with,” Matt Yglesias noted. In El-Sayed’s case, I suspect, Democrats got comfortable with his radicalism because it was mostly directed at a target toward which they too feel hostile: Israel and pro-Israel lobbying outfits like AIPAC.

 

Turning a Democratic primary in 2026 into a de facto referendum on a single issue is potentially a good strategy, depending on the issue. A for-or-against referendum on Israel when you’re arguing the “against” position? Good strategy. Opposing Israel is a key plank of “Woke 2” and liberals are increasingly comfortable with that.

 

Turning it into a for-or-against referendum on Thanksgiving when you’re arguing “against” for whatever insane reason? Not so good. That’s “Woke 1.” And Woke 1, as we’ve learned, was crazy.

 

If there’s a lesson from the varying results for progressives in Michigan and Wisconsin, then, I suspect it’s that Democrats will tolerate radicalism provided that it directionally reflects their own preferences. Whether El-Sayed can stay on the right side of that calculus as “Woke 1” skeletons come tumbling out of his closet remains to be seen.

Yes, ‘Woke 1’ Was Crazy. Now, About Those Fascist Cartoon Dogs . . .

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Democrats just needed permission to express their pent-up resentments over the hoops they were made to jump through during the era Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derisively referred to as “Woke 1.” The admission by a high priestess of the faith that its more “crazy” tenets are now apocrypha unleashed a cascade of relieved recriminations, as though “woke” was something that was done to the Democratic Party.

 

If the Democratic Party’s most ambitious office-seekers now see wokeness as a political albatross, that’s good. But not everyone got the memo.

 

“Superficially, if ‘Paw Patrol’ has politics, they are clunkily left-wing,” read one of many mind-numbing sentences in The Economist’s dissection of the popular children’s show. The cartoon dogs who double as first responders are conscientious environmentalists, support free and fair elections, and are “vaguely leftish” when it comes to communitarian ideals. And yet, the dogs are nevertheless class traitors, and they are inculcating in our unsuspecting youth a deference to authority that greases the skids for fascism.

 

You see, one of the cartoon dogs is a police officer, thus rendering the show “pro-police ‘copaganda’” — a sentiment shared by commentators and academics alike. Indeed, given the apparent lack of executive oversight, the “Paw Patrol” may even serve as a “sly advert for privatized state services,” The Economist continued. “It is very tempting to dismiss the whole debate as killjoy hogwash and culture-war lunacy.” Indeed, it is.

 

What a throwback. The item harkens back to peak “Woke 1,” when seemingly every liberal with a laptop competed with one another to deconstruct every aspect of American society in pursuit of the kernel of evil at its nucleus. These cartoon dogs were frequent targets of this mania.

 

The abstract of a study published in the journal Crime, Media, Culture accused the children’s show of promoting the “core tenets of neoliberalism” and encouraging “complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” Its plotlines feature “dismaying gender politics are in tune with the franchise’s gross rightwingery,” The Guardian’s Caspar Salmon wrote of the franchise’s covert boosterism for “Trumpian individualism, disdain for the state, and capitalist materialism.”

 

What felt like a critical mass of social media users called on the entertainment industry to “defund Paw Patrol” and even to “euthanize the police dog” — the sort of stuff that was once exclusive to the confines of America’s mental institutions. “It’s a joke, but it’s also not,” New York Times reporter Amanda Hess conceded. “The effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype,” she noted. And because “the movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm,” even small children must be dragooned into it by depriving them of cultural products that fail to cast American authority figures in a negative light.

 

So, yeah, that was “crazy.” But as The Economist reminds us, it’s still crazy.

 

If Democrats are as enthusiastic to repudiate wokeness’s most laughably militant excesses, they should be just as eager to root out the philosophy’s last redoubts: media and journalism, academia, and — contrary to the contrived backlash against Paw Patrol — entertainment. If they were serious, they might heed wokeness’s demand that they “do the work.” They’re not, though. Perhaps because the Democratic left wants credit for claiming to have abandoned the toxic brand “woke” while refusing to elaborate on how their views have evolved or criticizing the philosophy’s true believers.

 

It’s enough to make you wonder if the newfound critics of “Woke 1” on the left are entirely sincere.

Democratic Socialists Hit a Wall in Wisconsin

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

It turns out even Democratic primary voters have their limits.

 

Despite multiple polls showing Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong with a double-digit lead, she managed to lose Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had been so far behind he actually suspended his campaign last month. Crowley will now face off against Representative Tom Tiffany (who ran unopposed in the GOP primary) in November for the chance to lead the state for the next four years.

 

Hong is 37 years old, a former failed chef, and currently assembly representative for Madison, the state capital — a political environment infamous for the out-of-touch extremism of its leftism. It is difficult to convey just how robotically Hong publicly committed herself to her ideology over the years — the most obvious example being her recent inability to decide whether or not she still wanted to “Cancel Thanksgiving,” because settler-colonialism is still “very painful for many people in our communities.” Throughout her elected career, Hong made her views on crime well-known: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

 

As Hong surged in polls, panic set in among Democrats that they could squander a crucial race. In a desperate gambit, incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers, a two-termer who chose to retire, endorsed and campaigned with Crowley, bluntly telling reporters (multiple times) that he did not think Hong could win in November.

 

His bet paid off.

 

While Crowley is no moderate (he has called for expanding Medicaid in the state to allow people above the income threshold to buy into it, and co-sponsored legislation declaring abortion a form of health care), he is much more of a standard-issue Wisconsin Democrat than Hong would have been.

 

Interestingly, this represents the second polling miss of the month in the Midwest — in the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed was expected to crush Representative Haley Stevens, only to barely hang on.

 

Perhaps the strength of the Democratic Socialists has been greatly exaggerated.

Tony Evers, Electoral Gangster

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

The day before Tuesday’s stunning Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers traveled the state to stump for his preferred candidate, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. It was unusual that a sitting governor got involved in a partisan primary for his successor, but in this case, the circumstances of Evers’s involvement are almost too incredible to believe.

 

Effectively, Evers, a relatively moderate Democrat, stood up to the socialist wave overcoming his party, and he did so armed with only a soup ladle. Francesca Hong, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a backbencher in the state legislature, had shot to the front of the gubernatorial field, imperiling the Democrats’ chances of winning against Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in November. Every legitimate poll had Hong walking away with the race, leading by double digits, and in some cases doubling the vote of her next-closest competitor.

 

Republicans clearly wanted Hong to be the Democrats’ candidate. Past tweets of hers expressed crackpot theories, including the idea that Thanksgiving and virtually every other holiday should be canceled, that police and prisons should be abolished, and that being in a place with too many white people made her uncomfortable. Hong actually believed all the lunacy that your uncle on Facebook is trying to convince you Democrats believe.

 

“She’s not ready for prime time,” Crowley said of Hong. “And the fact that she’s been asked very simple questions and the way that she’s responding to those questions makes the news even more should cause all of us to pause.”

 

Nonetheless, Hong was coasting on a socialist momentum within the Democratic Party that had birthed U.S. Senate candidates including Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. And in the past few weeks, Hong’s nomination seemed inevitable.

 

It was, until Evers stepped in and reversed the race in a way that may never have been seen in modern politics. In order to stop Hong and face down the socialist wing of his party, Evers convinced Crowley, who had dropped out of the race weeks before, to reenter the contest and become the “establishment” candidate. And for weeks, it looked as if the effort was going to fall short, given Hong’s huge polling lead. And yet, on Election Day, it appears that Democrats all over the state decided to side with Evers in preventing Wisconsin from becoming a national laughingstock.

 

Democrats suddenly snapping out of an ideological delusion in favor of electability isn’t entirely unprecedented. In 2019, after Bernie Sanders was barreling toward the presidential nomination, lesser candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar quickly dropped out of the race and threw their support behind the establishment candidate, Joe Biden, who went on to defeat incumbent President Donald Trump.

 

But Evers’s last-minute switcheroo was even bolder, as he exhumed the dead corpse of a previous candidate in order to topple the socialist front-runner. He didn’t need candidates dropping out to coalesce establishment voters; he actually added more candidates to the race to do so. And in the span of about a week, he apparently turned an entire state against an extreme candidate. (And it wasn’t just the state — national figures including Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren all declined to endorse Hong, treating her as if she were a Steve Bannon underwear calendar.)

 

Evers’s emergency machinations should go down as one of the bravest political coups in American history, in one of the most chaotic elections the nation has seen. In the words of Saturday Night Live’s Stefon, this race had everything, from sex scandals to candidates tanking their campaigns with fiscal mismanagement. And it was all capped by a candidate dropping out of the race, then jumping back in and winning the nomination just weeks later.

 

Evers is darn near the last governor you’d expect to strike so swiftly and decisively. He plays the part of soft-spoken, aw-shucks Midwestern governor to perfection (even though he is occasionally prone to public profanity).

 

And yet, while Republicans may be angry that the Democrats have a more viable candidate to run against Tom Tiffany, there is something admirable in anyone who stands up to the creeping influence of socialism and expanded government control of our lives. Republicans rooting for Hong were playing a dangerous game — while Tiffany was polling ahead of Hong, we have now seen just how wrong polls can be. Hong could have beaten Tiffany; then the state’s residents would have been stuck with a lunatic as their governor. At least now Badger State residents can know that their next governor will be a sane person.

 

And for that, whether on the left or right, they should thank Tony Evers for throwing himself on the socialist grenade.

 

 

In Your Dreams, Mike Lindell

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

With 100 percent of precincts reporting in the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary, state House Speaker Lisa Demuth has 179,545 votes, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has 134,184 votes. That is a gap of 45,361 votes. You are not going to find 45,361 votes unattended in a county courier truck, or any other such shenanigans.

 

At 9 a.m., LindellTV, the candidate’s own video channel, reported that Demuth had won and Lindell had finished second.

 

Yet, as of this writing, Lindell has not conceded to Demuth.

 

Last night, he told reporters:

 

I’m all for any election that’s done with paper ballots, hand-counted, and we get rid of these computers in our election. We’re like a third-world country. Nobody — 132 countries don’t have computers. You guys can sit there and go, ‘oh, its all about other cheating, there’s always cheating in elections, like in Minnesota here.’ Eight people can vote, I can vouch for eight people — I didn’t even have to show my ID today, when I went to vote. But the problem is, there was no mathematical, or deviations tonight. But there was, and it came right at the end. It came about a half hour ago, that this 36,000 vote — and then, 6,000 for me. They inclined — if you just say, people voted the same day of, as early voting, at least it was like this [Lindell makes a level hand gesture]… all of a sudden, it went like this for me [makes a declining hand gesture], being on the day of, and then it went WHOOSH [Lindell makes a dramatically inclining hand gesture] and it went straight up for her. It just doesn’t make sense, you guys.

 

Dude . . . you lost by more than 45,000 votes.

 

It is not exactly shocking news to declare that Mike Lindell is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and sees election-rigging conspiracies everywhere he goes. But it is worth keeping in mind that with perfectly good Republican candidates who are more popular among Minnesota Republicans and Minnesotans as a whole available, President Trump chose to endorse Lindell. For a guy who talks about winning so much, Trump doesn’t really care that much about winning.

 

Anyone who claims to care about the cause of election integrity harms that cause by associating with Lindell. As it has been abundantly proven, election fraud occurs: People request absentee ballots under false names, people fill out absentee ballots for other people without informing them, people vote absentee and in-person in the same election, people fill out fictitious names on voter registration applications, and people cast ballots despite being ineligible as convicted felons. Generally these cases — proven in a court of law — involve a small number of ballots. But any fraudulent vote dilutes the legitimate votes of people like you and me.

 

Lindell, however, is about one step away from claiming the Illuminati, aliens, Elvis, and Bigfoot hacked the election. He is, unwittingly, the greatest ally the election system status quo could ever want.

 

 

Mamdani Against Prime Delivery

National Review Online

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

Progressives have long been happy to put their projects above consumer convenience. Their aversion to flexible labor markets, another hallmark of free enterprise, is a similiarly old story. In New York City, socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani has discovered how to merge both these tics into one destructive policy.

 

Mamdani endorsed a bill recently introduced in New York’s city council, the misleadingly titled Delivery Protection Act, that would impose a straitjacket licensing regime on package delivery services. To win permission to keep operating, warehouse operators would have to abide by myriad safety, training, and employment requirements. Most disruptively, it would mandate that operators directly hire their drivers, barring them from contracting out last-mile delivery.

 

Supposedly in the name of worker protection, the bill would effectively abolish an entire thriving industry of delivery businesses and sole proprietors. Both Amazon and FedEx rely on these independent contractors to carry packages to doorsteps (as opposed to UPS, which employs all its drivers).

 

Where most Americans see wonder in same-day delivery, Mamdani has only scorn. As he declares unabashedly, the Delivery Protection Act threatens the fundamental model that customers have come to depend on for efficient service. Amazon warns that it may relocate its warehouses outside New York City limits, meaning longer waits and pricier fees for residents. The jobs of Amazon’s 5,000 subcontracted delivery drivers, who earn $24 per hour on average, would also be put at risk. More certainly, all the small businesses that now employ them would be wiped away.

 

For what upside? It is not at all clear that the legislation would help the workers it purports to care for. Amazon and FedEx would be required to provide health insurance as drivers’ direct employers, but most already receive benefits from their existing third-party companies. Those firms must follow the same labor laws as the delivery giants.

 

In fact, the bill might make workers worse off. Drivers are presently free to work for dozens of contractors under whatever terms they negotiate. Mamdani would transform this competitive labor market into one dominated by just a few companies, drastically reducing drivers’ ability to switch bosses. With that lost freedom comes lost leverage.

 

A similar story to what Mamdani envisions already played out in California. The state enacted a law in 2019 that forcibly reclassified millions of independent contractors as employees across several industries, foisting greater costs on businesses. In response, self-employment fell without a commensurate increase in overall employment. The law was so damaging to popular services that voters opted to exclude app-based delivery workers a year later.

 

The sole beneficiary of the Delivery Protection Act, it seems, would be the labor unions that Mamdani holds dear. The Teamsters love the bill, likely because they have found it difficult to conquer delivery contractors one by one. Federal law makes it far easier to unionize large workforces under single companies, which the bill would proactively consolidate. Amid dwindling membership, collective bargaining may also become more appealing once the number of potential employers is winnowed down to three. What protects workers genuinely — the existence of many employers — would be replaced by union dues.

 

The last thing that New York needs is another economic cartel, as the city’s affordability woes stem largely from an ever-bristlier thicket of supply constraints. Mamdani’s proposal to layer on a functional delivery tax would further inhibit companies from meeting consumers where they are.

 

New York City has many problems. Convenient shipping isn’t one of them.