Mamdani’s New York State of Fear

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak. The police were there to protect him. Today every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”

 

These comments, made on Friday by Manhattan Rabbi Yosie Levine, encapsulate the new reality for Jewish New Yorkers: how they are threatened by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s aggressive anti-Zionism, how they are adapting in their day-to-day lives, and how they are challenging an emerging and daunting status quo.

 

Levine leads The Jewish Center, a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. On Thursday, a man named Raul Morales allegedly went to the synagogue and shouted “justice for Islam” and “Allahu akbar” before stabbing a visibly Jewish worshipper with a screwdriver a few blocks away. He is also accused of stabbing an Asian man a few minutes earlier with the same screwdriver, also while yelling “Allahu akbar.”

 

The attacks took place shortly after Mamdani released a slickly produced video in which he railed against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal and baby killer. The following day, Mamdani exhorted the public to take to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s expected visit to New York City in September. A day later, Morales allegedly grabbed a screwdriver and went looking for his “justice.”

 

Mamdani’s rhetoric about Israel has long been extreme, and its implications for Jews in America have grown more alarming. One of his more infamous statements came in 2023 during a gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America, a far-left organization that was floundering before refocusing its energy on anti-Zionist agitation immediately after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and that would then play a key role in Mamdani’s campaign for mayor.

 

“I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local,” Mamdani said of anti-Israel activism. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

 

The idea that anti-Zionism should be integrated into every political grievance creates a clear domestic enemy: American Jews. Since Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their homeland, and most Jews (as would be expected) believe this, most Jews are thus portrayed as a threat to the rights and freedoms of the public.

 

In the past, progressive politicians insisted, implausibly, they were only talking about Israelis, not all Jews. Mamdani’s innovation in this regard has been to jettison such gaslighting. In June, at a rally for congressional candidates he endorsed, Mamdani warned darkly of living in a “time of monsters.” Who are they? “These monsters take many forms today,” he said, but then he named only one: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

 

AIPAC may typify the term “the Israel lobby” in many minds, but it is an organization of Americans. Mamdani here is demonizing American Jews who participate in the political process through their constitutionally protected speech. The comments were so over-the-top that even Jewish progressives recoiled from the mayor.

 

“Language that turns AIPAC or Israel into the primary evil influence in American politics can echo antisemitic stereotypes that portray Jews as a sinister force aiming to control the world,” wrote Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the leader of a left-wing social justice organization and a strong critic of AIPAC. The New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal group whose former director had been hired by Mamdani to serve as the city’s antisemitism coordinator, criticized the mayor’s “dehumanizing” language.

 

Mamdani has erased distinctions between Israelis and American Jews. In the process, he is eroding some of the traditional divisions within organized American Jewry. He is not criticizing Israeli government policies; he is flagrantly Jew-baiting, and he is doing so with a passion and an enthusiasm that unsettles even left-of-center Jews who wear their own distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu on their sleeve.

 

At the same time, Mamdani is reshaping New York politics in his image. He backed far-left challenges to Democratic officeholders he deemed insufficiently anti-Zionist. Those candidates, in turn, echoed his rhetoric that casts Jews as scapegoats. For example: Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated the Democratic chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with Mamdani’s help, equated gentrification in the United States with Israel’s alleged displacement of Palestinians and blamed Israel for police violence against racial minorities in America.

 

Mamdani collapses all distinctions in other ways, too. In November 2025, the organization Nefesh B’Nefesh, which helps Diaspora Jews who seek to move to Israel but does not broker property itself, held an informational event at a synagogue in New York. Pro-Palestinian protesters mobbed the event and shouted slogans like “globalize the intifada,” an explicit call for violence against Jews anywhere in the world.

 

These protesters consider all of Israel to be “occupied” and “stolen land.” What was shocking was that the then-mayor-elect of New York City legitimized their claims: Mamdani said he opposed blocking access to a house of worship but that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” (Mamdani did not provide any evidence for his accusation against the synagogue.)

 

Once again, it was not Israelis 6,000 miles away but American Jews in New York who were, according to the mayor, violating their own sacred spaces.

 

All of this is unprecedented. But the anti-Netanyahu video, a taxpayer-funded Two Minutes Hate that recycled the classic blood-libel portrayal of Jews as deliberate mass baby killers, further upped the ante. In accusing Netanyahu of ordering an assortment of war crimes out of simple bloodlust, Mamdani was accusing IDF soldiers of carrying out such crimes. And because he categorized every single death in Gaza as the fault of the Israeli killing machine, he implicated anyone who served or serves in the Israeli military as the personification of this evil.

 

He does so knowingly. It hardly needs to be said that neither of the Israeli soldiers arrested and beaten by police in Belgium last summer was Netanyahu. Nor must they be soldiers at all: These days simply speaking Hebrew is enough to put one in danger. Take, for example, the six Israelis attacked by ax-wielding locals in Mongolia two weeks ago, just the latest of a number of such incidents since October 7, 2023. An increasingly common progressive belief is that in a country with military conscription, there are no nonsoldiers among the Israeli public. From there it is a brief hop to believing there are no civilians in Israel.

 

The enforcement of this monstrous principle has become ever more carefully planned out. Two weeks ago, Greek anarchists conducted “anti-Zionist patrols” in Thessaloniki, once home to a thriving Jewish community that was almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis. The coordinated attack on Israeli soccer fans in the Netherlands in late 2024 was arranged ahead of time. Just a few days ago, an online crowdsourced attempt to “map” the whereabouts of “Zionists” cropped up in Italy.

 

Like Mamdani, antisemites around the world collapse all distinctions. The massacre of Hanukkah celebrants in Australia; the gunning down, “for Palestine,” of a young engaged couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; the killing of an elderly Jewish man by an anti-Israel protester in California; the murder by fire of a Jewish woman in Boulder, Colorado, by a man who wanted to “kill all Zionist people”; the attempted massacre of young Jewish children at a synagogue in Michigan by a man who posted angry messages about Israel—in all of these cases and more, Israel is just a pretext for joining a global war on Jews.

 

It was ever thus. The term “blood libel” emerged to describe the medieval notion that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in religious rituals. The first such case was that of young William of Norwich, an English boy found dead in the woods in the 12^th century. Simon of Trent was another famous example. Indiscriminate violence against Jews followed the accusations. It works for adults too: The disappearance of an Italian friar in Damascus in 1840 resulted in much indiscriminately spilled Jewish blood.

 

Meanwhile, explaining away antisemitic incitement using excuses like “I’m only accusing one Jew of dishonorable military acts” also has precedent. In the late 19^th century, a false accusation of treason against French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, led to his imprisonment and nationwide attacks on Jews. Even Kristallnacht, the 1938 prelude to the Holocaust, can be put in this category. The pretext for the pogrom was the shooting in Paris of a German diplomat by a Jewish teenager whose family had been expelled from Germany.

 

Mamdani’s lies about Jewish baby killers and the consequences of those calumnies are the rule, not the exception, in Jewish history.

 

What is unusual is the location. America has been a “golden land” for the Jews, and no place has made them more at home than New York City, where nearly a million Jews live. Jews are woven into the fabric of the city’s culture; Gotham’s history cannot accurately be told without them.

 

That story contains plenty of antisemitism, as does the wider story of American history. It has its own blood libels and pogroms, though fewer in number than in most other Diasporic lands. But the Jews have not as yet given up on New York. Will Mamdani change that? Might we reach a tipping point?

 

Since Mamdani took office in January, hate crimes are up—and Jews have been the victims or targets of 55 percent of them. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the state of New York surged after the 2023 Hamas attacks and didn’t drop again until last year. Even with the overall drop, the number of incidents in 2025 was still double the 2022 number, suggesting the new normal is a much higher baseline of antisemitic incidents per year. Last year, the U.S. saw 203 antisemitic assaults; nearly half of them occurred in New York state. And 95 percent of those were in New York City.

 

How willing are Jewish New Yorkers to wait and see which direction the trend goes from here, especially considering the mayor’s encouragement of anti-Zionist street protests?

 

Reporting from the Times of Israel may offer a clue. From Mamdani’s November 2025 mayoral victory to July 2026, the paper found, Nefesh B’Nefesh saw a 31 percent increase in the number of people applying for the organization’s help in moving to Israel. The paper also spoke to Jews who had decided to move to other states but stay in the country.

 

Something is changing. But at the moment, that change most widely takes the form of security adjustments. That usually means hardening targets like Jewish private and religious institutions that would see increased threats. In April, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state would double the amount of money in the budget for security grants available to nonprofit, community-based organizations.  

 

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin has so far put forth two bills designed to protect institutions from street mobs. The first required the New York Police Department to create a buffer zone around houses of worship to ensure that protests could take place in the vicinity without endangering worshippers’ access to the building. That bill passed with a veto-proof majority. The second bill, which would have mandated a similar buffer zone around schools, was vetoed by Mamdani for being too broad in scope. Menin is tweaking the bill to address those concerns.

 

The organized Jewish community is also making its voice heard. Levine was far from the only leader to speak up and speak clearly about the danger of Mamdani’s anti-Zionist incitement. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the leader of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, addressed Mamdani in an open letter: “You promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”

 

The ADL, American Jewish Committee, Orthodox Union, UJA-Federation of New York, and Jewish Community Relations Council of New York all harshly criticized Mamdani after his chilling video about Netanyahu. And Jewish elected officials, including Menin and state Assemblywoman Nily Rozic, have pushed back on the mayor.

 

Perhaps, then, what we are seeing is the beginning of an immune response, a kind of natural resistance to the threat Mamdani poses to New York’s equilibrium. Yet even if it is an immune response, its success cannot be taken for granted. New York has never had a mayor so committed to making Jews feel unwelcome. New Yorkers will have to be equally committed to thwarting him.

The Misery Strategy

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

It’s well known, or it should be, that the Democratic Socialists of America believe in a number of maximalist policies aimed at razing and remaking the United States into something unrecognizable. Their liberal defenders play this down, but the DSA itself boasts of its enthusiasm for destruction. The DSA’s new platform calls for abolishing not just ICE but also police, prisons, the Defense Department, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the presidency, and national borders. If any vestige of America is left standing after that, I’m sure it’s also on the DSA target list.

 

You can see for yourself how gleeful the socialists are at the prospect of using the wrecking ball. Yesterday, the DSA’s national co-chair Megan Romer went on Fox News Sunday, where Shannon Bream asked her to confirm the policies mentioned above. Romer smirked and giggled while copping to each one, as if it’s only common sense to want to destroy the country.

 

But as I say, we knew this. What I found more interesting about the segment was something Romer was quoted as saying about the DSA’s methods for attaining power. “We will win by making conditions so intolerable to the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than live with the disturbance we cause,” she said. “Until we are able to fully seize power ourselves.”

 

So the plan is to make people so miserable that they’ll accede to the DSA’s agenda against their will. In other words, compulsion.

 

This is the opposite of the logic and ethics that govern all our politics. You’re supposed to gain support by doing good for people. That’s the civilized approach. But the DSA’s tactics are also the opposite of civility. I often describe loud leftist agitators as “the mob,” but what Romer describes is the way of the actual Mob—organized crime. It’s an aggressive extortion racket aimed at bullying others into paying up just to get some relief. “The worse, the better” goes the old Leninist maxim.

 

You know who else does things that way? Terrorists. The purpose of terrorism is to hurt the enemy until he submits.

 

The DSA’s victory plan is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it sheds some light on what our elected DSA politicians are actually up to. If you think, for example, that Zohran Mamdani wants to launch government-run discount grocery stores to help New Yorkers buy groceries at more affordable prices, think again. He wants to make life “intolerable” for private storeowners by undercutting them. Just as he wants to slap intolerable taxes on corporations, pied-à-terre owners, and job creators. It’s not even about raising revenues to spend on new elaborate social programs for the needy, because we’re nowhere near that yet. As Romer also says, the DSA understands that it won’t be able to implement its full remaking of America for a long time to come. This is just the “making conditions intolerable” phase, in which socialists put the screws to those who resist.

 

Recognizing the DSA’s arm-twisting plan to seize power is also important because it’s the only part of their Communist fantasy that’s actually going to happen. And it’s happening. These giggling ignoramuses aren’t going to abolish the presidency or the Senate or anything else. But they’re going to make us good and miserable trying.

The DSA Wants to Abolish America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

I understand that it is considered déclassé to participate in what the self-consciously serious among us have termed the new “Red Scare.” Well, okay then: déclassé it is. There is virtue in calling things by their names, and the appropriate name for the Democratic Socialists of America is “red.” They are communists. They are Jacobins. They are wreckers and despoilers and iconoclasts, who, if left unchecked, would wipe the United States from the face of this earth. To be “scared” by such figures is not only rational, it is imperative.

 

Asked on television by Fox News host Shannon Bream to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to each of our civilizational building blocks, the co-chair of the DSA, Megan Romer, casually dismissed each in turn:

 

BREAM: Abolish the Senate?

 

ROMER: True.

 

BREAM: Okay, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?

 

ROMER: Yep.

 

BREAM: Abolish ICE?

 

ROMER: Absolutely.

 

BREAM: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally?

 

ROMER: As a long-term plan, yep.

 

BREAM: Defund the Pentagon?

 

ROMER: Absolutely.

 

BREAM: Abolish prisons, at least in large part?

 

ROMER: Yeah, again, as part of a long-term program, yeah?

 

BREAM: OK, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations?

 

ROMER: Yeah, absolutely.

 

One must award Romer credit for her thoroughness, for, despite her casual tone, she managed in the space of a minute to demand the abolition of every load-bearing structure in America. To abolish the Senate is not only in effect to abolish the states, but, given that the Senate is the only unamendable part of the contemporary Constitution, it is to abolish the union, too. To abolish the Supreme Court is to abolish the rule of law. To abolish our borders and our military is to abolish our sovereignty. To abolish prisons is to abolish ordered liberty. And to abolish private property is to abolish our economy. That is, at least, an ethos.

 

The American system of government is built atop the presumption that the government exists to secure the natural rights of the people, and little else besides. The DSA’s vision represents a perfect inversion of this premise.  Romer and her friends want to shirk all the basic responsibilities of the state — national defense, territorial integrity, policing, the protection of individual liberty — while micromanaging all of the private tasks that have traditionally been the preserve of civil society. Running Apple and Denny’s is in; maintaining an army and navy is out. Providing housing is included; superintending the punishment for murder is proscribed. “A wise and frugal government,” Thomas Jefferson submitted during his First Inaugural, “shall restrain men from injuring one another,” but “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.” Evidently, the DSA prefers the opposite course.

 

Reviewing the combination of aspirations that Romer elected to catalogue, one might be tempted to ask how, absent a constabulary of some kind, her movement intends to enforce its vision. But alas, we already know the answer to that. The United States has been a nation for 250 years, and during that time alone, its citizens have watched as the spiritual ancestors of Romer’s cause promised liberation and flowers and delivered the blade of the guillotine instead. In a vacuum, the chance that Megan Romer and Co. would be able to contrive a constitutional order superior to our status quo is slim. But as a communist? That chance is nil. Americans ought to be suspicious of anyone who expresses a desire to dissolve the Senate or the Supreme Court or the border patrol or the free market, and when that call comes from the Bolsheviks, that suspicion ought to be trebled. From Paris to Moscow to Beijing, we have seen how the story ends.

 

Commenting on the American character a year before the Revolution, Edmund Burke praised the colonists for their foresight. “In other countries,” he wrote, “the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance.” But in America, he proposed, “they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.” The result: “They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” Megan Romer is a tyrant, and the ideas she is advancing are infinitely more tyrannical than anything that King George III or his parliament could have concocted in a month of Sundays. It would, indeed, be preferable if we did not have to deal with communists in the United States, but we do not have that luxury at present. We need not wait for the chains before objecting to the forge.

The Bible Belongs in the Classroom

By Adam Kirsch

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

This summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a new required-reading list for public schools, mandating what the state’s 5.4 million students will read in every grade from kindergarten to 12th. If you were a student in the past 20 years, or raised one, you’ll recognize most of the titles: picture books such as The Cat in the Hat and The Snowy Day, parables such as The Giver and Fahrenheit 451. What made the Texas list controversial is the inclusion not of a new book, but of a very old one: the Bible. Students will be assigned short excerpts and adaptations from the Old and New Testaments, starting with vivid tales (Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath) and building to more complex and morally challenging passages, such as Job’s complaint against God.

 

Texas’s decision to start teaching Bible stories—like its requirement to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which the state legislature approved last year—is clearly meant to send a political message. But regardless of your political or religious beliefs, there are good reasons to agree that the Bible should be part of young people’s education. For a high-school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.

 

Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts of the Bible—in particular, those of the King James Version, long the standard translation for American Protestants. The most obvious example is slavery, which both Black people and white people saw through a biblical lens. In fifth grade, Texas students will read about Moses and the exodus from Egypt, which enslaved African Americans took as a model for their own liberation; Harriet Tubman was known as Moses for her work with the Underground Railroad. When President Abraham Lincoln discussed the fearful losses of the Civil War in his second inaugural address, he justified them as God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, quoting Psalm 19: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” For us, the phrase “four score and seven years ago” immediately summons up the Gettysburg Address; for Lincoln’s original audience, it would have sounded like a mournful reference to Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

 

As for literature, the titles of classic American novels are a catalog of biblical quotations: East of Eden (Genesis), Absalom, Absalom! (Samuel), The House of Mirth (Ecclesiastes), The Sun Also Rises (Ecclesiastes), Song of Solomon (the biblical book also known as “Song of Songs”). How can you understand Moby-Dick without knowing the story of Jonah and the whale, or appreciate the music of Leaves of Grass if you’ve never heard the rolling lines of the Psalms?

 

Of course, none of this stopped Texas’s reading list from becoming culture-war fodder. To many liberals, requiring the Bible looks like an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity. Although the state’s official explanations for the new reading list have avoided mentioning religion, instead framing the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation said the decision sends “a clear message to nonreligious and non-Christian students and families that they don’t quite belong or should convert.” The Dallas Morning News complained in an editorial that the Texas reading list includes “excerpts from the Bible but no other major religious works,” suggesting that the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita should also be represented.

 

This is the same kind of criticism often lodged against the idea of the Western canon: Why should the products of one culture, or one gender or ethnicity, be given special status? Such questions are inevitable when a public sphere that used to be dominated by a single group becomes more diverse. In 1963, the idea that public schools might have to teach Bible stories to Hindu and Muslim students was largely hypothetical. In Texas in 2026, it’s a certainty. The state is home to almost 500,000 Muslims and a similar number of Indian Americans.

 

But saying that Americans have special reasons to study the Bible doesn’t imply that it’s more sacred than the scriptures of other faiths. In the same way, saying that American students should study English doesn’t mean that it’s superior to other languages. Both decisions simply reflect the fact that Americans, like all people everywhere, are situated—that we exist in a particular society with a particular history. If the most important goal of education is to “know thyself,” as the oracle at Delphi liked to say, then you have to know the influences that make you the person you are. And for anyone who participates in American life, the Bible is one of them, directly or indirectly.

 

Perhaps the strongest objection to Texas’s reading list is that it will require teachers to make such complicated distinctions. The readings for seventh grade include the Sermon on the Mount; imagine trying to explain the literary and historic quality of the verse “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” while remaining strictly noncommittal about the existence of blessings, spirit, and heaven. Parental complaints are guaranteed, and not just from non-Christian households; Christian believers have the biggest stake in how the words of Jesus are explained.

 

Today, people on the left tend to have a Pavlovian reaction to any mention of religion, especially Christianity, rejecting it as right-wing, evangelical, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ. Writing in the Texas Observer, the historian Joel Zapata argues that the state wanted students to read Ecclesiastes—“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—to make them more docile: “Students will learn that life circumstances are beyond their power to change. They will learn that their place and the place of others in the economy and larger society should not be questioned.”

 

Many conservatives surely do believe that reading the Bible will reinforce their own political values. But anyone who looks at the specific passages Texas chose to require will find something rather more complex and challenging than campaign fodder. In fourth grade, students are supposed to read a section of the Gospel of Luke:

 

When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

 

How might this story apply to, say, the president of the United States, who is so greedy for honors that he lingered on the winner’s podium at the World Cup? A number of texts on the Texas reading list, such as Ayn Rand’s essay “What Is Capitalism?,” were chosen to affirm our culture’s worship of wealth and success. How might a teacher juxtapose those readings with the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus blesses the poor, the meek, and the merciful? Can any complacent prosperity gospel survive an encounter with the Book of Job?

 

Many texts that get assigned in schools are moralistic, mainly because they are easy to teach. Texas’s reading list has plenty of examples, such as Kipling’s “If” and, absurdly, Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan (“Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles and, I believe, right ones”). The great power of the Bible is that it seldom says what people think it says or want it to say. It is continually subversive, because the temptations it warns against are with us today just as much as they were 2,000 years ago. Of course, most of what we read in school leaves no lasting impression; students treat reading as work to get through, because that’s what it is. But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.

They Have No Idea What We Think

By Abigail Anthony

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

In the past week or so, there have been some popular threads and insightful discussions on social media about the presence of conservatives and conservatism — or more accurately, lack thereof — in universities. (See here, here, here, and here for a few examples.) Below I have paraphrased responses contributed by (presumably left-wing) individuals defending the state of academia, in no particular order. (A few of these lack hyperlinks as citations, either because the account went private or the post was deleted as I was drafting.)

 

1.      Conservatives oppose education itself, independent of what is being taught at educational institutions or how they lean politically, and therefore do not train enough qualified people.

 

2.      Universities are for literate people, therefore conservatives are excluded.

 

3.      Universities do not directly discriminate against conservatives on the basis of ideology; they simply maintain rigorous intellectual and scholarly standards that conservatives fail to meet.

 

4.      Conservatives necessarily hold conservative beliefs, none of which are intellectually defensible positions, and therefore conservatives are unfit for academia.

 

5.      Conservatives support Trump, so they must be stupid and therefore do not belong in universities.

 

6.      Intelligent people lean to the left, and because academia is for intelligent people, academia leans to the left.

 

7.      Academia leans to the left because reality and truth lean to the left.

 

8.      Universities do have viewpoint diversity by virtue of having different disciplines and specialized schools, therefore the complaints about a lack of viewpoint diversity are unfounded.

 

9.      Conservatives are almost always bad writers and therefore do not meet scholarly standards.

 

10. Conservatives are anti-intellectual and do not believe in the underlying methodologies necessary for producing legitimate scholarship; an example of conservatives rejecting methodology is apparent in their belief that there are two biological sexes.

 

11. Some disciplines are built on left-leaning premises, like how sociology examines power structures such as racism, and conservatives are unwelcome in these fields because they reject the underlying premises.

 

12. There are some conservative professors, ergo there is no discrimination against conservatives in academia.

 

13. There is no discrimination against conservative beliefs in academia because conservatives who refrain from sharing their political beliefs do sometimes get tenure.

 

14. There’s a progressive professor who didn’t get tenure, so it is actually conservatives who are the problem on campus.

 

15. Shutting down some of the violent pro-Palestinian activism on campus that disrupted university operations means conservatives — not progressives — are opposed to free expression, viewpoint diversity, and debate.

 

16. Conservatives don’t even apply for jobs in academia, which has nothing to do with the current political climate on most campuses, so we can’t prove there’s discrimination.

 

17. Conservatives believe they have a right to the prestige associated with university affiliation but do not want to put in the effort to achieve the status of professor; conservatives despise all ideological out-group members and therefore want leftists kicked out of academia.

 

18. There is a left-leaning consensus in the humanities because left-leaning arguments are won by merit in a marketplace of ideas; conservatives want their discredited or rejected views to be considered only on the grounds of fairness.

 

19. Conservatives don’t want to be in academia for reasons wholly unrelated to ideological discrimination. They just want money.

 

20. Conservatives are dogmatic and reflexively reject any counterarguments that undermine their views; they do not want to be intellectually challenged.

 

21. I, a leftist, had to listen to an awful right-wing professor for a whole quarter, therefore right-wing students have to listen to left-wing professors and not complain.

 

22. Welcoming conservative arguments in academic discourse, especially on the premise that the pursuit of truth requires considering a broad range of views, means we open the floodgates to demonstrably false views like “the earth is flat” or pseudo-disciplines and methodologies like “witchcraft.”

 

23. Conservative views are not supported by the academic literature, therefore those views are unsubstantiated by evidence and should not be discussed in academic contexts.

 

24. Conservatives are underqualified for academic positions and want to be hired by affirmative action.

 

25. Conservatives want to be ideological DEI hires, even though they oppose DEI.

 

26. Actually, academia has a ton of conservatives and libertarians.

 

27. A problem with academia is that there are too many conservatives.

 

28. Ideological or political leanings are irrelevant when teaching in a majority of academic disciplines, and most academics are not interested in politics and just care about their scholarship, therefore ideological or political bias is not a large-scale issue.

 

29. We, the progressives, don’t want viewpoint diversity because that would mean hearing from racist, sexist people who want to strip us of rights.

 

So, to summarize: There are too many conservatives in academia, but also conservatives are barely represented on campus so academia leans left, and conservatives need to stop complaining about a perceived ideological bias on campus, but we should maintain the existing left-leaning bias because conservatives are dumb and evil, yet most professors are apolitical and therefore there isn’t a detectable partisanship on campus. Conservatives are discriminated against because their views are immoral or unintellectual, but also there isn’t ideological discrimination because they actually just fail to meet scholarly standards, and conservatives are unwelcome in certain fields because they reject the left-leaning premises of specific disciplines, yet conservatives are the ones who resist intellectual challenges. The ideological imbalance is a figment of the conservative imagination, but also it is real and good.

 

But the most significantly flawed argument is represented perfectly in a handful of posts from different users, which I will quote: “Conservatives are not well represented in academia because conservatism is, for the most part, the ideology of the incurious. Abortion is bad because the Bible said so. Immigrants are bad because Fox News said so. Capitalism is good because Reagan said so.” Another person, when describing pro-life arguments and whether they should be evaluated seriously in academic discussions, said “every single argument is about controlling a woman’s body there’s nothing to discuss with people who want that.” To hire a pro-life ethicist in a gender-studies department would be equivalent to hiring a young-earth creationist in a geology department, another person claimed, because pro-life arguments are built on an “ideology” of “subjugating women.” An assistant professor at the University of Alabama suggested that hiring a geography professor with critical views on immigration is similar to a medical school hiring a pro-cancer doctor or a black studies department hiring white supremacists.

 

That’s exactly the issue with universities today: The people arguing that conservatives are too “incurious” for academia are the same people who have no idea what conservatives believe or why we believe it. In other words, they insist on excluding certain views, philosophies, and ideologies without even vaguely knowing what those are. Ultimately, the left-leaning supporters of academia’s status quo are incapable of presenting conservative views in terms that we would find accurate, fair, and acceptable because they have no idea what we think. Ironically, those same people consider themselves to be admirable proponents of “inclusivity.”

 

But, as an effort to model open discourse and participate in substantive debate with people who disagree with me, I want to pose the following questions:

 

1.      Who are the conservative professors who received tenure in the past 50 years but were unqualified for the position? Are there any progressive professors who similarly received tenure in the past 50 years despite being intellectually unfit?

 

2.      What conservative arguments or positions, if any, should be presented fairly in university contexts for students to consider?

 

3.      Is it ideal if there are zero conservative-identifying faculty and students at any given university?

 

4.      Should a student be able to accurately guess a professor’s political views and preferred policies based solely on what the professor says in class?

 

5.      Should you strive to be able to articulate the views of your opponent on a given topic in terms that your opponent would deem an acceptable characterization?

 

6.      Should the political views of a candidate for hiring or tenure be considered, even if those views have nothing to do with that person’s scholarship?

 

I suspect that I would answer these questions differently from most professors, and that’s because we disagree on what the mission of a university should be and how education should be designed to achieve such an aim.

Trump Sabotages the Economy, Right Before the Midterms

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

Incumbent Republicans, you could have been running for reelection in a roaring economy, but a president addicted to tariffs wouldn’t let you.

 

Early voting starts in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia on Friday, September 18, just 52 days from now. The cement is hardening in Americans’ perception of the economy, and that perception is negative. In fact, forget Democrats and independents for a moment; the most recent Pew Research survey found “the share of Republicans who say Trump’s policies have worsened conditions has risen from 18 percent to 28 percent, while the share saying they have improved conditions has fallen from 57 percent to 42 percent.” Overall, 60 percent of U.S. adults say Trump’s policies have made the economy worse, while just 20 percent say Trump’s policies have made the economy better.

 

(I know, I know, the pollster is biased! Globalist! Elitist! The Swamp! Deep State!)

 

Right as we enter the home stretch before the midterms, President Trump decided to throw another batch of tariffs onto the pile. Our Andrew Stuttaford was one of the few to notice; I suspect the headline “Trump announces additional new tariffs” is starting to be like “Bangladesh hit by floods” or “U.S. national debt reaches new high” — the sort of news that people expect and just tune out:

 

The tariffs are being assessed at different levels. Countries with prohibitions on the import of goods made by forced labor, including the U.K. and tariff-piñata Canada, but have been found (by the U.S. trade representative) not to do enough to enforce them will be subject to an additional tariff of 10 percent (although this will not apply to goods covered by the USMCA), as will those that have either committed to introduce bans or have introduced partial bans. Some others will pay an adjusted rate (10–12.5 percent, net, of their most-favored-nation rate).

 

Countries that have not imposed a forced-labor import prohibition nor made a relevant commitment (or partial regime) will pay 12.5 percent.

 

All in all, 60 “trading partners” are affected; that figure understates the number of those covered because the 27-member EU is treated as one. In practice, therefore, nearly 90 countries will be hit.

 

There are various exemptions, such as for goods already subject to Section 232 tariffs and, in a nod to concerns about affordability, products that cannot be grown or produced in sufficient quantities (or at reasonable prices) in the U.S., such as, presumably, bananas and coffee.

 

What do tariffs do? They make things more expensive. Here’s Yale’s Budget Lab, in April: “Imported PCE core goods and durable goods prices have both risen by 1.5 percent during 2025 through January, both well above prior-year comparisons. Implied passthrough of tariffs to imported consumer goods prices ranges from roughly 46–86 percent for core goods and 51–115 percent for durables, depending on methodology.”

 

Here’s Robert Minton, Madeleine Ray, and Mariano Somale of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, writing on April 6:

 

We estimate that the tariffs implemented through November of 2025 have raised core goods PCE [Personal Consumption Expenditures] prices by 3.1 percent through February 2026, explaining the entirety of excess inflation in the core goods category relative to pre-pandemic inflation rates and contributing to a 0.8 percent boost in core PCE prices as a whole. Moreover, the data so far suggest that pass-through of these tariffs is effectively complete.

 

Here’s Ron Mau and Tucker Smith of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, writing May 5: “We estimate that tariff collections increased March 2026, 12-month core PCE inflation by about 0.80 percentage points and that core inflation absent tariff effects on relative prices would be 2.3 percent.”

 

Here’s Jaison R. Abel, Mary Amiti, Richard Deitz, Sebastian Heise, and Nick Montalbano of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, earlier this month, warning that more tariff-driven price increases are in the pipeline: “Our latest regional business surveys reveal that nearly half of firms that have paid tariffs still plan additional price increases to offset these costs, with some expecting to raise prices six months or more in the future.”

 

Since taking office, the Trump administration has collected $445 billion in tariff revenue, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Where do you think all that money is coming from? If you said, “foreign countries,” you’re wrong.

 

The New York Fed found “about three-quarters of businesses facing tariff-induced cost increases in both the manufacturing and service sectors passed along at least some of these higher costs to their customers by raising prices. Almost a third of manufacturers and about 45 percent of service firms reported fully passing along all tariff-related cost increases, while 45 percent of manufacturers and a third of service firms said they passed along some but not all of the cost increase.”

 

The argument from the Trump administration was that the tariffs were going to help launch a boom in manufacturing jobs. When President Trump took office, the U.S. had 12,673,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. As of June, the U.S. has . . . 12,598,000 manufacturing jobs, a slight decline. (An under-discussed aspect of the problem? A skilled labor shortage. If an administration’s whole economic policy is designed to trigger a “blue-collar resurgence,” shouldn’t you make sure you have a steady supply of skilled blue-collar workers first?)

 

(I know, I know, every economist associated with the Federal Reserve is a globalist! An out-of-touch egghead with all those spreadsheets and charts! A testosterone-deficient soy-boy with all that math and numbers!)

 

At this point, it’s no longer disputable; tariffs make goods more expensive. Thus, tariffs are a big factor in the cost of living, which is a big factor in Americans’ perceptions of the economy, which are a big reason why Trump’s job approval rating is around 40 percent, which is a big reason why Republicans are in trouble in the upcoming midterm elections. Keep in mind, this is all separate from the war against Iran’s impact on global energy prices and the price of a gallon of gasoline.

 

Still, I suppose a true cynic could argue that keeping the tariffs in place is worthwhile, even if they’re economically destructive, because they’re popular. The only problem with that argument is that tariffs are unpopular.

 

A new national CBS News/YouGov survey finds that 64 percent of U.S. adults oppose new U.S. tariffs on imported goods, while just 36 percent support them.

 

The Chicago Council-NPR-Ipsos survey suggests only a minority of Americans see any upside to the tariffs — even the ones imposed on Chinese goods:

 

Americans think the tariffs have been bad for the Chinese economy (72%). But majorities also say that the tariffs have also been bad for creating jobs in the United States (61%), for the US economy (66%), for their own standard of living and consumers like them (70%), and for the cost of living in the United States (76%).

 

Democrats and Independents are largely aligned in their deeply negative evaluations of the effects of US tariffs on China. At least two-thirds say that tariffs are bad for each of the affected areas asked about. They are particularly negative when it comes to core cost concerns: 92 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Independents say tariffs on Chinese imports have been bad for the cost of living in the United States.

 

Republicans are more positive, but not across the board. Two-thirds say that the tariffs have been good for creating jobs in the United States (66%) and the US economy (64%). And eight in 10 Republicans view the tariffs as having been bad for the Chinese economy. But they are divided on the impact to consumers like them and their own cost of living (52% good, 45% bad). Republicans are also on the negative side of the ledger when asked about the tariffs’ impact on the US cost of living (43% good, 54% bad).

 

For what it’s worth, I think tariffs on Chinese goods are more justifiable in the aim of economic decoupling from that hostile state and addressing national security concerns. But if you can’t persuade most Americans that tariffs on Chinese goods are worthwhile, you don’t have a chance of persuading a majority that it’s worth it to enact higher tariffs on Canada, the European Union, or other non-hostile economic partners.

 

Oh, Jim! You’re just a snobby suburban white-collar elitist! Of course you oppose the tariffs, but you should talk to some people in a heavy manufacturing state, like Michigan!

 

Okay, fine; let’s go ask voters in that state:

 

A majority of Michigan voters say state and federal lawmakers should change course on trade to reduce tariffs and lower consumer costs, according to a statewide poll by a business coalition that has campaigned against the shifting tariffs imposed under President Donald Trump.

 

By a margin of 70 percent to 20 percent, voters said lawmakers should pursue a different trade policy that reduces tariffs, the survey found. On the broader question of whether they support or oppose the United States imposing tariffs on imported goods, voters were more divided: 48 percent said they oppose tariffs and 43 percent said they support them — within the poll’s margin of error.

 

This November, Michigan voters will cast ballots for a new U.S. senator, a key governor’s race, 13 U.S. House seats, 38 state senators, 100 state representatives, a lieutenant governor, a state attorney general, a secretary of state, two seats on the state board of education, two seats on the Michigan State University board of trustees, two seats on the University of Michigan Board of Regents, and two seats on the Wayne State University Board of Governors.

 

But hey, why would Republicans want to run on policies that are popular in a state like that, right?

 

Trump’s tariff agenda is a collection of unpopular tax-hiking policies that make consumer prices higher, with no offsetting boom in manufacturing jobs. Yes, the stock market is booming most days, and unemployment is relatively low by historical standards. But congressional Republicans should be able to run on their economic record, and they can’t.

 

Monday, President Trump visited General Motors’ Milford Proving Ground, the company’s vehicle testing facility in southeastern Michigan. There, Trump delivered a speech declaring:

 

We are doing unbelievably well as a country. We’re building more auto factories and more plants than at any time in the history of our country. And someday the fake news is going to be writing stories about it. They don’t like to write those stories; that’s why they call them the fake news. . . . One year ago, our country was dead and now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re the hottest country. Everybody is respecting us. You know, they respect us again. They respect the United States . . . ladies and gentlemen of Michigan, the golden age of America is upon us. We’re in the Golden Age.

 

First, while there are indeed expansion plans at various stages in the automotive industry, the U.S. is not “building more auto factories and more plants than at any time in the history of our country.” (Note that a bunch of electric car manufacturing plant projects are being abandoned and retooled for gas-powered vehicles.)

 

Second, if this were truly a Golden Age, you would think that more than 36 percent of Americans would believe the country is headed in the right direction.

 

Third, one year ago, President Trump was president.

The Worst Lady

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Donald Trump is a terrible president, and he’s an even worse first lady.

 

Things are falling apart in Iran, oil has been back over $100 a barrel, inflation is still inflating, and the president is out there spending his time with … party planning and decorating. Dwight Eisenhower he is not.

 

Never mind that he is decorating badly—doesn’t this guy have other things to do? If he is not out there acting out an aneurysm in front of the White House press corps, he’s playing interior decorator and party planner, poking around at the edges of some low-stakes cultural stuff, and being the world’s most embarrassingly failed social climber.

 

Isn’t that the kind of thing for which presidents have, you know, wives?

 

“First lady,” if the ghastly term cannot be avoided, is the dumbest pseudo-office in our republic. The president’s wife has no legitimate special role to play in our national life for the same reason the spouse of the store manager who oversees the Walmart Supercenter in Williston, North Dakota, has no special role in managing the Walmart. They don’t give the managerial consort at Walmart the patio furniture section to manage as a goodwill project or anything like that: The manager manages and the spouse spouses. It is true that the job of the president of the United States and the job of a Walmart store manager are not precisely comparable: A good Walmart store manager earns more than the president, to begin with, and is expected to deliver real, measurable economic results, and probably is the one of the two you’d rather have helping out during a natural disaster or similar crisis, and he almost never shuts down traffic in Williston, North Dakota, by swanning around in an armored caravan acting out a fever-dream Roman triumph as imagined by the faculty of École Philippe Gaulier.

 

But we Americans have been trying to give ourselves an ersatz king ever since we gave the ol’ heave-ho to the last real one. (“Real.”) For every Tarquin, there is an Augustus. And because kingship is simply an idiotically sacralized version of fatherhood at the national scale, the royal consort is almost as important as the monarch himself. If we are expected to think of the president as “America’s dad,” in the formulation for which John Kasich probably ought to be stripped of his citizenship and deported, then the so-called first lady—you’ll search our founding documents in vain for any mention of such a title—is America’s mommy.

 

Gross, right?

 

I do not much blame Melania Trump for not really wanting the job. That is not her traditional line of work. She takes a plainly transactional view of her marriage: Asked by an interviewer if she would have married Donald Trump if he were not rich, she cynically asked whether he would have married her if she weren’t beautiful. The third Mrs. Trump is said to have wept—and not for joy—when it became clear in 2016 that Trump had, bizarre as it is to put the fact into English words, been elected president of these United States. You’ll remember the evening: In 2016, Trump beat out Bill Clinton’s wife and has been trying to prove that he is a better first lady ever since. It is a pity that Harris Glenn Milstead won’t be around to play him in the definitive biopic.

 

(One wonders whether the accomplished daughter of Prof. Radhakrishna and Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri also gets weepy when she thinks about whether she really signed up for this—and the “heritage American” stuff, too.)

 

If Jackie Kennedy was the ideal first lady—rearranging the china cabinet while her husband was out failing to rearrange China and the Cabinet, tough things to do when your schedule is taxed by an extramarital “two-girls-a-day routine”—then Mrs. Clinton surely was the worst of them, derailing her husband’s first term by inserting herself into a national fight over healthcare and health insurance that proved too complex and demanding for her modest abilities. Like Darline Graham Nordone, Mrs. Clinton was presented with the gift of a Senate seat as a tribute to the career of a shifty male family member who never let himself get tied down by the bonds of matrimony, and then she was humiliatingly defeated by inexperienced tyros in every election she contested for another office. But, oh, what a time the 1990s were: Every time Mrs. Clinton tried out a new hairdo, it was a front-page headline.

 

The big lesson from the Clinton administration: Relative peace and 297 percent return on the NASDAQ will buy a big creep a lot of goodwill. President Trump, a considerably bigger creep, has jumped combover-first into a 1970s-style stew of inflation intensified by unpopular—and failed—warmaking. And so Trump is out painting the town.

 

Literally.

 

Among his other Louis XIV-meets-American Psycho efforts at beautifying Washington—hell of a job with that reflecting pool, you [13-letter expletive participle deleted] incompetents!—Trump proposes to paint the Eisenhower Building, a perfectly fine old stone pile that is reasonably inoffensive by the standards of the hideously crypto-fascist grotesquely bloated Brutalist imperially pagan capital pseudo-city. The Eisenhower Building is granite-colored, on account of its being made of granite; Trump proposes to spend millions of dollars to make it white, like the people he prefers to rent to. Why? There’s the obvious thing—that he really is a short-fingered vulgarian who will work overtime to make things ugly whenever and wherever he can, even if that means giving all of Washington a case of architectural Mar-a-Lago face.

 

But one wonders if much of this is not the reality-television grotesque’s instinct for trying to manage the storyline. Not only the dopey decorating projects but the new round of tariffs that are likely to go nowhere and the various minor psychodramas of midsummer—Trump very much seems like he is attempting to gin up some relatively low-stakes controversies to distract Americans’ attention, or at least divide it, lest in the muggy dog days they start thinking too deeply (I know, I know) about the fact that the president has launched an open-ended and failing war in the Middle East, apparently because he thought it would be as easy and as cost-free as murdering boatloads of Latin Americans on the high seas for … some reason. A fair number of Trump voters—including some in his ride-or-die demographic—have had enough. Republicans can be on Fox News all day calling Colorado Gov. Jared Polis a Marxist, but it isn’t the governor of Colorado who promised to get a handle on inflation and then helped to jack up the price of filling up an F-250 to $200. And Trump would rather be having smallball fights over first lady stuff than reminding Americans how bad he is at being president.

 

First lady? Worst lady.