No One Who Bought the Gaza Starvation Narrative Deserves to Be Taken Seriously

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold published a bombshell report this week:

 

At the rate of 0.5 percent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, according to an analysis by The Free Press of data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC, a U.N.–affiliated hunger-monitoring system. The researchers also concluded that about 12 percent of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development that is the result of poor nutrition. That is less than half of the region’s 26 percent stunting rate, according to the latest report on child malnutrition by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.

 

Today, U.N. functionaries are encountering a very different problem in Gaza: “obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5.” And that is to say nothing of the clearly well-fed adult Gazans who miraculously resurface only after the latest round of fighting with Israel has concluded.

 

“A researcher who has overseen teams collecting malnutrition data in the Horn of Africa remarked that she had ‘never seen’ the emergence of obesity and excess weight in a place that was declared only a year earlier to be suffering from famine,” Reingold continued. “How did Gaza go from being officially classified as famine-stricken to having—in less than a year—one of the region’s lowest levels of severe child malnutrition? Humanitarian agencies have failed so far to answer that fundamental question, and one major organization is still fundraising on the claim that starvation rages on in Gaza.”

 

We’re confronted with one of two possibilities: Either Israel has pulled off the greatest disappearing act in human history or the famine we were supposed to obsess ourselves with in the spring of 2025 never happened.

 

It is impossible to summon any sympathy for those who were surprised by UNICEF’s findings. They are either hopelessly gullible or were so committed to their alternative version of reality that they refused to acknowledge any other. After all, the falseness of the allegation against Israel was obvious at the time.

 

Discerning news consumers might have noticed the discrepancy in the international press’s coverage of “food-starved Gaza,” in which residents were forced to eat “lentils, pasta, and rice.” They might have asked themselves why self-described humanitarian organizations resorted to proving the existence of a famine by promoting pictures of children — and it was only ever children — who suffered from emaciating genetic disorders or preexisting conditions. They could have just applied elementary logic to claims like the one issued by the BBC alleging that there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours” unless U.N. functionaries could reach them. That one depended as much on the audience’s innumeracy as their indifference to the truth.

 

Much of the public’s confusion is attributable to the United Nations itself. The United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) insisted a famine was afoot in the first place. The organization was incensed when Israel limited its access to the Gaza Strip after it was revealed that Hamas was raiding U.N. convoys and rationing food aid to the Gazan people — that is, when it wasn’t working directly with the U.N. Israel and the US established an alternative aid-distribution mechanism in the form of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but that charity was swiftly accused of deliberately starving the Gazan people. “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid,” said senior U.N. official Jonathan Whittall. “It is engineered scarcity.”

 

If the U.N. wasn’t overseeing its distribution, there might as well have been no food aid at all. That’s what Democratic politicians in the U.S. appeared to believe. Or, at least, those were the shibboleths the activist class expected them to mouth. Far too many Democratic politicians dutifully obliged.

 

“Hunger and malnutrition are widespread, and, alarmingly, deaths due to starvation, especially among children, are increasing,” read an open letter signed by 40 Democratic lawmakers. Senator Peter Welch (Vt.) accused Israel of executing a “war crime,” using “starvation” to advance the “government’s strategy of forcibly displacing Palestinians from their land.” Senator Brian Schatz (Hawaii) correctly intuited that it was “not at all credible” to think that the Israeli military was incapable of providing aid to the Gazan people, but he rejected the logic of his own conclusion.

 

Israel’s “blocking all food and emergency aid” ensured that “tens of thousands of children” would face “imminent starvation,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) concluded. “Half a million Palestinians are now at serious risk of famine,” said the equally emotive appeal of Senator Chris Murphy (Ct.), “and every day that food and medicine are kept from starving families, more children suffer, and more innocent lives are lost.” To Senator Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the “burgeoning famine” in Gaza amounted to “collective punishment that is clearly illegal under international law.”

 

“This man-made famine and genocide must end,” wrote Representative Summer Lee (Pa.). “Over 2 million people are being intentionally deprived of food, water, medicine, and baby formula,” Representative Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) concurred. None of them could beat Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib’s dramatic crescendo: “This is the final stage of their genocide,” she declared.

 

Some of these heedless politicians and their credulous followers might convince themselves that the epochal famine they warned of last year has since been mitigated. After all, high-intensity ground operations inside Gaza concluded ten months ago. But that is not an evasion that is available to those who continue to accuse Israel of engineering a “genocide” inside Gaza even today. Nor would an appeal to that kind of illogic absolve those who subordinated their powers of critical thinking to their desire to participate in a moral panic.

 

The most you could say for those who fell in line is that they deferred to the U.N.’s authority. After all, it was that body that sounded the alarms in the first place. But when Reingold went looking for the data that informed the U.N.’s conclusions, she found that the folders to which she’d been granted access “containing recent presentations and meeting minutes” were “gone.” They’d been offline for about a week before Reingold discovered it, only for them to be “restored about 11 hours later.” Suddenly, the IPC’s website showed that malnutrition rates in Gaza had precipitously declined.

 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” one Israeli government consultant told Reingold. That isn’t just true of the United Nations. The global anti-Israel movement rests on a reliable and durable foundation of incuriosity. But that is an explanation, not an excuse. At the very least, we should expect those who allowed themselves to be taken in by this flimsy lie to explain why we should ever take them seriously again.

It’s No Mystery Why Young Men Are Leaving the Workforce

By Caroline Downey

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Gen Z are an enigma to some people. Why are they whining about $20 burritos? Why are they obsessed with buying a starter home? Why aren’t they dating? The typical answer is that something mucked up the natural order. Among other culprits, technology contributed to the phasing out of both old-school courting rituals (say, approaching a love interest at a bar) and some sectors of employment. The latest head-scratcher, it seems, is: “Where have the men gone in corporate America?”

 

The guilty parties will play dumb. But the answer is no mystery — because it wasn’t really a voluntary exit, was it? It was expulsion and exile.

 

“American women now hold 176,000 more payroll jobs than American men,” according to the Wall Street Journal and July data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

For many years under progressive administrations and in major companies, the DEI regime has reigned. A lot of firms had either official or unofficial gender and/or race targets they were striving to meet. The NASDAQ, which includes more than 3,000 major companies, had rules requiring its listees to publicly disclose diversity statistics and to have — or explain why they did not have — at least two directors who are minorities, including one who self-identifies as female.

 

Though not a strict numerical quota, such forced diversity disclosure served as a moral litmus test for companies. Though a court eventually struck down the rules, the exchange for over three years signaled that females should be privileged in C-suites.

 

That and other virtue-signaling memos trickled down through the culture to this generation of young men. In college, I remember a male friend’s frustration as he and other finance undergrads competed for a small pool of jobs while big banks clamored to fill spots with females, despite their having, in his telling, less impressive applications.

 

Before President Trump issued executive orders prohibiting DEI in the federal government, affirmative action in the awarding of government contracting was widespread, effectively a different kind of cronyism.

 

The message was the same in college admissions. Before the Supreme Court declared affirmative action in admissions unconstitutional in 2023, colleges participated in discrimination against white men by applying racial preferences. Even now, some schools, including Duke Law, have tried to circumvent the Supreme Court’s Harvard ruling via proxy discrimination, developing mechanisms to flag for ostensibly marginalized backgrounds in admissions essays and usher in minority candidates.

 

As for women, their rising numbers in colleges were aided by the lifting of artificial caps on female enrollment. Before the 1970s, schools such as Yale University limited female enrollment to a small fraction of the class. With affirmative action and Title IX, universities dropped these ceilings and invited many new female students. However, some STEM institutions didn’t just open the doors — they gave favorable consideration to women to counter underrepresentation.

 

“Girls are twice as likely as boys to get into Caltech or MIT, to make up for the fact that they are half as likely to apply,” the Washington Post wrote in 2024.

 

To be fair, now that females make up nearly 60 percent of all college students nationwide, some colleges have allegedly practiced gender balancing in the other direction. Dubbed “affirmative action” for men, this isn’t the way, either. But even if female enrollees didn’t technically steal spots that would otherwise go to men, the disproportionate number changed the constitution of the average college. It is not a coincidence that gender studies, which is based on the idea that the patriarchy is the root of evil in society, has exploded as a discipline across academia in the past decade. With women dominating, colleges have evolved to focus on women’s concerns, as Helen Andrews wrote in her essay “The Great Feminization.”

 

Gee, maybe that was a deterrent to men? If colleges are increasingly adopting an ideological tone that treats maleness as problematic, that might chase men out or keep men away.

 

A conscious policy choice that has displaced young men in the workforce involves legal immigration programs such as H-1B, which, aside from being a corrupt labor arrangement, takes jobs from young men in technical fields. For those who would argue that these immigrants bring special genius and expertise that Americans cannot provide, there is no highly skilled worker shortage in the United States. Rather, it is more likely that the infusion of foreign labor depresses wages for Americans, disincentivizing them from putting their STEM degrees to use or pursuing them in the first place.

 

That being said, there is a whole sector begging for young men to join. An analysis this year found that nearly 1.4 million trade jobs across seven essential industries will be unfilled by 2030. Since the turn of the century, labor force participation has steadily declined across the board. As tradesmen retire, new apprentices aren’t replacing them fast enough. For every five tradesmen who leave the workforce, only two younger workers step up. There is incredible financial opportunity for young men in vocations if they want it.

 

It’s true that for many years, young men have repeatedly run into walls erected by politicians and corporate partners who determined that the appearance of equity was more important than fairness. The trend of the stay-at-home boyfriend is partly a consequence of a workforce now dominated by women, which was not so much an organic development as one that was socially engineered. Their disengagement from American life did not happen in a vacuum. Young men feel defeated, and they cannot be entirely blamed for that.

 

But the answer is not to grovel to despairing young men or treat them with kid gloves. The Trump administration has done the foundational work of ripping up the institutional barriers standing against men, though some remain. We, as a culture, must continually affirm that young men are valuable parts of our economy and our future. And entrepreneurship and getting your hands dirty are still paths welcome to young men who desire to build.

The Data Center Backlash Is Just a New Moral Panic

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands.

 

The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Moral panics emerge when large numbers of people start to freak out about something that doesn’t warrant the freak-out.

 

When I was kid, there was a moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game. It was sparked by the tragic suicide of a gamer and quickly led to various Christian groups insisting, in the words of one Georgia pastor, that “the game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons.”

 

Moral panics are seductive to journalists. CBS News’ 60 Minutes host Ed Bradley interviewed Gary Gygax, the creator of the game, in 1985, asking “If you found 12 kids in murder suicide with one connecting factor in each of them, wouldn’t you question it?”

 

Gygax responded, “I would certainly do it in a scientific manner, and this is as unscientific as you can get. It’s nothing but a witch hunt!”

 

Gygax was right, but it took a while for people to realize it.

 

History is full of similar episodes. Some were entirely silly—like the 1950s hysteria about comic books corrupting the youth. But often they take real concerns and legitimate issues and turbocharge them. The child-abduction panic of the late 1970s and early 1980s was sparked by some actual, horrific child abductions. The understandable fear among parents led to a kind of mass hysteria.  

 

Moral panics form a bit like “perfect storms” with just the right conditions. But they differ in three ways. First, storms are easy to predict. Second, when you’re in a deluge, no one disputes that you’re in one. But when you’re in a moral panic, the people panicking can’t recognize it until it’s over—sort of like when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently, “Woke 1 was crazy.” She didn’t think so when she was fomenting Woke 1.

 

Which brings us to the third difference: Humans don’t know how to create hurricanes, but they do know how to create moral panics.

 

Consider the freak-out over AI data centers, which are proliferating across the country. A recent poll found that more people would rather have a nuclear power plant or steel factory in their community than a data center. That’s bonkers.

 

Panic-peddlers are pushing even crazier stuff. Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast is describing AI data centers as “weapons labs” to be used on Americans. His “tech correspondent” claims that data centers are like the embryonic “neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.” A Kentucky farmer who turned down a $26 million offer for her property explained to CNN that part of her reasoning is that the vibrations from data centers “vibrate at a low frequency that can bring up cortisol levels.”

 

We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this moral panic isn’t entirely homegrown. Fracking induced a similar freak-out 15 years ago, and foreign governments played a role in fomenting it, hoping a moral panic would block the practice much as a similar panic killed the nuclear industry for a generation. It would not shock me if we’re seeing something similar today.

 

Not all concerns about data centers are so crazy or even unreasonable. They do use a lot of water, though not nearly as much as some claim. They can cause electricity rates to go up. They’re ugly. And, if you’re freaking out about what AI will do to your job or to American society, taking it out on data centers makes a certain amount of sense.

 

Politicians, as a class, tend to indulge moral panics. Which is why it’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats alike are racing to get on the “right” side of the issue.

 

Consider Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, up for reelection this year. Texas has prided itself on being the most business-friendly environment possible, enticing Big Tech to flee California for the accommodating Lone Star State. Just last November, Abbot boasted that a $40 billion investment by Google proved that “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”

 

Now, Abbott is throwing Google and Big Tech under the bus. By failing to win over local communities, he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “They basically dug their own grave for the problem that's been caused for them.” He added, “that's why they got the backlash they deserve.”

 

AI is coming. The only question is whether America should take the lead or let China. If your answer is “America,” then data centers are the price. If your answer is “China” then by all means keep freaking out.

No Daylight Between Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent this week trying to create the appearance of daylight between himself and poisonous internet personality Hasan Piker. There is no reason for Michigan voters to take his statements, which don’t even directly criticize Piker, as anything more than a desperate general election gambit.

 

Piker garnered attention for a livestream this week in which he claimed that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He made the statement while the screen showed a photo of Jeremy Moss, a Jewish Democrat who is running for a U.S. House seat in Michigan.

 

There is a long history of blaming Jews for bringing antisemitism on themselves, including in Nazi propaganda. The idea that a particular religious group cannot hold a given set of views without inviting violence is deeply un-American. While Piker’s comments could be charitably interpreted as his sympathetically noting the way things are, rather than arguing that this is how they ought to be, there is very little reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defended terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.”

 

Headlines that El-Sayed has “distanced” himself from Piker are overstated. In response to Piker’s latest comments about American Jews inviting violence on themselves, the candidate released a statement that could have been generated by AI, declaring generically, “Americans deserve the right to advocate what they believe without fear of violence.” Notably, he avoided directly criticizing Piker, merely claiming that “while politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer,” he wanted to focus on affordability.

 

But the politician most responsible for making Piker an issue has been El-Sayed himself, by happily campaigning with the streamer — and not just once. He embraced Piker at an April campaign rally at which he mocked the idea that it was deemed controversial even as President Trump was trying to commit “genocide in Iran.” Just a few weeks ago, Piker appeared at El-Sayed’s final rally before the Democratic primary. Piker’s views were no secret.

 

That Piker would again say something controversial about Jews during the campaign was not an unforeseeable event, considering that El-Sayed consciously used Piker to energize the youth vote that helped deliver him the nomination. And there’s plenty of evidence that El-Sayed, who has made rabid anti-Zionism a cornerstone of his campaign, shares a lot of Piker’s sentiments. El-Sayed himself said that Israel was just as “evil” as Hamas.

 

What’s happened, of course, is that Piker was seen as an asset during the Democratic primary and now is viewed as a liability. Given the strong environment for Democrats in a state where Republicans have not won a Senate race in over 30 years, a generic Democrat would be expected to be coasting to victory. But El-Sayed, who dramatically underperformed polling in the primary, finds himself in a dead heat with former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee.

 

El-Sayed is eager to convince reluctant voters that they can vote for him in good conscience. But there is no reason to believe that daylight exists between him and the terrorist-sympathizing hater Hasan Piker.

The Gray Zone Descends on Leipzig (Again)

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

As a reminder, the term “gray zone” describes an action or series of actions that are not quite war, and not quite not war, either. I wrote a bit the other day about how the pace and intensity of Russian operations within this zone had been increasing, noting among other developments the dispatch of an explosive-laden drone (it contained twice as much Semtex as the device that blew up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie) to Leipzig Airport. Mercifully, it was headed off by a vigilant bus driver.

 

The same day, reports The Guardian, a second drone possibly collided with a DHL cargo plane, which had to land elsewhere. No sign of a drone was found, but inspectors found damage to the tail section of a type that suggested it had been hit by something. One theory is that a drone could have been sucked into the engines after the collision and shredded into small pieces.

 

We’ll never know, I suppose.

 

And now, however, there’s this:

 

German investigators uncovered a third drone and suspected military explosives thought to be connected to an attempted attack on Leipzig airport, local media have reported.

 

The drone was discovered in Kabelsketal, just to the west of the airport, along with about 50g (1.8oz) of a suspected military explosive on 14 August, 10 days after the unsuccessful sabotage. Leipzig airport is a cargo and military logistics hub used by Nato and Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines for transporting military supplies.

 

Germany’s Chancellor Merz has said the government would soon provide information about who it believed was behind the drone attacks.

 

That shouldn’t take long, but proving it may take longer.

 

Merz has also promised that those responsible would “pay.”

 

But how?

 

One aspect of gray-zone operations is that the absence of hard proof of those responsible makes it more difficult to justify (publicly anyway) retribution. And their scale is typically set at a level too low to be treated, formally anyway, as an act of war — although that, judging by the growing seriousness of these incidents, is something that seems to bother Russia less and less.

The CIA Director’s Surprise Visit to Moscow Comes at an Ominous Moment

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25,2026

This post is in response to The Gray Zone Descends on Leipzig (Again)

By Andrew Stuttaford

Andrew Stuttaford has been a devoted chronicler of the “gray zone” provocations that cannot be directly pinned on America’s adversaries but sure do have a conspicuous tendency to advance their interests. His latest dispatch on the subject follows the discovery of an explosive drone discovered at Leipzig airport, in Germany, earlier this month.

 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pledged that the people or groups behind this and other hybrid attacks on German soil “will pay for them.” But, Andrew asks, how? The logic of the “gray zone” attack is that there is no return address, no chain of custody that links the attacker to the state sponsor.

 

That’s what makes CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow so inauspicious. The White House took unusual steps to conceal the director’s itinerary before he departed for Moscow on a U.S. Air Force C-17 out of Riga, Latvia. No one in the administration is commenting on the trip for the record. On background, sources will only confirm that the trip is real. “Publicly available flight tracking data does not show the C-40B on the next flight to Moscow,” the Washington Post reported. “The aircraft is a modified business jet used to transport senior government officials.”

 

The details are sparse, but the backdrop against which this rare in-person meeting is happening is portentous.

 

Ratcliffe’s trip comes as Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian infrastructure have precipitated an energy crisis in Russia. Moscow’s worsening manpower shortages have made Western analysts fear that the Kremlin will attempt to escalate its way out of the crisis that Vladimir Putin imposed on his people. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal revealed that U.S. intelligence suggests that Russia will test the NATO’s resolve to challenge Moscow’s ambitions with a provocation that risks all-out conflict.

 

“U.S. and European leaders increasingly see signs of Russia conducting probing attacks to test NATO’s resolve, including Russian cruise missiles that have landed in Poland and drones flown into Romania,” the report read. “The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country or sending unmarked armed groups to occupy territory to a limited incursion on the alliance’s eastern flank.”

 

The “gray zone” provocations in parts of Europe that Moscow regards as sensitive are likely part of the multivalent Russian threat. U.S. intelligence is reportedly convinced that the Kremlin was behind the event in Leipzig. It is highly likely, according to Latvian intelligence, that Russian military intelligence was behind the explosives smuggled into Europe in summer 2024. “Security officials in Lithuania said last year the four parcels were part of a test run for a Russian plot to trigger explosions on cargo flights to the United States,” CNN reported last year.

 

These operations raise the risk of miscalculation to unacceptable levels. Perhaps Moscow wants to confront the West with a “Why die for Danzig?” moment. The Kremlin asks us to consider, Would the West really maintain its support for Ukraine if the world were in the balance? But alliance dynamics are sticky things. And if Moscow succeeded in sponsoring attacks that killed NATO civilians on or over NATO soil, there is no guarantee that an escalating series of reprisals and retaliations would not take on a logic all its own and spiral out of control.

 

Whatever Director Ratcliffe’s mission in Moscow is, this is certainly more than a get-to-know-you confab.

El-Sayed’s Circumcision Quip Was Too Clever by Half

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

You know that a Democrat has done or said something indefensibly asinine when the political press covers the reaction to it with more vigor than the precipitating event. So far, that is what we’ve witnessed in the hours since Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed asked Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters if his penis is intact.

 

The exchange, via Mediaite:

 

“Sex change for minors. Do you support that?” Watters asked at one point.

 

“I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have,” El-Sayed replied.

 

Watters then pressed him with a more graphic formulation: “So you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”

 

El-Sayed fired back: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?”

 

“Yeah, but I mean that’s a personal question, doctor,” a visibly surprised Watters responded.

 

Watters argued that circumcision is “different than castration,” prompting El-Sayed to reply: “I’m just saying that yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.”

 

The coverage of these remarks diverted quickly away from them, focusing instead on how the candidate’s political opponents were supposedly fit to be tied over El-Sayed’s failed attempt at cleverness. But the reaction to this story, however entertaining it may be, is not the real story here.

 

Surely, El-Sayed’s revealed confusion over the practice of circumcision and how it is distinct from genital mutilation will do nothing to dispel the allegations of antisemitism swirling around his campaign. More damaging to him, perhaps, is the candidate’s flat-footedness on the controversial issue of youth gender transition therapies and the harm they do.

 

The minimally curious should by now have grappled with the medical literature that finds young people suffering from gender dysphoria do not, on balance, experience positive mental health outcomes as a result of surgical or pharmaceutical interventions. Indeed, their conditions often worsen. El-Sayed and others should be expected to have surveyed the landscape in Europe, where the public health apparatus expresses increasing uncertainty about the value of those interventions.

 

They should recognize, at the very least, the political peril associated with their incuriosity, especially if they’re running for office. It’s not too much to expect candidates to familiarize themselves with the public’s anxieties toward biological males playing in women’s sports or the increasing episodes of violence attributed to gender dysphoric personalities.

 

If El-Sayed had acquainted himself with even the basic contours of the issue, he probably wouldn’t have struck the condescending posture he adopted on Monday night. Instead, he smirked his way through an exhibition of profound ignorance — a display that was not masked by the candidate’s obviously practiced and admittedly expert Barack Obama impression — that conveyed only his contempt for the concerns shared by a majority of Americans, including a plurality of Democrats.

 

“You should want to move on,” said El-Sayed, closing out the interview with the confidence of someone who hadn’t just fumbled the ball on the one-yard line. But anyone who watched the exchange would conclude that it was El-Sayed who was desperate to change the subject.