Adding a course taught by a professor who accuses Israel of genocide. Hiring another professor who describes his own work as “counter-Zionist.” Launching a student journal of erotic poetry and “support for Palestinian Liberation.” Appointing another scholar to a visiting professorship that already existed and has been refilled annually for nearly a decade. Adding a course on antisemitism taught by a professor who backs a definition of antisemitism embraced by boycott-Israel advocates.

Harvard and ten of the nation’s biggest-name appellate lawyers are brazenly trying to pass all these steps off to federal judges as proof that the university is moving to address what even the university itself concedes in its latest court filing has been “disturbing, offensive, and vile treatment of Jewish students.”

Harvard’s legal, political, and public relations strategy in its faceoff with the Trump administration over billions in federal research funding became clearer this week with court filings in a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, President and Fellows of Harvard College v. US Department of Health and Human Services. The federal government also filed a memorandum of law this week in a similar case, United States v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which is before Judge Richard Stearns in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

What Harvard has not done is survey Jewish students or the campus as a whole to see whether what it found in 2024—that Jewish students get an inferior campus experience—has changed. The government’s federal filing notes Harvard’s own past finding that “substantial numbers of Jewish students indicated experiencing discomfort and alienation at Harvard … 26% felt physically unsafe and 44% felt mentally unsafe. Nearly half (49%) felt their well-being was not supported at Harvard … Almost 60% of Jewish students indicated they had experienced some form of discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to their views on current events.” Harvard hasn’t collected or disclosed new or updated data on that, either.

Instead, Harvard’s ten outside lawyers, led by former George W. Bush administration solicitor general Paul Clement and including former Scalia clerk Scott Lehotsky, former Trump Organization lawyer and current Fox Corp. director William Burck, and former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts Joshua Levy, tell the court in its latest filing that “Harvard implemented many changes aimed at ensuring its campus is safe, fair, and welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students.” An 11th outside Harvard lawyer, Scott Keller, recently withdrew from the case to take the job of general counsel of Chevron.

Harvard’s filing says “The University’s deans have implemented changes concerning appointments and curriculum (including bolstered course offerings and faculty focused on Jewish history and antisemitism).”

The court filing footnotes this claim to a Harvard “academic life” web page that really has to be seen to be believed. It’s one thing, in court or in the court of public opinion, to put your best foot forward. It’s another thing to offer an account so selective and full of half-truths and spin that it winds up being misleading, a deception that is the opposite of Veritas. I’m not saying that Harvard hasn’t improved from the nightmare it was, or that it hasn’t put effort and resources into improving. But that Harvard is billing these particular “changes” as leaps of progress against discrimination is laughable.

Among the “changes” touted on the Harvard web page that is footnoted in the court filing, many referencing the Harvard Divinity School:

— “In spring 2026, HDS added a new course on Jewish Ecology.” That course was taught by Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg, who accuses Israel of genocide.

— “a new student journal on Jewish liturgy.” That’s Ashera, a journal of Palestinian liberation and erotic poetry that was actually “created” not by a student but by a professor, Shaul Magid, who advocates what he describes as “counter-Zionism.”

— “In June 2025, HDS hired for the position of the Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence.” That was Magid. In his 2023 book, The Necessity of Exile, Magid declared that “Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project,” and said that he doesn’t think “that liberalism and Zionism can be seen as compatible in any easy way.” The book, he writes, is “in some sense, anti-Zionist” or “more precisely … counter-Zionist.”

— “New faculty at Harvard Law School. In fall 2026, Harvard Law School will welcome a new faculty member as the Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law.” This visiting professorship has existed since at least 2017, through the most vile periods of Harvard antisemitism. The person who will hold the position in the fall of 2026, Moshe Halbertal, was also there in 2018-2019. And while Harvard may be bringing in traveling Talmud professors, it is also giving $90,000-a-year fellowships to four anti-Israel activists. Harvard’s English and history departments also paid a $35,000 honorarium and $7,500 in travel expenses “for a 5 star hotel” to have Ta-Nehisi Coates appear on campus on September 24, 2025, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and “read from his chapter on Palestine,” according to documents released by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Enumerating the changes with such specificity also risks contradicting Harvard’s other legal arguments. Harvard is claiming a First Amendment right to teach whatever it wants without government interference, and simultaneously telling the court to look favorably at all the new stuff it’s doing and faculty it’s hiring.

In addition to the filings from Harvard and the government, several “friend of the court” briefs were filed in the cases this week by other parties. Hillel International filed a brief siding with Harvard against the Trump administration, signed by a lawyer, David Zimmer, who is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. After a Harvard student who successfully sued, then settled with Harvard, Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, called Hillel out on the matter, Hillel moved to withdraw its brief, explaining that “authorization to file the brief was provided to counsel without the brief having gone through a required internal review process within Hillel.”

Another brief backing Harvard was filed by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and National Council of Jewish Women. Their lawyer is Naomi Shatz. Shatz was also the lawyer for Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a Harvard Divinity student from Ghana, charged with misdemeanor criminal charges of assault and battery and of interfering with the civil rights of a fellow student in what prosecutors said was an attack on Yoav Segev, an Israeli student at Harvard Business School. Shatz’s defense strategy included telling a Boston judge that Segev “had no bruises.” The civil rights charge was dismissed and the assault charge was dealt with by pretrial diversion to community service.

Shatz’s brief claims “identifying Jewish People as the Reason for Funding Cuts Will Create Backlash and Scapegoating of Jewish Students and Faculty,” which seems like circular logic—don’t crack down on campus antisemitism, because the antisemites might discriminate against the Jews even more fiercely in response to the enforcement.

A brief in the district court case from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Equal Rights Under the Law highlights a subtle legal issue that helps explain why Harvard is so eager to emphasize what it has done. The Brandeis Center argues that the government does not need to prove “deliberate indifference.” It says, “intentional discrimination may be proven by a number of different methods; all that is required is proof that persons were treated worse because of their protected category.”

As the court cases work their way through the system and Harvard works on its slow academic timeline to hire professors (a search is under way for a tenured full Yiddish professor to begin in July 2027 to replace Ruth Wisse, who retired in 2014), many talented Jewish students who might in past years have chosen Harvard are looking elsewhere. The Hillel college guide lists the top 60 schools by Jewish population percentage. Brown, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Duke, Yale, University of Pennsylvania all make the list. Harvard is absent.

READ MORE: Harvard Touts ‘Counter-Zionist’ Professor, Palestinian Liberation Erotic Poetry Journal as Evidence of Progress Against Jew-Hate

President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, can’t sleep in the aftermath of the war between Israel and Hamas, he says.

Sullivan, a longtime Democratic foreign policy hand who is now Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School, made the confession to the New Yorker magazine’s David Kirkpatrick for an interminable article that appears in the July 27, 2026 issue. The article carries the headline “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—And Iran,” with the subheadline, “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.”

“Sullivan, whose role as national-security adviser made him the last to leave the room before Biden made a decision, told me that he had lain awake many nights thinking about what the U.S. might have done differently,” the article says. It is not clear whether the U.S. departure from Afghanistan, which left 13 American service members dead and tens of millions of Afghans in the clutches of the Taliban, is also disrupting his sleeping, but advertising that fact certainly wouldn’t help him secure a cabinet position in the next Democratic administration, nor would admitting he’s had second thoughts about deceiving the American people with regard to President Biden’s mental faculties.

Sullivan, unlike New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, hasn’t publicly accused Israel of genocide. Nor has Sullivan advocated wiping Israel off the map, the goal sought by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and their America-hating Iranian sponsors. That’s earned him the enmity of rabid anti-Israel groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which wrote to Harvard president Alan Garber and Harvard Kennedy School dean Jeremy Weinstein in March 2025 urging them to revoke Sullivan’s appointment, which they said “gave new meaning to the concept of failing up and showed a racist disregard for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians … Mr. Sullivan helped slaughter.”

Sullivan didn’t respond immediately to an inquiry the Washington Free Beacon sent to his office asking when these sleepless nights were, whether they are ongoing, and whether he has sought any help for it.

His Harvard website lists courses on “National Security Decision Making” and “The Policy and Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence.” Usually the risk in a university class is that the students fall asleep, but unless Sullivan rests up, there’s a chance he could doze off himself, like President Biden during meetings in the waning days of his administration.

A Washington Post article published this week flagged “changes to sleep” as a possible warning sign of more serious medical problems. “Insomnia or reduced nighttime rest can also precede dementia. One study of more than 4,400 cognitively healthy older adults found that having less nighttime sleep or more daytime sleep was linked to an increased accumulation of amyloid beta — a biological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — in the brain,” the Post reported, suggesting that people with these concerns talk to their doctors.

If the issue is policy-related rather than neurological, one thing Sullivan or Biden might have done better is communicate more directly that America would not restrain Israel or withhold weapons. Once President Trump took office and adopted that approach, Hamas released all its remaining hostages.

As for the idea that Sullivan might somehow have saved Palestinian lives by being tougher on Israel, that’s absurd. The Israeli public wouldn’t have accepted an Israeli surrender, and the U.S. attempting to force that would have amounted to a victory for the Iran-backed terrorists. Had such a policy played out, it wouldn’t only be Sullivan tossing and turning in bed, but Israelis still facing a Hamas threat or awaiting the return of hostages. And even, perhaps, some Gazans dismayed to be consigned to permanent rule by Hamas thugs.

It’s tempting to see these publicly voiced retrospective doubts as suspiciously convenient, calculated to make Sullivan and his peers more acceptable for jobs in a future Democratic administration that will be more anti-Israel.

I tend to accept the remarks, in Sullivan’s case, at least, as sincere. Perhaps I’m too generous—it’s one of my weaknesses—but I actually feel sorry for the guy.

From afar, Sullivan looks like a tremendous success by all the usual career and status standards. A Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Yale, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (he also won a Marshall scholarship but declined it like one of his other anti-Israel critics), he was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He’s married to Rep. Maggie Goodlander, a Democrat of New Hampshire. Goodlander, a Navy Reserve veteran and former aide to Senator Joe Lieberman, recently signed a pledge in favor of capitalism and patriotism, though also voted for the Massie amendment to cut aid to Israel. Sullivan will turn 50 in November. He’s a professor at Harvard, and he also does presumably lucrative paid work for Morgan Stanley, D.E. Shaw, and other financial industry clients. He can claim a residence in New Hampshire, a state with no income tax. He’s largely avoided the full-on Bernie Sanders lurch into anti-Israel monomania that has afflicted his Obama administration colleague Ben Rhodes, though he does serve with Rhodes on an advisory board for Foreign Policy for America, a group that is pushing the “genocide” blood libel against Israel. He also joined the board of Rhodes’s Soros-funded National Security Action, led by longtime anti-Israel activist Maher Bitar.

Yet the guy is apparently so plagued with self-doubt and insecurity and misplaced guilt that he can’t even get a good night’s sleep. He’s intelligent enough that he’s probably already taken the obvious steps—cut out the alcohol, reduce the caffeine, get outdoor exercise, put the phone away an hour before bedtime, make sure the room is dark, take some deep breaths and let them out slowly. Perhaps the problem is that Sullivan is hanging out with the wrong crowd, peers who hate Israel and think it was wrong to help it defend itself against a terrorist onslaught. No one wants public servants who are arrogant or cocksure. But if all those Yale and Oxford degrees didn’t convey the core conviction or value that backing Israel against the terrorists was the right thing, maybe they aren’t so impressive after all. One bedtime routine I learned in religious day school and summer camp but not at Harvard was prayer to the God of the Hebrew Bible. Sweet dreams, Professor Sullivan.

READ MORE: Jake Sullivan Can’t Sleep

NPR has retracted its story claiming that Justice Alito is retiring, replacing it with an editor’s note explaining that the story “was published in error.”

The coming days will disclose whether the error was publishing it a few days too soon or publishing it at all. NPR attributed it to “a misunderstanding” by 82-year-old Nina Totenberg, who has been at NPR for half a century. Either way, at least in this situation NPR editors publicly acknowledged an error and took the story down. That’s more than they’ve done for hundreds of other articles that are similarly erroneous but, alas, remain unretracted and without editor’s notes on NPR websites and audio platforms.

I stopped listening after October 7, 2023, and then I stopped listening again after President Trump took office again, because it’s become basically unlistenable. The only reason to listen was to gather evidence of bias that could be used to remove the taxpayer subsidies. Once Trump and congressional Republicans succeeded in eliminating the taxpayer subsidies there really was no reason left to listen. I guess I checked in once or twice curious about whether the removal of the government subsidy had somehow chastened NPR into more accurate, less biased coverage. Maybe they were aspiring to get the funding back by demonstrating improvement? Instead it seemed that the loss of government funding had only unleashed NPR to bare its left-wing bias without apology. They no longer had anything left to lose, money-wise, and the funders who stepped in to fill the gap were left-wing foundations and individuals who weren’t interested in fair-and-balanced coverage so much as they were in having their opinions confirmed about how horrible Trump is.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, a watchdog organization that I’m on the board of, documents dozens of examples of NPR sliming Israel while playing propagandist for Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. “NPR has not only crossed the line of no return, but has abandoned the basic moral compass that news consumers should demand from journalism,” Camera’s Jennifer Kouzi wrote in one recent piece.

The Media Research Center, a conservative research group, also has countless examples of NPR’s left-wing tilt. “National ‘Public’ Radio sounded like National Mamdani Radio,” one recent Media Research Center piece said, faulting the outlet for showering New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani with softball questions “that sounded like what Democrats would ask at a precinct caucus.” Another Media Research Center item was headlined, “Lefty NPR Indulges Fans of Alleged Murderer, Sex Symbol Luigi Mangione: ‘He’s Hot.’”

Foreign NPR segments frequently feature reporters in Lebanon who would be killed by Hezbollah if they told the real story of what is happening there rather than amplifying what Hezbollah wants western audiences to hear. Political coverage of Washington starts from the premise that President Trump is a norms-breaking would-be-tyrant jeopardizing democracy and the rule of law. Reporters from other left-leaning news organizations, book authors, left-wing professors, and officials of left-wing advocacy groups are brought on-air to support the baseline alarmist premise, fueling anxiety among NPR listeners. The implicit argument is that the only way to preserve American democracy is to donate to NPR so they can stay on the air warning about how endangered American democracy is.

The catastrophism, the oversimplification, is on display routinely. Here’s a piece from NPR’s home page today, headlined, “After Trump’s reelection, these U.S. scientists found jobs in the U.K.“ It begins “For decades, the U.S. was seen as a nation that prized its universities and scientific researchers. That changed when President Trump began his second term, says Megan Peters, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine. ‘It became very apparent, very quickly, that the new administration did not value higher education,’ she says, or the scientific research done at universities. ‘So when I went on the job market, I started looking around overseas,’ Peters says.”

There’s no skepticism about the claim that Trump, who touts the Ivy League credentials of every Ivy League appointee he appoints, does “not value higher education,” no consideration of why, if Trump doesn’t value higher education, he has devoted so much energy to trying to reform it, and no questioning of why someone’s connection to the U.S. is so attenuated that their response to a federal policy change is to flee to a foreign country. It’s just a straight-up panicdote suggesting that fleeing elsewhere is a rational response to the Trump presidency.

It’s so predictable that it’s boring. Part of the fun of radio is the serendipity, the surprise, the hearing a story that’s unexpected. You don’t get that from an anti-Trump, anti-Israel audio newsletter, which is what NPR is these days. An “Editor’s Note” with that confession would be a welcome surprise.

READ MORE: NPR’s ‘Alito Retiring’ Retraction Raises Question: What About All the Other Erroneous Stories It Hasn’t Retracted?

Good news about pertussis, also known as whooping cough: despite fears that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unconventional views about childhood vaccines would lead to a resurgence of the disease, reported cases have actually declined from a recent high during the Biden-Harris administration.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 28,783 cases of the disease in 2025, down from 43,321 in 2024. And so far in 2026, the numbers are down even more, with 4,763 cases total and the year nearly half over.

How does the New York Times cover the reassuring news? With an alarmist, top-of-the-front-page headline calculated to appeal to the negativity bias of readers and whip up a panic among parents.

“Doctors Seeing Grim Illnesses Strike Unvaccinated Children” is the headline that appeared on the Times front page this week, “above the fold” for those old enough to know or care about such distinctions. The article is dismissive about the actual statistics, which is ironic, because the whole point of the article is to portray the Trump administration as dangerously anti-science. The Times writes, “For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.”

Another term for “[a]necdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm” might be a panicdote, a portmanteau of “panic” and “anecdote.”

For a sense of what the Times is up to, consider that the newspaper reports about whooping cough, “there were more than 28,000 cases reported last year, compared with around 7,000 in 2023.” By giving the numbers for 2025 and 2023 without mentioning the peak in 2024 or the lower numbers for 2026, the Times is cherry-picking data in a way that seems calculated to stoke fear rather than to accurately portray reality.

The product being delivered here to Times readers is not accurate disease surveillance; instead, it’s the feeling of superiority over those deplorable Trump voters. “Stupid Is As Stupid Does” is the headline over one Times reader comment, upvoted by 1,500 other Times readers, enough to qualify it as a “reader pick.” Said the comment, “Gee, who could have seen *that* coming?! I’m sooo tired of these yapping, ignorant, conspiracy-theory-addled anti-vax and anti-science people. They need to be across the board ignored and silenced. I’m tired of giving lunatics the time of day and acting like we have to listen to them.”

Where is, or was, the pertussis boom? In 2025 the states with the highest numbers of cases were California, Oregon, and Washington, not exactly hotbeds of Trump support.

A public broadcasting reporter in Oregon, Amelia Templeton, tried to understand what was happening and attributed the rise not to Trump or Kennedy but to changes in the formulation of the vaccine and to the aftereffects of COVID-era social distancing. “In the 1980s, the United States shifted to using shots that had less of the pertussis bacteria in them, known as acellular vaccines. Following that shift, epidemiologists started to see a resurgence, often in school-aged children who had been vaccinated years earlier. Their conclusion: immunity from the acellular vaccines doesn’t last as long,” she reported. Also, “the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. That likely led to less passive immunity from recent infections in the population and contributed to the current rise in cases.”

The Times blames not social distancing or the vaccine formulations but rather “distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified.”

The Times article hangs on “doctors around the country say.” It names six doctors: Meghan Hofto, Jessica Kirk, Robin Harrison, Taylor Rosenbaum, Sonali Meyer, and Erin Charles. Kirk donated $250 in 2024 to the Democratic Victory PAC, federal campaign finance records show. Meyer gave $150 to a Democrat-aligned emergency physicians political action committee in 2024, another $150 in April 2026, $100 in October 2020 and $200 in November 2020, federal campaign finance records show. Rosenbaum gave two $47 contributions in October 2024 to the Harris campaign, records show.

So at least three of the Times’s six “doctors around the country” participating in the panicdote story about a Trump-driven whooping cough outbreak are Democratic political donors. The Times doesn’t disclose that to readers, keeping it a secret just like the number of whooping cough cases in 2024 and in 2026. We’re happy to fill in the missing information here, at least until we are “silenced” the way the Times reader comment suggests.

The Times article quotes no parents or patients, just the doctors. Some reporting might find that the non-vaccinators are a variegated group and include a lot of progressive back-to-the-land types. They might even include some illegal immigrants or asylum seekers. They aren’t all the MAGA-hat-wearing villains of the New York Times commenter or editor’s imagination.

It’s a sad thing, because trusted information about public health risks is important for people to understand what to do when there are genuine risks. For the Times to start treating communicable diseases like homelessness or antisemitism—something that it pays attention to spikes in or hypes when Republicans are in control, while largely downplaying when Democrats are in power—will just further erode already weak public confidence in the press.

“This country needs a fair press,” Trump said Thursday afternoon in the Oval Office, going on about “how corrupt our media is.” The Times describes comments like that as a symptom of Trump’s supposed authoritarianism, yet articles like this one make Trump’s criticism seem accurate. When Trump makes anecdote-based claims about election fraud or immigrant-driven crime that aren’t supported by statistics, the Times gets all worked up in a lather about how irresponsible it is. How is this Times news article any different from that, other than it’s on the other partisan side? If there were a vaccine to take against Trump Derangement Syndrome, it sure could be deployed with good effect at the New York Times.

READ MORE: New York Times Stirs Baseless Panic Over Trump, Vaccines, and Childhood Diseases

Under pressure from competitors and from government officials—including President Trump—who say that Harvard is too uniformly left-wing and too hostile to Jews and Israel, Harvard used this week’s graduation ceremonies to recognize some of its critics.

At Harvard’s main universitywide commencement ceremony on Thursday, May 28, a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal opinion section, Peggy Noonan, was one of five honorary degree recipients. A December 2023 column by Noonan, headlined, “What Universities Have Done to Themselves,” had criticized then-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony, concluding “The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status.”

On Wednesday May 27, 2026, Harvard Business School honored the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, with an alumni achievement award and invited him to speak to the graduating class. Romney, along with Joanna Jacobson, Seth Klarman, Bill Helman, and Mark Nunnelly, was a lead signer of a scathing October 2023 letter to Harvard leaders: “Jewish students have locked themselves in dorm rooms across your campuses afraid for their own safety. Despite these serious concerns, University leadership shockingly has been paralyzed.”

Harvard president Alan Garber, in his remarks at commencement, thanked the graduates for “responding to the legitimate concerns of our critics with principled action.” At best there are some signs that the description might start to be accurately applied to the university itself. Whether those actions are indeed principled or rather just largely cosmetic, belated responses to intense pressure remains to be seen, along with how far any such responses will go against entrenched internal resistance, left-wing bias, and inertia at Harvard.

Harvard is under threat of an ongoing $2.6 billion lawsuit from the federal government over antisemitism. One federal judge, Richard Stearns, found “Harvard failed its Jewish students,” and another federal judge, Allison Burroughs, found “It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue ... Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

Past Harvard commencement ceremonies featured an honorary degree to a boycott Israel activist (2025) and in 2022 the opening prayer of Harvard commencement was offered “in the name of Jesus, my radical brother, the 1st-century freedom fighter who knew enslavement, at the hands of oppressors and occupiers,” while captions on the large video screens flashed “first century Palestine’s freedom fighter.”

This year, in contrast, the opening prayer was offered by the “chaplain of the day,” identified in the program simply as “Getzel Davis” but who is a rabbi and the director of Harvard’s presidential initiative on interfaith engagement. His remarks spoke of “in my own Jewish tradition.” The senior English address came from Noah Eckstein, who declared, “I am a proud Jew. I am also the proud grandson of a Christian, and the proud grandson of a Muslim.”

One of the most provocative pieces of wisdom of the day came via comedian Conan O’Brien, who also got an honorary doctorate and who gave a speech. Said O’Brien: “My grandfather, who everyone called ‘hoofer,’ and who had to drop out of the 7th grade to support his parents, was a traffic cop in Worcester, Massachusetts. And he had a saying, ‘take what you can get and ask for more.’ Very wise man.”

In that spirit, what more can critics ask from these universities in general and from Harvard in particular?

One step is to cease using graduation ceremonies to honor and praise anti-Israel activism. The Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that at the Harvard College Class Day ceremony the day before the university-wide commencement, “Program marshals Jade M. Stanford ’26 and Kirthi Chigurupati ’26 presented the Richard Glover Ames Memorial Award — given each year to two ‘unsung heroes’ of the graduating class — to James K. ‘Jamie’ Durant ’26 and Alexandra Fernand ’26, honoring Durant’s pro-Palestine activism and the pair’s Phillips Brooks House Association work. … But the speech pivoted to Durant’s role as a co-founder of Jews for Palestine, an unrecognized pro-Palestine student group. Chigurupati said Durant faced discipline from the College for his activism and praised him for ‘willingly’ accepting punishment ‘for what he believed was right.’” How and why is this still happening?

Another step is to dial back the derision about the federal government’s litigation efforts. Under the circumstances, what’s called for is humility, not self-congratulatory bravado. O’Brien joked, “I am suing Harvard for my less than spectacular undergraduate sex life. For me, ‘having a three way’ meant adding a second mirror to my dorm. … Harvard, I’ll see your ass in court. Yes, I am confident that my claims will have more merit than those filed by the president of the United States.”

A third step is to understand that viewpoint diversity and escaping stifling ideological conformity is more meaningful if it applies not only to embracing Reagan speechwriters like Noonan a half-century later, or to 2012 Republican presidential candidates like Romney 14 years later, but to including on campus and in the mix some supporters of the current president, who 77 million Americans, or roughly half of the electorate that turned out, backed in 2024. Hosting or even honoring anti-Trump Republicans like Romney or Noonan is one thing; where are the honors for those such as Rep. Elise Stefanik or Rep. Virginia Foxx, supporters of Trump, who exposed the rot and Jew-hate at Harvard and other universities?

“We are living through a period of extreme narcissism. Our current leadership in Washington believes that empathy is a weakness and that our nation stands supreme and alone,” O’Brien said. Where’s the empathy among the Harvard crowd for the Trump voters who lost manufacturing jobs to China trade agreements championed by Harvard economists, or whose wages were depressed and schools and cities disrupted by open-borders immigration policies? Where’s the empathy for the 42,000 protesters killed by Iran? Where’s the empathy for the Jewish students locked in dorm rooms for their own safety while Harvard faculty write open letters about how they, personally, have never experienced any antisemitism and the Harvard central administration denounces the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts as the retaliatory edge of incipient authoritarianism? Or, as the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Matthew Potts, who preaches from Harvard’s owned and operated Memorial Church put it in his benediction at the commencement, “dangers to the republic.”

Among those dangers to the republic is that, as Harvard honorary degree recipient Noonan put it in that excellent 2023 column, “The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status.” Noonan was praised in the Harvard commencement ceremony for her “patriotic grace,” “civility,” “integrity,” “dignity,” and “patriotism,” as well as her role in Reagan’s 1984 speech at Normandy marking the 40th anniversary of the World War II battle: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” Nineteen Harvard graduating seniors were commissioned this week as second lieutenants and ensigns into the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Space Force. The article about them in the university’s Gazette mentions the Civil War and the Korean War.

At this moment U.S. troops are engaged against Iran, and Harvard men and at least one woman are right in the middle of it. The secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, and the joint regional commander, Central Command’s Admiral Brad Cooper, both studied at Harvard. So did the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brian Mast, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tom Cotton. Jared Kushner, Harvard class of 2003, is negotiating the ceasefire. Caroline Glick, another Harvard graduate, is advising Prime Minister Netanyahu on it. It’d be overstating it to call them and their soldiers today’s boys of Pointe du Hoc, yet the current conflict, still under way, has seen tremendous feats of bravery—think of the rescue mission that brought the F-15E aviators out of Isfahan province—that have yet to be appreciated or honored fully.

I’m all for universities focusing on research and teaching rather than politics. And it’s understandable for a university to be concerned with its own “academic freedom” above the freedoms of the 42,000 protesters who were killed in faraway Iran earlier this year. Commencements are planned long in advance, and this U.S. phase of the Iran conflict only got going in earnest on February 28, 2026. If it ends successfully in American victory, like Noonan and Reagan’s Cold War, perhaps Harvard will embrace the role of its graduates in preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb, restoring freedom of the seas, and combating terrorism. If it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon—well, Noonan’s 2023 column went on, relying on Fareed Zakaria, about how “the American public has been losing faith in these universities for good reason” and “A white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today” and “Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.”

Who’d have thunk that three years later she’d be walking through Harvard Yard in a crimson robe?

It was a somewhat encouraging day for Harvard, but as O’Brien’s grandfather the Worcester traffic cop put it, “take what you can get and ask for more.” Wise man, for sure.

READ MORE: At Commencement, Harvard Acknowledges Its Critics

Harvard is bringing four more anti-Israel activists to campus, hiring a filmmaker, a "journalist" for a Qatari-owned outlet, an English teacher at a Hamas-linked university in Gaza who has accused Israel of "scholasticide," and a professor who has described Israel as an "ecofascist state" guilty of "domicide." They’ll serve as Radcliffe Fellows in the 2026-2027 academic year, earning at least $89,550 over nine months for a stipend, expenses, and housing allowance and potentially tens of thousands of dollars more in child care, health care, and moving expenses, along with access to Harvard libraries and athletic facilities, office space, and use of Harvard undergraduates as paid research assistants.

The newly named fellows include:

— Mahdi Fleifel, the Dubai-born writer-director of London-based Nakba FilmWorks. In 2018 Nakba FilmWorks affirmed its support of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. In an interview published in July 2025 with the World Socialist Web Site, Fleifel appeared to justify the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel: “The events of October 7? You leave the Palestinians to rot and die in a cage, what do you expect is going to happen? They’re going to send Christmas cards?” He also agreed with an interviewer who asserted that dignity and freedom for Palestinians “requires the overthrow of everything,” replying, “Exactly.”

— Ibtisam Azem, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as, since 2014, a New York-based “journalist and novelist” for Qatari-owned Alaraby Aljadeed Ltd. In July 2025, she conducted a fawning interview with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University anti-Israel activist that the U.S. government is trying to deport. Her questions included, “How do you situate your arrest and the broader Palestinian freedom movement in the U.S., especially student-led activism, in relation to other justice movements like the civil rights movements for African Americans, Indigenous struggles, or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa?” Her introduction to the interview described “the genocide in Palestine—a genocide backed by President Donald Trump’s administration.” She’s also a public supporter of the boycott against Israel; in a 2020 interview with the Asia Times, she said, “there is no agreement to translate the novel into Hebrew. Any such translation must be in accordance with the principles of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions).” In the same interview she described both Israel and the U.S. as “settler-colonial countries.”

— Ahmed Kamal Junina, a citizen of New Zealand who is a professor of English at Gaza-based Al-Aqsa University. In 2016 the PLO-controlled Palestinian education ministry reportedly stopped recognizing degrees from Al-Aqsa amid a dispute over the influence there of the Hamas terrorist group. The vice president of Al-Aqsa University, Faiq Al-Naouq, was a Hamas leader photographed at Hamas events promoting armed resistance against Israel, according to an article in JewishOnliner. Junina’s articles for European outlets such as the Guardian and the Independent demonize Israel while making no mention of Hamas. One website bio of him says, “he investigates how language serves as a resource for survival, empowerment, and political resistance in higher education under occupation. Ahmed is committed to decolonial, critical, and participatory methodologies.”

— Irus Braverman, a professor at the University of Buffalo who has described Israel as an “ecofascist state.” “The ecofascist dream is not just of a Jewish ethnostate but of a green one, too,” she wrote in a 2025 paper. In a 2024 paper she accuses Israel of “domicide—the purposeful and widespread destruction of homes and buildings to make a place unlivable.” Harvard says she’ll “pursue a project on ecopastoralism in Palestine-Israel.” Braverman is a contributor of short videos to a demonize-Israel project with fellow academics, with TikTok-ready titles such as “Israel uses parks to seize lands” and “Sheep-Washing: How Settlers Use Sheep to Colonize Palestine.”

Harvard’s May 14 press release announcing the new group of fellows named ten of them but omitted the four anti-Israel activists, relegating them to a hyperlinked “full list“ in the last sentence of the announcement. The Harvard Radcliffe Institute press release also features a social media tool that facilitates sharing on the grim left-wing-tilted site Bluesky but not on the much more popular Elon Musk-owned X. Radcliffe used to be a women’s college before Harvard went co-ed. Instead of shutting down it started offering fellowships, led by Drew Faust, who went on to become president of Harvard, and by a longtime Harvard academic administrator, Judith Vichniac, who died in 2019 and who I suspect would have been dismayed to see the institution head in this direction, with anti-Israel activists swarming the Radcliffe endowment like Hamas thugs in Gaza looting a truck full of U.N. humanitarian aid.

The federal government sued in March 2026 over what the Justice Department’s complaint calls the university’s “toothless non-response to the ongoing relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination.” An estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding for the university is at stake. Harvard’s $126-million-a-year lawyers are in court filings this month claiming, yet again, that “isolated instances of conduct targeting Jewish students” do not amount to a “severe, pervasive” “hostile environment,” and also that Harvard wasn’t deliberately indifferent. Harvard has also claimed the federal government is threatening funding for medical research into cures or treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart disease and is engaged in an “unconstitutional retaliation campaign against Harvard.”

Nakba FilmWorks and Junina did not respond to email inquiries from the Washington Free Beacon. A Radcliffe spokesperson and the dean of the Radcliffe Institute did not respond to a request for comment.

Harvard describes Junina as from “Al-Aqsa University (Palestine)” and says “At Radcliffe, he will develop ‘The University in Extremis: Reimagining Academic Freedom in Palestine,’ a book project examining how universities in Gaza and the West Bank illuminate academic freedom and the social purpose of higher education under siege.” Presumably Junina will not explore the fact that there is no academic freedom at all in Gaza, which operates under the control of Hamas and prohibits political and religious dissent.

Radcliffe recently “laid off four employees, shifted three staff members to part-time roles, and eliminated eight vacant positions,” the Crimson reported, with a memo from Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin citing “a wide range of federal actions targeting Harvard” along with “market volatility.”

In a December 2025 interview, Junina faulted college administrators for disciplining anti-Israel protesters. “I see this suppression as part of a broader global trend of silencing dissent, particularly when it comes to Palestinian rights. Student activism has historically driven some of the most important social changes—the anti-apartheid struggle, the civil-rights movement, anti-war protests—and universities know this. That is why the crackdown was so severe.” In the same interview, he described his losses: “I lost 43 members of my extended family in this war, including my sister, three nephews, my niece Amal, whose name means ‘hope,’ two brothers-in-law, my uncle and two cousins, along with their families.”

Junina has accused Israel of “scholasticide,” which the Anti-Defamation League and the Academic Engagement Network describe as “a false and harmful accusation” that is “fully aligned with the goals of the global BDS movement” and serves to “unfairly demonize Israel.”

“For me, this fellowship is a rare and meaningful opportunity to bring Gaza’s academic questions, struggles, and voices into one of the world’s leading intellectual spaces. I’ll go to Harvard carrying with me the voices of Gaza’s students and academics,” Junina said in a LinkedIn post.

Harvard says that Azem “will be working on a novel tracing the history of a Palestinian family in Jaffa through the narratives of three generations and their relationship to land, settler-colonial law, and organized crime.”

The Radcliffe Institute faculty advisory council includes Andrew Manuel Crespo, who gave a June 2025 Harvard Law School graduation speech denouncing “atrocities” in “Palestine.” It also includes Robin Bernstein, who signed a 2021 “statement by Harvard faculty in support of Palestinian liberation“: “We demand an end to US support for Israel’s apartheid regime, condemn Israeli state aggression, and affirm our support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.”

The Harvard website invites non-U.S. citizens to apply for the fellowships. “Applicants from throughout the world are encouraged to apply. Harvard University typically sponsors J-1 scholar visas for Harvard Radcliffe Fellows,” the website says.

READ MORE: Harvard Gives $90,000-a-Year Fellowships to Four Anti-Israel Activists

A new chairman of the Federal Reserve is an opportunity to scale back the system’s staff, whose numbers have swollen in recent years and now far exceed that of similar institutions in other countries.

The Bank of Japan says it has 4,601 employees. The European Central Bank says it has “more than 5,000” employees. The Bank of England announced layoffs in March 2026 from a base of 5,700. Germany’s Bundesbank reports a core staff of 10,333. The Reserve Bank of India has a staff of 13,520, according to the Economic Times, a business newspaper that focuses on India. The U.S. Federal Reserve System, by comparison, reports the equivalent of 24,179 full-time employees in its annual report for 2024, which is the most recent report available on the Fed website.

President Trump and the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, have been speaking about the issue. Bessent has suggested the public doesn’t fully realize the central bank’s scale. “You never think there’s a sprawling organization out there,” the Treasury secretary said last month in remarks previewing steps the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, might take. “I think he’s going to do a serious look at how did the reserve banks interact, because I think the reserve banks, it’s a management disaster, because something like 50% of the people in each reserve bank do not report to the president of that reserve bank,” Bessent said in a conversation with Semafor editor in chief Ben Smith.

Elon Musk, who worked with Trump to reduce the size of the federal workforce early in Trump’s second term, has called the Fed “absurdly overstaffed.”

Trump is scheduled to swear in Warsh as Fed chair on Friday.

The outgoing chair, Jerome “Too Late” Powell, had first insisted that the Fed was “overworked maybe, not overstaffed,” then internally announced a ten percent reduction in headcount over a period stretching into 2027, including voluntary early retirements. That, in turn, triggered resistance from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. “Taking more cops off of the Wall Street beat only exacerbates this toxic mix of deregulatory actions that turn the clock back to the early 2000s,” the senator wrote, implicitly likening private-sector bankers to criminals. Political donations from the Fed staff have a sharp partisan tilt toward Democrats. In the 2024 campaign cycle, 90.3 percent of contributions from Fed employees went to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets, so the people whose jobs are at risk are the donor and voter base of Warren and her partisan colleagues. Bessent has mocked the institution as providing a universal guaranteed minimum basic income program for academic economists.

It’d be one thing if all these employees were producing stellar results. Yet the results have been disappointing. Bessent said May 3: “If we think about the Powell Fed, if we think about monetary policy, ethics and supervision, they weren’t great. Monetary policy, we had the worst inflation in 48 years. Ethics, we had five governors or regional bank presidents have to resign for ethical problems. And then we had three of the four largest bank failures in U.S. history.” On top of that is the $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed’s Washington headquarters building, which Powell has defended but Trump has described as a scandal.

The U.S. is geographically larger than Japan, the U.K., and Germany; our central bank includes 12 regional banks, each with their own headquarters and executive. The smallest of these, Philadelphia, reported 877 employees; the largest, New York, had 2,997. Early on, the idea was that the regional banks might conduct their own independent monetary policies, with interest rates varying depending on the regional economic conditions. And the regional banks used to feature some methodological diversity, with the St. Louis Fed a bastion of Milton Friedman’s monetarism and the Minneapolis Fed championing rational expectations theory. That sort of diversity has faded, replaced by conformity as Washington has tightened its grip on the regional banks. There have been more dissents lately on interest rate policy, but not many unconventional or heterodox substantive economic voices such as, say, Rick Reider or Ed Yardeni around the Fed. So in some ways, reducing headcount may be an easier job for Warsh than restoring the quality and range of the research work.

READ MORE: New Fed Chair Has Chance to Right-Size ‘Disaster’ of Bloated Staff

The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, who got elected in part by mobilizing a campaign army of volunteer door-knockers, now wants to replicate the same tactic to achieve his promise to "freeze the rent."

At an April 29, 2026 press event, Mamdani asked New Yorkers to sign up at organize.NYC.gov to help gin up testimony at hearings of the Rent Guidelines Board, which by law annually sets rent rates in the city’s approximately 1 million rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments.

The idea was met with skepticism from the assembled press corps, which asked whether Mamdani was using taxpayer money and resources to engage in politics, at a moment when the city is facing a budget shortfall that Mamdani has described as a financial crisis. Mamdani and his aides repeatedly insisted, with straight faces, that the volunteer door-knockers would just be asking New Yorkers to testify at hearings, not telling them what to say. Reporters at the event noted it was extremely unlikely for tenants to show up at hearings to testify begging for rent increases. At one point the mayor went so far as to trot out the city’s top in-house lawyer to affirm the legality of the scheme.

“The Board is an independent board. They have to make an independent decision,” Mamdani said. “We will also be making very clear to anyone who canvasses as a part of this initiative that there is no tolerance for the encouraging of any kind of specific testimony. We are knocking on doors, we are asking, ‘Do you know if you are rent stabilized? Will you come and testify?’”

The website of what Mamdani is calling the Office of Mass Engagement directs would-be volunteers to a slick, user-friendly campaign event-style signup. “In June, the Rent Guidelines Board will decide whether the rents of the more than 2 million New Yorkers living in rent stabilized units will go up,” the text says, “But before the board comes to a decision on that vote, they will hold public hearings across the five boroughs, hearing directly from tenants about what a rent increase or lack thereof would mean for them, as well as from landlords on the costs of maintaining rent-stabilized buildings. Sign up for a door-to-door canvass to increase civic engagement and the participation of all New Yorkers in the upcoming Rent Guidelines Board hearings!”

There’s a checkbox to affirm that “By signing up to canvass, you agree that volunteers such as yourself may not provide any instruction, encouragement, or suggestion regarding the content of anyone’s testimony at the upcoming Rent Guidelines Board hearings.” Yet there’s no mechanism to enforce that. I suppose one could provide the canvassers with NYPD-style body cameras, but in Mamdani’s New York, only police officers, not volunteer “organizers,” are treated with guilty-until-proven innocent levels of suspicion.

The Office of Mass Engagement is itself a name that to anyone with even a twinge of libertarian tendencies sounds like it comes directly from a dystopian work by George Orwell or Ayn Rand. Yet in Mamdani’s New York, concern about “authoritarianism” is limited to Trump and Netanyahu but does not extend to the socialist mayor. The Office is headed by a “commissioner,” Tascha Van Auken, whose city government website biography notes that she “led the largest volunteer field operation in modern New York City history as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign field director,” and “activated more than 100,000 volunteers, knocking on over 3 million doors, and making more than 4.5 million calls to New York City voters.” Before her work on the Mamdani mayoral campaign, Van Auken was a political operative for the New York Working Families Party and for various boycott-Israel New York political candidates.

The initial canvassing opportunities available on the city website were in Jackson Heights, Queens; North Washington Heights, Manhattan; the East Village in Manhattan; and the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, all Mamdani strongholds.

One virtue of the mayor’s Wednesday event, at 760 Grand Concourse in the Bronx, is that, for a careful listener, it provided a window into the downside of government intervention in rents. “My name is Carmen. I grew up in this building. My mother lived here 47 years,” one tenant activist called up to the podium by the mayor said. Carmen, who appeared to be middle-aged, described writing a 37-page letter detailing tenant complaints about “security concerns, infestations, inconsistent heat.”

I guess one could argue that such a longstanding attachment to a specific geographic place is somehow admirable, akin to Vice President Vance’s reference in his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention to his own family’s seven-generation connection to that “cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.”

Yet to anyone knowledgeable about New York City real estate, spending a half-century or more in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Grand Concourse represents a missed opportunity. Had Carmen or her family moved out and bought an apartment or a house somewhere along the way, the mortgage might be paid off by now, and they might be millionaires just based on the home equity. They might be able to hire tradesmen directly to fix problems rather than being at the mercy of a landlord. They might have sold the place in the city and moved to a lower-cost location in the sunbelt, using the surplus to help pay for vacations or children’s education. They might have a share in the American dream of home ownership and self-reliance rather than depending on a socialist mayor knocking on doors as a way to intimidate the rent guidelines board into a one-year freeze or an eventual seizure of the building by the city and a transition into being fully government dependent. “We have to get out of this trap of private property,” as Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, who appeared alongside Mandani at the event, once said.

Also at the event, Mamdani was asked what he would say to King Charles III if he got a moment with the monarch at a ceremony to remember the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. “I would probably encourage him to return the Kohinoor diamond,” Mamdani said, welcoming the visiting dignitary by portraying him as a plundering settler-colonialist, imperialist jewel thief. It was part of an ongoing pattern by the 34-year-old socialist of viewing wealthy individuals who set foot in New York City—anti-Israel foreign students at Columbia excepted—as targets for shakedown campaigns.

“Mass engagement” is socialist for “mob rule.” To recoil at Mamdani’s plans, you don’t have to be a king with jewels, or even a landlord, just someone with a scintilla of respect for property rights, free enterprise, and the rule of law.

READ MORE: Mayor Mamdani Unleashes Door-Knocking Campaign To Advance Rent Freeze

An Obama and Biden State Department administration official who participated in the negotiations that led to the 2015 deal that gave Iran $700 billion in sanctions relief in exchange for promises of an unverifiable temporary pause in its nuclear weapons program is now complaining that President Trump doesn’t have enough expert advice.

Wendy Sherman, who was deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration and under secretary of state for political affairs in the Obama administration with a stint in between as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, also criticized the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, he "has led us down a road—and we have been part of it—that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza that has destabilized the Middle East." Sherman made her comments in an interview with Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain, a British Muslim veteran of the BBC who spoke at Oxford in October 2025 about what she called "acute mass harm to civilians in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine." Husain also used the Oxford speech to denounce Israel for deliberately killing Palestinian journalists, without acknowledging that many of the so-called journalists were terrorists.

It’s a closer race between what’s more repugnant—Sherman, with her track record, crapping all over President Trump’s Iran policy and falsely accusing Israel and the U.S. of genocide, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg hiring Husain and providing her and Sherman with a platform to promote these falsehoods.

The Sherman interview is titled, apparently without irony or comic intent, “How to negotiate with Iran,” as if the person who negotiated the horrible 2015 deal that enriched Iran to support regional terrorist proxies were in a position to provide authoritative advice about anything other than mistakes to avoid repeating.

The Sherman interview is labeled “weekend interview” and elaborately presented similarly to the ones the New York Times magazine has been running—a video podcast along with a print transcript annotated with footnotes. When Husain launched it, Bloomberg issued a press release touting what it described as “a new flagship global podcast,” that “will launch the same week Husain delivers the prestigious annual public lecture of the University of Oxford. Previous Romanes Lecturers have included British Prime Ministers William Gladstone, Winston Churchill and Tony Blair.”

In the hands of an editor with more brains and background knowledge, footnotes might have offered an opportunity to fact check, or provide context for, some of Sherman’s more fantastic claims. Sherman says, “When the 1979 Iranian Revolution happened, it was really a reaction to what we and the British had done in 1953, when we knocked off a prime minister [Mohammad Mossadegh] because we were afraid that Iran was going to nationalize the oil industry, and we thought that would hurt us.” That is inaccurate on several levels. The prime minister wasn’t ousted by America but by clerics, and they and America were both less concerned about the oil than about Communist influence, as Ray Takeyh has explained in at least three fine articles, “What Really Happened in Iran,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014; “The Coup Against Democracy That Wasn’t,” Commentary, December 2021, and “The Real Story of the 1953 Iranian Coup,” the Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2023.

Proving causation in history and in social science generally is complex, but the idea that an American action taken in 1953 is “really” to blame for the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran is such a blame-America-first oversimplification that undercuts Sherman’s credibility. Husain lets it go unchallenged. What’s the point of having footnotes to give context if they aren’t going to be used in a situation like this?

Sherman complains that Trump “has cost our alliances, American taxpayers, 13 American lives, our inventory of weapons, our ability to project power abroad.” Yet Iran’s decision to attack the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan has only pushed those countries further into the U.S.-Israel alliance. The net gain to U.S. military strength of the warfighting experience may yet outweigh the expended weapons. If, after the war, Iran ends up in the U.S. camp, with its oil and gas flowing in U.S. dollars, then our ability to project power will be significantly enhanced in comparison to the status quo of Iran aligned with Russia and China against America.

Sherman says Trump will be “in a weakened position” when he goes to meet Xi Jinping in China in May, but in fact the weakened party is China, an unfree country that is reliant on smuggled Iranian petroleum. Even the New York Times appears finally to be adjusting its view on this; back in March it was writing “How the war in Iran could help China,” but now the reality is setting in and the Times headlines are changing to, “The Iran War Is Starting to Expose Cracks in China’s Economy.” The Times reports, “Thousands of workers who lost their jobs took to the streets last week in southern China, staging daily protests to demand back pay and compensation from several toy factories that abruptly closed on April 20. The closures came as costs for plastic, which is made from oil and natural gas, surged after traffic slowed through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to energy buyers around the world. … The shuttered factories are in Yulin City, a low-wage toy manufacturing hub about 260 miles west of Hong Kong. Workers draped banners across factory gates with slogans like, ‘Give me back my blood and sweat money.’” Imagine how the Chinese Communist tyrants will feel if the Iranian protesters for freedom succeed in toppling the dictatorial regime in Tehran, with American help?

Sherman says, “Some of our best allies — Canada, the UK — have said they can’t rely on us and have beaten a path to China.” She doesn’t mention, and Husain doesn’t either, that this raises questions about how reliable Canada and the U.K. are as allies. Where are they when we ask for help, and what capabilities do they have to bring to bear? Do they really want to be satellites of Communist China, with all that entails for political and religious freedom, for property rights, for rule of law, for freedom of the press?

Sherman lectures about humility: “yes, the US has unequal power, but we have to be humble about it.” Where is Sherman’s own humility when it comes to her responsibility and that of Presidents Obama and Biden for a deal that resulted in enriching and empowering Iran with sanctions relief money?

Sherman makes a prediction: “My guess is that Iran will still have some measure of control over the Strait.” Why would Trump leave Iran in a position to close the strait again, basically giving it the power to push gas prices to $4 a gallon, and thus interfere in American politics, at will? It’d be an American unconditional surrender after a war in which Iran has been militarily defeated.

Sherman complains that the Trump administration doesn’t have enough experts. “I was glad to see that Vice President [JD] Vance brought some experts with him [to talks in Pakistan], but I’m not sure any of them were in the rooms. I had nuclear physicists, sanctions experts, lawyers and Treasury folks on my team. I had people who spoke fluent Farsi. I had literally hundreds in the US government who were engaged in this. I don’t see any of that infrastructure here,” she says. I’m all for experts on Iranian culture and nuclear concealment, yet all of Sherman’s “experts” left in power and enriched a regime that killed between 32,000 and 45,000 protesters and that funded Hamas and Hezbollah. All the “experts” in the world are no substitute for a president or a prime minister with determination and values who see the issues with clarity.

As for Sherman’s preening about the supposed “genocide” in Gaza, even the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s estimates put the Gaza death toll at about 71,000. Some significant portion of those were terrorist combatants. The Syrian Civil War killed as many as 620,000. That war began in 2011 on Obama and Sherman’s watch and accelerated when Obama declined to enforce a red line against Syrian chemical weapons use, a decision that Obama later described by saying, “I’m very proud of this moment.” No one cares about the half-million dead Syrians because the Jews can’t be blamed for them.

Sherman declares herself “angrier and angrier.” The same could be said of readers who have the context and are fuming to see these emotional pronouncements go unchallenged.

Husain made news in May 2025 when she clashed with Elon Musk in an appearance at the “Qatar Economic Forum, Powered by Bloomberg,” an event that is “held in collaboration with Qatar’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry” and “Editorially curated by Bloomberg News.” Bloomberg is not registered with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent. Musk said, “it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who is trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer.”

Husain’s Oxford lecture reads like a Saturday Night Live parody of Muslim self-aggrandizement. She faulted the British media for anti-Muslim bias and credited Islam with operating the world’s oldest university, inventing algebra and the concept of an endowed chair in a university, providing the intellectual foundation for the European renaissance, and serving as the architectural inspiration for Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame, including stained glass, the pointed arch, and the rose window.

According to Wikipedia, Husain’s maternal grandfather was the first director general of Pakistan’s intelligence service. Another interview Husain did earlier this month was with a former ambassador of Pakistan, Maleeha Lodhi. It was headlined “US Dominance in the Middle East Is ‘Basically Over.’“ Lodhi claimed, “US dominance has been fading … the era of America’s dominance in the region is basically over.” Interviewer Husain mostly played along: “If there is one winner in all of this, would you say it’s China?”

As for Sherman’s “genocide” accusation, it was seized on by a former foreign policy aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Matt Duss, who used it to attack President Biden and Sherman. Said Duss: “It’s a dodge to say that Netanyahu ‘led’ the US. Yes, he’s a liar and a manipulator, but Biden made his choice, as did Trump. Still quite notable coming from the US’s former second highest-ranking diplomat and longtime proponent of the Democratic Party’s pro-Israel orthodoxy.”

For Duss and others in the Sanders-Zohran Mamdani socialist wing of American politics, even accusing Israel of genocide is insufficient. Sherman also says in the interview, “It is critical that Israel remains an ally of the US and we protect the right of a Jewish state. … Israel absolutely deserves security and peace. I’m a strong supporter of Israel and the right of a Jewish state.” It’s an open question whether someone with Sherman’s professed views could get nominated to a job in an Ocasio-Cortez presidential administration, or get confirmed in a hypothetical Senate with Chris Van Hollen as the Democratic leader. As exasperating as Sherman and Bloomberg and Obama were and are, there’s a real risk—not a certainty, but a risk—that the next Democratic administration, if there is one, would be even worse.

READ MORE: Obama-Biden Iran Negotiator Says Trump Doesn’t Have Enough Experts, Bemoans ‘Genocide’ in Gaza

The founder and chairman of Netflix, the Democratic megadonor Reed Hastings, is stepping down from the company’s board in June “in order to focus on his philanthropy and other pursuits,” the company announced late on April 16.

Netflix stock price sagged on the news and was trading in the $94.50 range Monday afternoon, down from a close of $107.49 on the day of the announcement. Hastings, 65, owns about 21 million shares, which were worth more than $2 billion at the higher price, and less than $2 billion at the lower price.

The departure’s significance is not just financial; it’s political. Hastings, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $5.2 billion, is already a prolific Democratic donor; federal campaign finance records show he gave more than $20 million from 2020 onward to Democrat-affiliated or anti-Trump committees. His wife, Patty Quillin, gave an additional $5 million. Leaving the helm of a publicly traded company may free Hastings up to devote even more time and money to politics and to policy-related charitable giving.

President Trump is following the story and took a shot at Hastings in a Truth Social post issued at 10:55 pm Friday night: “Was Reed Hastings forced to leave the Netflix Board because he’s a SLEAZEBAG? What was his Crime, and how many did he commit?”

President Obama and Michelle Obama announced over the weekend that their production deal with Netflix, which began in 2018 and was extended in 2024, is now “in a process now of transitioning to a more independent [future] where we can work with a bunch of different studios,” Deadline reported. Obama administration official Susan Rice remains on the Netflix board. It’s not clear whether the end of the Obama deal is related to the departure of Hastings, but it hasn’t exactly been a huge success either commercially or as a government-relations move.

Securities law mandates disclosure of stock sales by corporate directors, but not by former directors. Exiting the board will allow Hastings to sell his shares without being subject to insider-selling filing mandates, prompting some discussion.

Netflix had been competing with Paramount Skydance Corporation for control of Warner Bros. Discovery, which controls CNN; Paramount, led by David Ellison, won that takeover battle earlier this year.

In addition to being involved with the national Democratic Party, Hastings and Quillin are also politically active in California. Hastings gave $7 million in 2018 to “Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, sponsored by California Charter Schools Association Advocates,” California records show, and $3 million in 2021 to “Stop the Republican Recall of Governor Newsom.” Quillin gave more than $7 million from 2020 onward to California committees working on “decarceration” and fighting against tough-on-crime ballot initiatives.

Hastings, a board member of Bloomberg, shares some of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s more constructive philanthropic passions when it comes to charter schools and education reform. He is on the board of KIPP, a charter school network, alongside Emma Bloomberg. He’s also on the board of City Fund, alongside Romy Drucker, who directs the education program at the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports charter schools. He’s on the board of Khan Academy, the ed-tech project that grew out of Sal Khan’s viral educational videos. In 2020, Hastings and Quillin announced a $120 million gift to historically black colleges, another area that has also been a focus for Bloomberg.

Quillin’s giving and volunteering is more idiosyncratic. She’s on the board of The 19th, which covers “gender, politics, policy and power” and describes itself as a newsroom “born out of the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump following a campaign that far too often centered around questions of a woman candidate’s ‘electability’ or ‘likeability.’” She’s also on the administrative board of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is focused on birds.

“A pivotal moment in Patty’s journey occurred in 2016 when she visited a group of young men serving life sentences at San Quentin State Prison. This experience profoundly impacted her, leading to three years of volunteering at the prison and sparking a deep passion for criminal justice reform. Patty is now a passionate advocate for creating a more humane and rehabilitative justice system,” according to a bio of her on the website of Chicken & Egg Films, another project where she is a board member.

Quillin’s bio also describes her as “Founder and Board Chair of Meadow Fund, a donor-advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.”

Lateefah Simon had served as president of the Meadow Fund and now describes herself as “the first Muslim woman elected to Congress from California and the first member of Congress born with congenital blindness.” Simon has been churning out press releases calling for President Trump’s impeachment on the grounds that the conflict against Iran “puts him squarely in violation of the U.N. Genocide Convention, the Geneva Convention, and the Rome Statute.” Simon’s financial disclosure form as a congressional candidate in 2023 lists her as having earned income of $557,700 from “Patricia Quillin” in 2022.

Time reported in 2025 that Hastings and Quillin had given 2 million shares of Netflix—“worth about $1.1 billion in January 2024—to their education-focused Hastings Fund, a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.” Because the Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a pooled fund, it’s hard to track what gifts coming out of it are directed by Hastings and Quillin, and what is directed by other donors. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation tax return for the year ending December 31, 2024 lists donations of $31.5 million to the City Fund and $26,651,118 to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (Sapsucker Woods Rd, Ithaca NY).

Quillin and Hastings in 2012 signed the giving pledge, a commitment to give more than half of their wealth to charity. The Giving Pledge website links to a Variety report about a $5 million Hastings gift to White Stork, a Ukraine-focused charity that “will use the funds to support combat medics along the frontline with anti-drone jamming systems and other help.”

Spokespersons for Netflix and for the Silicon Valley Community Foundation did not respond by deadline to inquiries about Hastings’ plans.

READ MORE: After Netflix, What Is Democratic Megadonor Reed Hastings’ Next Move?

For contrast, the timing couldn’t have been better. Two of the most prominent New Yorkers this week released documents outlining starkly different visions of America’s future and perceptions of its past.

After reading New York City’s 375-page “Preliminary Racial Equity Plan” issued by the city’s 34-year-old socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and then reading the 48-page annual shareholder letter from the 70-year-old CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, it’s hard to believe that the two men are describing the same planet, let alone the same country and city.

Both men are racing to define America’s past in its 250th anniversary year. For Dimon, a big danger is that Americans lose faith in our country. “While we should acknowledge America’s flaws, they should not be used to pull apart our country. We need to believe in ourselves and get back to work, not tear each other down,” Dimon writes.

For Mamdani and his “Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice,” a big danger is overlooking what the report calls “historical harms” and how “New York City’s past is deeply intertwined with the structural racial inequities experienced by its communities of color.”

“New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression. The land New York City stands on today once belonged to the Lenape people, who were forcibly displaced through settler colonialism. From the era of Dutch colonization to modern times, systemic racism has shaped the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other communities of color,” the Mamdani report says, explaining, “This plan uses the gender-neutral term ‘Latine’ when referring broadly to communities and identities. However, many historical documents and data sources (including those referenced in this plan) use binary gender classifications and terms such as Latino/Latina or Hispanic (often used interchangeably). Those labels are retained when quoting or citing those sources. In specific historical contexts, these terms are used because it reflects the terminology of the time.”

(More succinctly, gender-fixated policymakers have started using the made up word “Latine” instead of previously trendy “Latinx,” which many Latin American people found offensive.)

Mamdani’s racial equity plan offers an oversimplification of what happened to the Lenape people; one of their chiefs, White Eyes, spoke to the Continental Congress in 1776, seeking a strong alliance with the Americans, and also in 1776, the Continental Congress proposed a text to communicate to White Eyes “to convince you that we wish to advance your happiness, and that there may be a lasting union between us, and that, as you express it, we may become one people.” The letter went on, “We wish to promote the lasting peace and happiness of all our brothers, the Indian nations, who live with us on this great island. As far as your settlement and security may depend upon us, you may be assured of our protection. We shall take all the care in our power, that no interruption or disturbance be given you by our people, nor shall any of them be suffered, by force or fraud, to deprive you of any of your lands, or to settle them without a fair purchase from you, and your free consent. If contrary to our intention, any injury should be offered to you by any of our people, inform us of it, and we shall always be ready to procure you satisfaction and redress.” That’s not to deny that some Americans and the American government did terrible things to many Native Americans; it is to say, though, that to sum it all up as “colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression” is an example of ideological negativity defeating empirical curiosity.

Mamdani and Dimon offer different views not only of the past history but also of the best course for current and future policy. Dimon talks about “our country’s values” and lists among them “free enterprise,” “self-reliance,” and “freedom of religion,” three terms that do not appear at all in Mamdani’s document.

Both documents quote the Declaration of Independence and what Walter Isaacson calls the Greatest Sentence Ever Written. Dimon quotes the full sentence, splitting it into two: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” “That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Mamdani’s document eliminates the “Creator” and leaps immediately into denouncing America for profiting from slavery: “A country that proclaims ‘all men are created equal … with inalienable rights … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in its Declaration of Independence, is also a country which greatly profited off practices and systems of slavery, since the founding of settlements and colonies in the 17th century.”

Both documents denounce bigotry, but there, too lies a contrast. Dimon writes, “We should fight blind ideologies, like anti-Semitism, and any form of racism however and whenever it rears its ugly head.” Mamdani’s 375-page document makes no mention of anti-Semitism and in fact seems to bend over backward to omit it. A “historical timeline” that is part of the mayor’s plan mentions 2001 as the year when a “‘War on Terror’ ushered in an era of mass surveillance and profiling of Arab, South Asian, and Muslim communities.” It also mentions what he calls the 2017 “Muslim Ban,” when “the Trump administration restricts entry into the U.S. from several Muslim-majority countries, sparking mass protests across the nation for being discriminatory and anti-immigrant.” There’s no mention on the timeline of the 1991 Crown Heights Riot in Brooklyn, which at the time it occurred was the worst outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in contemporary American history.

Both documents discuss regulations. Dimon writes, “Some politicians think that all regulations are good — the more the better. Given that many of these politicians come from the blue side of America’s red-blue divide, I think it’s more appropriate to call excessive regulation ‘blue tape.’” Mamdani gestures in the direction of reducing regulations and easing permitting requirements for small businesses. Yet in practice the “goals, strategies and indicators” outlined by the mayor—more than 200 goals, more than 800 strategies, and more than 600 indicators—are just another extra-large roll of blue tape.

According to the New York Times, Dimon is a registered Democrat who tacitly supported Kamala Harris. But he hasn’t been shy about criticizing Democrats as sometimes “intensely stupid.” He recently told Axios that the business community had “overdone DEI in a lot of cases.” He’s also open-minded about the new Great Migration. In another recent interview, at the Hill & Valley Forum, with former congressman Mike Gallagher, now at Palantir, Dimon said, “Our head count in Manhattan when I got to JPMorgan was 35,000 and now is 26,000. Our head count in Texas started at 11,000, now it’s 33,000. … People vote with their feet.”

Mamdani, by contrast, looks backward, focusing on select grievances which he seeks to remedy with “equity.” He and his cohort portray American history as a tale of imperialism and oppression. His friends at the Times even sought, in 2019, “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

These dueling visions—grievance versus optimism—will likely define the debate about America’s future. As Dimon put it, they aren’t totally mutually exclusive—acknowledging America’s flaws doesn’t prevent celebrating America’s ability to fix its flaws and believing in its continued capacity for self-improvement. Yet Mamdani—the son of a Columbia professor full of criticism of settler colonialism—generates doubts about whether New York City will be at the lead of America’s next 250 years or, instead, will be undermining it. Those of us in the optimism camp have some confidence that, regardless of New York City’s role, America will net out as it has over the past 250 years, as a kind of miracle.

READ MORE: Mamdani, Dimon Offer Clashing Visions of New York City—And America at 250

The rule of byline inflation holds that the reliability of any news content is inversely proportional to the number of journalists credited with producing it. So it is with a front-page New York Times news article headlined “For Military, Trump Seeks $1.5 Trillion.”

The article carries the names of an astonishing nine Times journalists. There’s a byline by Tony Romm, and “contributed reporting” credit from another eight individuals: Brad Plumer, Scott Dance, Maxine Joselow, Andrew Duehren, John Ismay, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Lisa Friedman, and Michael C. Bender.

The Times article begins, “With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House asked Congress on Friday to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history.”

“The highest level in modern history” language is dramatic. It’s also unusual. When the New York Times writes about Democrat-proposed welfare spending or proposed tax increases, it never, or hardly ever, uses nominal current dollars to claim the “highest level in modern history.”

For example, a March 2023 Times news article about President Biden’s budget proposal began, “President Biden on Thursday proposed a $6.8 trillion budget,” and continued, “The budget contains some $5 trillion in proposed tax increases.” The Times did not describe either the proposed spending level or the proposed tax increase as the biggest in modern history.

A March 2024 Times news article about President Biden’s budget proposal similarly began, “President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget on Monday.” It went on, “The budget proposes about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over a decade.” In that article, too, the Times did not describe either the proposed spending level or the proposed tax increase as the biggest in modern history.

Because we have a fiat currency with the Federal Reserve targeting 2 percent inflation, and because the incentives of Congress generally tilt toward spending more, not less, spending in Washington ratchets up from year to year. This is such a sure thing that a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, Alan Cole, won $128,000 betting on a prediction market that federal spending would go up, according to a front-page report in the Wall Street Journal that observed Cole “just needed federal spending to go up, as it almost always does.” This is especially so if you are counting in nominal current dollars rather than by some constant dollar or inflation-adjusted measure.

If the Times editors and reporters can’t grasp the concept, imagine a headline saying “New York Times Reporter Pay Hits Highest Level in Modern History.” It may be accurate in some technical sense. The paper is currently offering $113,270 - $125,000 for a “fitness reporter” to “capture the latest in fitness culture” and “produce outstanding stories about fitness.” But such a headline doesn’t tell the full story of what Times reporter pay means relative to how much apartments cost in New York City, or relative to how much lawyers or bankers or high-tech workers or television news anchors make.

Because the nominal, current-dollar figures are not particularly useful, people who care about defense spending or hope to increase it frequently look at it as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. That has its own issues—it doesn’t necessarily cost more to defend a country simply because its GDP has increased—but it’s another way to look at things.

The Times gestures in this direction lower down in the news article: “The roughly $1.5 trillion sought for the Pentagon next fiscal year would amount to about 4.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, according to Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution. By that measure, it would be the largest year-over-year increase for defense since the Korean War, her analysis showed, after adjusting for inflation.”

This is confusing to readers because the first sentence talks about levels of nominal spending and of defense spending as a percent of GDP, but the second sentence talks about a “year over year increase” and then places it in historical context.

The Office of Management and Budget’s historical table 8.4 provides outlays by category as a percentage of GDP for the years 1962 to 2025. The 2.9 percent of GDP that “national defense” spending amounted to in 2025 is a tie for the lowest level on the whole 64-year chart. Every year of the Obama administration—not known for its reckless abandon when it came to military spending—came in higher. In 2016, the final year of the Obama administration, national defense was at 3.1 percent of GDP. At 4.5 percent of GDP, defense spending would still be lower than in every year from 1962 to 1992, even lower than in 1978 and 1979 under the anemic Carter administration that was humiliated by its failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran. In 2010, under Obama, the level was 4.6 percent of GDP, so even after a Trump-proposed increase to 4.5 percent of GDP, by the percent-of-GDP measure spending would still be below Obama levels.

You can also look at it in “constant dollars.” By that measure, OMB table 8.2, in 2017 “constant dollars,” the $680 billion national defense outlays for 2025 were lower than what Obama spent in 2009 to 2012, where each year the spending was more than $700 billion.

Reasonable people may differ over what the proper level is. People may disagree over how much of the worldwide burden should be borne by countries like Japan or those in Europe, and how much by American taxpayers. People may disagree about whether the U.S. should think of itself as a peacetime power or as one facing challenges from China, Russia, and radical Sunni and Shia Islam on par with the Cold War and post-September 11, 2001 eras. People may differ on whether any “peace dividend” should be spent on preparing to defend against future threats or repurposed for debt reduction, deficit reduction, domestic spending, or tax cuts. My own view is that there’s a hostile world out there full of threats. Even in a world that looks peaceful, you have to be arming up because you never know what is coming next. That was the point of Winston Churchill’s book While England Slept and President Kennedy’s book Why England Slept. To have an intelligent, informed conversation about these issues, though, you need a reasonably accurate handle on what spending is, and a decent understanding of how it fits in the historical context. The New York Times threw nine reporters at the issue and failed to illuminate it. We’re willing to fill in some of the gaps, though it’d be preferable if the Times got the story right on its own.

The Times reporter, Tony Romm, didn’t return an email seeking comment. Riedl told the Washington Free Beacon, “I provided the Times with a table of historical defense spending (nominal, real, and %GDP) that was straight out of the OMB historical tables.”

I asked, “Does the Times paragraph accurately reflect your take?” and “Were you happy with the NYT paragraph or did you find it somewhat garbled?” Riedl didn’t answer directly. Riedl did say “defense spending as a percent of GDP **should** fall over 75 years because the cost of military hardware and troop compensation do not need to rise as fast as the nominal GDP to maintain the same levels. So 4.5% of GDP today buys more defense than 5%-6% of GDP did in the 1980s.” One could make the same argument about healthcare, or education. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen, unlike the professors, doctors, and nurses, are putting their lives at risk in distant lands, earning pay that’s frequently less than what a New York Times fitness reporter earns.

The Times article didn’t quote or cite anyone from the defense industry or the defense department or from any advocacy groups or think tanks supportive of sharply increased defense spending. Maybe with the room the paper used to credit the eight Times reporters who contributed reporting, the editors could have squeezed in instead some sources with more diverse perspectives about the right level of defense spending.

READ MORE: On Defense Spending, a New York Times Double Standard

The New York Times is drawing bipartisan condemnation for its coverage of an attack on a synagogue in Michigan that critics faulted for seeming to justify the attack.

“Synagogue Attacker Lost Family Members in Lebanon Airstrike” was the headline of a print Times news article, published Saturday, March 14, 2026. In print, the Times failed to mention that, according to the Israeli government, at least one of the “family members” was a Hezbollah terrorist. Online, the Times quoted an anonymous Lebanese official who said the family members were not Hezbollah members.

That may seem like a subtle detail, but it generates a totally different storyline. The Times headline and storyline basically conveys “grieving guy takes revenge for innocent family members killed by Israel.” The other would be more like, “would-be murderer in Michigan was a terrorist fanatic like his brother in Lebanon.”

Don’t just take it from me: The State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism during the Biden administration, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, wrote that the Times headline “suggests that because he lost family members in Lebanon trying to kill Jewish children is sorta ok.”

The Times eventually published online a March 15, 2026, article reporting the Israel Defense Forces disclosure that, as the IDF put it in a social media post, “INTELLIGENCE REVEALS: BROTHER OF TERRORIST BEHIND U.S. SYNAGOGUE ATTACK WAS A HEZBOLLAH TERRORIST.” As the IDF put it, “Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali was responsible for managing weapons operations within a specialized branch of the Badr Unit. The unit is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the war. His brother, Ayman Muhammad Ghazali, carried out the terror attack in Michigan this past Thursday. Ibrahim was eliminated in an IAF strike on a Hezbollah military structure last week.”

That follow-up Times article doesn’t use the word “terrorist” or “terror,” as is typical with Times practice of inaccurately conveying what the Israeli government is saying, as if Times readers can’t be trusted with the language. The same Times article reports, “A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk to the media, denied that Ibrahim or his family were affiliated with the group.” The U.S. government has long designated Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

In the attack, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali reportedly drove a pickup truck full of explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, while preschool with 140 students was in session. Eventually he killed himself during a gunfight with security guards.

A New York Times spokeswoman, Nicole Taylor, told the Washington Free Beacon, "We’ve published dozens of stories and blog posts, providing readers with accurate information as we learn and confirm more facts. In any breaking news event, we update our coverage and headlines as a story develops, or where initial reporting was incomplete, as was the case with our early report that relatives of the synagogue attacker were not affiliated with Hezbollah. We also updated a headline and story on the attacker to better capture the violence of the act, along with what our reporters learned about his life."

The “Synagogue Attacker Lost Family Members” story came on the heels of another Times headline about the same attack that prompted widespread outrage.

“Temple Israel was founded in 1941, Dedicated to the Formation of a Jewish State,” was one online Times headline in the aftermath of the attack. “Extremely dangerous and disgraceful. The @nytimes continues to spew antisemitic propaganda,” wrote Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican of New York.

A professor at MIT, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, declared himself “Infuriated at the NYT’s Antisemitism-fomenting Clickbait.” He called the headline “reprehensible” and said it “may finally push me out the door as a New York Times subscriber” after decades.

The House Committee on Education & Workforce posted from its official account: “This is the kind of headline that emboldens antisemites … A terrorist attacked a synagogue with a preschool and targeted innocent people in an antisemitic attack. When hatred rears its ugly head, pay attention.”

The Times changed the headline over that article so that it now reads, “Temple Israel Is One of the Largest Reform Temples in the U.S.” A professor at Wayne State University who was quoted in the Times article, Howard Lupovitch, told the Washington Free Beacon, “the original headline focused on one part of a longer, wide-ranging conversation and made it the centerpiece of what I said. I was glad they changed it.”

Dunking on online headlines on a breaking news story is the sort of thing you can make a case for refraining from doing, but at this point whatever credibility the New York Times had is so thoroughly eroded that for at least some readers, patience and trust are wearing thin, or are gone entirely.

Russ Roberts, host of the EconTalk podcast and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, whose sensibility is pretty sober, had this reaction to the New York Times obituary declaring the catastrophic predictions of The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich as “premature”—rather than just plain wrong: “Don’t give the NYT your money. Don’t subscribe. Don’t play their puzzles. Don’t pay for The Athletic. We can return if they return someday to their purported purpose of informing and not just proselytizing. (And yes I know about Walter Duranty. But what was once occasional is now the mode.)”

In this case it’s not clear whether the problem is with the Times in particular or with the mainstream media in general. The Wall Street Journal ran a similar story in its Saturday paper, headlined “Synagogue Attacker Lost Family in Lebanon,” also failing to mention the Hezbollah connection of the “family.” The two authors of that story did not reply to email queries about the omission from the Free Beacon. As is frequently the case at the Wall Street Journal, the online commenters were having none of it: “Well the WSJ ‘news’ section may have reached a new low. This article appears to be trying to excuse the attack on a synagogue in Michigan because of civilian casualties in a war on the other side of the world. Absolutely disgusting,” wrote one reader, Ian K. Another reader, Joshua Klein, wrote, “And that is justification for targeting innocent Jewish preschoolers in what universe? Shame on WSJ framing this as justification for a heinous act.”

At least some news organizations were more timely than the Times or the Journal in reporting the Lebanese Hezbollah angle. NBC reported Friday afternoon that “the strike killed two of his brothers, who were known to be members of Hezbollah, and his niece and nephew, an official told NBC News.” CBS also reported, “A freelance journalist working for CBS News in Lebanon learned from sources there the two brothers were both members of a Hezbollah rocket unit in southern Lebanon.”

The Times has been boasting that it now employs 2,300 journalists, doubled from 10 years ago, so at least over there, whatever the problem is, it’s not a resource issue in terms of having enough bodies to throw at a story.

READ MORE: New York Times Coverage of Michigan Synagogue Attack Prompts Bipartisan Backlash

The joint U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran has already been a “tremendous success,” as President Trump explained this week: “they have no navy, they have no air force, they have no anti-aircraft equipment. It’s all been blown up. They have no radar. They have no telecommunications. And they have no leadership. It’s all gone.”

Trump didn’t say so out loud, but similarly and totally obliterated are whatever slim hopes the isolationist forces ever had of capturing Trump’s Republican Party. The isolationist-industrial complex might as well be at the bottom of the Gulf of Arabia along with the Iranian Navy, given how irrelevant and ineffective it has shown itself to be.

Don’t take it from me. Even the isolationists—sorry, the self-identified “restraint-oriented” camp, which I’d be more hesitant about describing shorthandedly as isolationist if they were less hesitant about slapping the “neocon” label on all the non-isolationists—are, basically, confessing as much.

One such character, Scott McConnell, wrote in a British magazine, the Spectator, under the headline, “I spent 25 years fighting neocons. Then Trump became one,” “I’m glued to the news coming out of Iran. I’m experiencing some depression, as one might, upon realizing that much of what one has worked on for 25 years has suddenly gone up in smoke, destroyed when Donald Trump discovered he was pretty much a neocon after all … one can’t help but acknowledge the American right really likes bombing foreign countries, despite what had seemed an inexorable advance of right-leaning realist and restraint-oriented young foreign policy staffers and intellectuals who grew up or served during the Iraq war, and despite Trump’s successful effort to present himself as the ‘peace candidate’ and my enthusiasm for his endeavor.”

Another such character, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, Justin Logan, told Politico, “I would characterize the current moment as one of fear and paralysis. … There’s also a group of people who had aspirations or have aspirations to go into the government, who are asking themselves whether they still want to do so, and who are biting their tongues while they figure out the answer to that question.” The fear and paralysis he was apparently referring to wasn’t in Tehran but in places like the Cato Institute, the Orwellian-named Defense Priorities, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which really should be called the Quincy Institute for Irresponsible Statecraft, and their funders. The funders have invested millions of dollars and hours of time into trying to turn Republican foreign policy into some kind of cross between President Jimmy Carter at his weakest and Senator George McGovern’s 1972 campaign, which produced a 520 to 17 electoral college landslide for President Nixon.

Precisely how little traction this camp has was visible in the March 4 Senate vote on a resolution “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress.” The only Republican senator who voted for it was Rand Paul of Kentucky. The other 52 Republicans voted, essentially, to back Trump’s military action. That pretty much sums it up: one out of 53 Republican senators. Rand Paul is a son of Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president as a libertarian in 1988 and endorsed Pat Buchanan in 1992 and has been a longtime lonely extremist figure on national security matters.

You can parse the nuances within the isolationist camp. Some of them hate Israel, some of them just want less defense spending, some of them have business interests abroad in unfree countries, some of them are seriously and sincerely scarred by poor outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan. At this point, it’s not even worth the bother. Just how thoroughly vanquished that side of the fight is was visible in a social media post recently from Trump, who posted “Rich Goldberg was GREAT on Mark Levin tonight. Two guys who really get it! Thank you both. President DJT.” The reference was to Rich Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who appeared March 7 on Mark Levin’s Fox News program.

Goldberg’s comments do make clear one subtle yet significant difference between the current military action against Iran and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is, as Goldberg put it, “we have an ally like Israel that is forward at a major threat to the United States that has the military hardware that we have provided over many years to ensure that they have the capability with our intelligence sharing level to go ahead and operationalize in this manner. I think we are seeing something for the history books playing out before our very eyes and it’s going to not just shape the future of the U.S.-Israel security alliance. I think it’s going to have to be replicated in other regions of the world where the United States and fellow democracies face big threats.”

Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, also have been at times reticent to describe democracy as a goal of the current military effort. “I went through 20 years of those wars myself, worried about getting dragged in, worried about mission creep, worried about nation building or democracy expansion. That’s never the perspective the president has pursued on this,” Hegseth said this week.

Yet when Hugh Hewitt asked Trump on Jan. 8, 2026, if he had a message for the people of Iran, Trump said, “All I can say is you should, you should feel strongly about freedom. There’s nothing like freedom.”

Israel, which Hegseth described as “a really strong partner in this effort,” has been more direct and public about its goals. Netanyahu wrote March 10 in Farsi, “People of Iran, We are waging a historic war for freedom. This is an unparalleled opportunity for you to overthrow the Ayatollahs’ regime and seize your freedom. Alongside the United States, we are striking the tyrants of Tehran harder than ever. … In the coming days, we will provide you with the conditions to take your destiny into your own hands. Your dreams will turn into reality. … When the time is right, and that time is rapidly approaching, we will pass the torch to you. Be ready to seize the moment!”

Ron Dermer, who helped write Natan Sharansky’s 2004 book The Case for Democracy, which helped to provide the ideological underpinnings for some of President George W. Bush’s choices, is, according to at least some Israeli press reports, back providing some advice to Netanyahu after having resigned in November 2025 as minister of strategic affairs.

If the “restraint” camp in Washington is depressed already, imagine what their reaction will be if and when freedom breaks out in Iran and the Islamic Republic is vanquished and replaced by a government that no longer threatens the region, America, and the Iranian people. The most brilliant, experienced, and eminent foreign-policy wise men—Walter Russell Mead, Daniel Pipes—all say it’s a less-than-likely outcome. In the end it will be up to the Iranians, not the U.S. or the Israelis. But we’re getting very close. My own bet is on freedom. Take it from the columnist who wrote “Khamenei Is a Dead Man Walking.”

READ MORE: ‘Fear and Paralysis’ Grip Right-Wing Isolationists

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, is abandoning his support for Israel now that he thinks it has become politically inconvenient.

That’s the takeaway from Newsom’s March 3, 2026, book-promotion appearance with two former aides to President Barack Obama, Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau, who have a podcast known for hostility to Israel. Asked about the military action against Iran that Israel and the United States are jointly waging, Newsom had nothing at all positive to say about it. Instead of saying a single critical word about Iran—the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, which has killed 35,000 pro-democracy protesters this year, which oppresses women and gays, and which has launched assassination attempts and cyberattacks against America while stoking unrest on U.S. college campuses—Newsom denounced Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for dragging America into war.

“The issue of Bibi is interesting because he’s got his own domestic issues. He’s trying to stay out of jail,” Newsom said. “He’s got an election coming up. He’s potentially on the ropes. He’s got folks, the hard line, that want to annex the West Bank. I mean, [Thomas] Friedman and others are talking about it, appropriately, as sort of an apartheid state. They couldn’t even—I mean, we’re talking about regime change?—for two years, they haven’t even been able to solve the Hamas question in Israel. So this is, I mean, you know, I want to be careful here, but you know, in so many ways, that influence in the context of the conversation of where Trump ultimately landed on this is pretty damn self-evident.”

Newsom said the United States should “reconsider” its military support for Israel. “You just got to reconsider the whole thing,” he said, claiming, not particularly credibly, “it breaks my heart.”

“My entire life, I felt dumb,” Newsom said in the appearance. If he felt dumb before, he deserves to feel even dumber now, especially if he thinks Americans won’t see through his self-serving shape-shifting. Newsom traveled to Israel on October 20, 2023, and spoke of “the extraordinary people I just met today in Israel” and “the deep connections between my home state and this country.” In 2020, he also vetoed a California K-12 ethnic studies mandate amid concerns voiced by Jewish groups and other critics that the mandate could promote anti-Semitism.

Some analysts viewed the remarks as a sign of how anti-Israel forces have taken over the Democratic Party.

Jonathan Greenberg, who worked from 2006 to 2011 for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, commented, “The concern here isn’t Newsom. He’s entirely selfish and believes in nothing. The concern here for Jewish Democrats is that he’s an accomplished windsock. And this is his read on the wind.”

A former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, said, “Correct — he is just giving the Democratic Party voters what he thinks they want.”

“Mr. Newsom is gambling that betting against Israel and America is a winning political strategy for what is left of the party of Truman,” said a New York Sun editorial headlined “Gavin Newsom Goes to War — Against Israel.”

A statement from Newsom on February 28, 2026 had criticized the war as unjustified and illegal while also saying, “the corrupt and repressive Iranian regime must never have nuclear weapons. The leadership of Iran must go.” That messaging was absent from the March 3 book tour appearance.

The book tour will be Newsom’s first extended national exposure for some potential 2028 voters. It includes stops in the early presidential primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina. In his appearance with Vietor and Favreau, he seemed to want to talk more about himself than about any concrete achievements he has delivered for the state of California. The state suffers from crime, poverty, homelessness, and high prices. At one point Newsom likened his physical appearance to the actor Pierce Brosnan, known for television appearances as the character Remington Steele and for a stint as James Bond in the movie series. At another point he spoke about what he described as a “pretty severe learning disability that still marks who I am today, a lot of my anxieties, my insecurities.” He praised the doctor who helped with his mother’s physician-assisted suicide. He said his father had walked out on his mother and explained why, not to him directly, but to an oral history interviewer for the University of California’s Bancroft Library.

He described “Murdoch Inc.”— an apparent reference to Fox and News Corp., whose media holdings include the Fox News Channel and Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal—as “Pravda,” the organ of the Communist Party in the murderous Soviet totalitarian state. He singled out Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity by name, which is really despicable, because both of them hate Soviet Communism. Newsom’s book publisher is a division of Bertelsmann, a German company that competes with some businesses controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family.

Newsom recalled during the appearance, “my mom was so insistent that I never get into politics.” On the basis of this particular appearance, at least, it might have been better for the country if Newsom had taken his mother’s advice.

It’s very early in the 2028 presidential race. My own sense of it—I could be wrong—is that by the time voters decide the Democratic nomination, Israel and Iran politics may not be particularly high on the agenda of typical Democratic primary voters, and that, to the extent national security and foreign policy figure at all in the race, some political advantages will accrue to a candidate not vulnerable to being portrayed as an extremist Israel-hating terrorist-sympathizer. On the substance of it, if the operation against Iran winds up as a success, a candidate running against Newsom could fault him as mistaken for having opposed it, and say, to the extent Israel helped win it, it should be thanked. That anti-Newsom candidate could point out that by using the “apartheid” slur unwarrantedly against Israel, Newsom is falling into precisely the “Zionism-is-racism” lie advanced by Pravda and its Soviet Communist sponsor. And that candidate might denounce Newsom for his spinelessness. Israeli and American troops and civilians across the Middle East and brave Iranian protesters are putting their lives on the line to prevent a sick and evil radical theocratic regime from threatening civilization with missiles and nuclear weapons. And Mr. Handsome Genius Conspiracy Theorist from California says what’s really driving U.S. government decisionmaking is Israeli electoral politics rather than the pace of Iran’s missile program and its slaughter of 35,000 protesters?

READ MORE: ‘Apartheid State’ Israel Pushed Trump to Iran War, Gavin Newsom Claims

Iranian Shiites have a saying, “Sag Sunni.“ It means Sunni Muslims are dogs. The Iranians don’t mean it as a compliment.

The framing of the recent military action in the Middle East so far has been the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Yet President Trump pointed out during a White House appearance with the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Tuesday that Iran has also attacked other countries nearby: “They’ve hit Qatar. They’ve hit U.A.E. They’ve hit Saudi Arabia. They’ve hit Oman,” Trump said. Iran also used missiles and drones to attack Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, according to a statement by those governments and the U.S. Reports on social media yesterday showed what appeared to be an Iranian drone strike near a U.S. consulate in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

What’s up with that? It goes beyond just Iranian incompetence in reaching Israeli targets or Iranian attempts to hit American military bases and diplomatic installations in the Arab countries. It—like much of what happens in the Middle East—has something to do with the split between Sunni Islam—the dominant variety and the religion of most of the regional royalty—and Shiite Islam—the religion of Iran’s ruling clerics and of its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. Iran is a Shiite country with some Sunni minorities. The Sunni-Shiite split is frequently a stronger explanatory dynamic in the Middle East than settler-colonialism or U.S. imperialism or oil or whatever other favored explanation the press or academia are pushing.

Some of these tensions are visible also in the U.S. internal reaction to the campaign against Iran, which has been more muted than the opposition to Israel’s military actions against Hamas terrorists in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Many of the U.S. mosques and activist groups are Sunni-aligned, and, perhaps as a result, they haven’t been organizing massive protests against the U.S.-Israeli strikes against the Iranian regime. An exception is the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, a Shiite Muslim who inaccurately described the U.S. and Israeli actions as “catastrophic” and as an “illegal war of aggression.”

Brigadier General (Reserve) Amir Avivi, the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, said the Iranian regime was “acting in an hysterical way … maybe in order to create some kind of pressure on the U.S.,” but actually counterproductively, upsetting the UAE and pushing Saudi Arabia more into the U.S.-Israel camp.

A former Pentagon official with serious expertise in Arab and Muslim religion and culture, Harold Rhode, said Middle Easterners like to go with the strongest horse. Rhode told the Washington Free Beacon from Jerusalem, Israel, that he understands that last week, Iran went to the Saudis and other Gulfis “instructing” them not to let America fly over their airspace and use military bases in their countries to attack Iran. The Arabs told the Iranians that they would do what Iran said. But the Arabs then went with the real strongman—Trump—and ignored the Iranians. The Saudis et al realized that Trump was serious and went with the strongest horse—Trump. The Iranians, feeling betrayed, shot off missiles and drones against the Gulf Arab kingdoms, pushing them further into the arms of the U.S.

One key to understanding this came from my barber, who is a religious Sunni Muslim. At one point after October 7, 2023, we were discussing whether Israel would invade Lebanon. I said that the Iranian-backed Shiite militia, Hezbollah, posed a threat to the Jewish state. He shrugged—or as much as a barber can safely shrug while holding an electric razor near a customer’s head—and said, “they’d kill me before they kill you.”

Rhode said, “Shiites call the Sunnis dogs. They don’t see them as real Muslims, they see them as heretics.”

It’s not that all Sunnis and Shiites hate each other. In some countries, there’s intermarriage between the two groups, and the denominations coexist in places such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. But there’s resentment, too. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the Shiites are populous in the oil-rich Eastern provinces. Kuwait and Bahrain have large Shiite populations but the prosperous ruling monarchs are Sunni.

The split dates to 632, when the Muslim prophet who founded the religion of Islam, Muhammad, died. A fight emerged over who would inherit control and leadership of the movement after his death—the aristocratic families of Mecca, now in Saudi Arabia, or Muhammad’s cousin Ali, who was married to Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. The followers of Ali—Shiat Ali or Shia for short—became Shia Muslims. Not all of them are Iranian or Hezbollah terrorists—some of them are more moderate, and the Iranian Revolution has some modern ideological elements as well. And there are Sunni anti-Israel and anti-American terrorists, too, including Hamas and ISIS. Hamas took some backing and training and inspiration from Iran even though Hamas is Sunni and Iran is Shiite. Yet 1,400 years later, the Shiites are shooting missiles and drones at the Sunnis.

READ MORE: The 1,400-Year-Old Sunni-Shia Islamic Religious Split Is Shaping the Iran War

About an hour and 44 minutes into this week’s debate among seven candidates for governor of California, the moderator asked a question that he said had been sent in by “Henry in San Bernardino.” It said, “Governor Newsom made several high-profile commitments, such as addressing housing affordability, reducing homelessness, and improving public safety that some Californians feel remain unmet or insufficiently delivered. What concrete accountability mechanisms would you put in place to ensure that your own commitments are not just announced but measurably delivered within a defined timeline?”

The question underscored an awkward reality for the six Democrats on stage and for the party as a whole. The Golden State governor, Gavin Newsom, is near the top of polls for the 2028 presidential nomination. He has an autobiography, Young Man in a Hurry: a Memoir of Discovery, scheduled for publication in just a few weeks, on Feb. 24, that is already bringing a burst of press attention. Vogue is warning middle-aged women readers: “He is embarrassingly handsome.”

Yet after seven years with Newsom as governor, California is still suffering—not only from the problems Newsom got elected originally trying to fix, but from others that he has helped create along the way.

“We have the highest poverty rate in the United States of America,” said a former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. “In our cities, we’ve had too much crime.” Villaraigosa said the state had spent $24 billion supposedly combating homelessness, “and homelessness went up.”

“Let’s face it, the cost of gas is high,” acknowledged the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, another Democrat running for governor.

If Newsom does end up as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028, his opponents in the primary and general elections could make a pretty good attack ad just showing six other Democrats talking about what one of them, the mayor of San Jose, Matt Mahan, called “the brutally high cost of housing” and “the obvious failures of our policies to address homelessness.”

The former California state controller, Betty Yee, said politicians “should feel ashamed” of the impacts that “green energy” policies have had on low-income communities. She said the California government is “spending more than we are bringing in,” even though the state is not in a recession.

Yee said Californians “can’t afford a leader who thinks grandstanding is actually governing.” She left unclear who the comment was directed at, but California voters are surely picking up what she was putting down.

Another Democratic candidate, Xavier Becerra, a former California attorney general and former U.S. secretary of health and human services, said “the governor’s office is not a place for on-the-job training or inflated promises.” Like Yee, he didn’t name the target of that comment, but it also might have been interpreted as casting shade at Newsom, who was elected in 2018 and is term-limited.

The sole Republican candidate on the debate stage, Steve Hilton, said “the biggest driver of the high cost of living is Democrat policies.” He said the state had suffered from “16 years of Democrat one-party rule.” The most recent Republican governor of California was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left office in January 2011. Presidents Nixon and Reagan were California Republicans, as was House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but the party has struggled to compete in statewide elections in recent years.

As in other Democrat-dominated cities and states, the effect has been that the highest-stakes ideological battles are sometimes within the Democratic Party itself. Some of those rifts were on display in the debate, with Thurmond and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer anchoring the far left, and Villaraigosa and Mahan sounding more pragmatic, technocratic, and moderate by comparison. Steyer, Thurmond, and Yee backed a billionaire tax that, as Steyer put it, has rendered “the big tech CEOs … terrified.” Steyer and Thurmond also said they favored abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Thurmond said he backed “universal health care for all, including undocumented immigrants.” Steyer said he backs rent control.

A question about whether the candidates backed Newsom’s push to ban gas-powered vehicles in the state by 2035 also exposed differences among the candidates, with Thurmond and Yee favoring the policy and with Villaraigosa and Hilton opposing it. Mahan dodged: “only if the technology is there.”

Other sections of the debate dealt with California’s incomplete and over-budget high-speed rail project; its K-12 public education system that was compared unfavorably to that of Mississippi; homeowners insurers fleeing the state; and a lack of funding for drug treatment programs.

If the Democrats don’t nominate Newsom for president in 2028, there is always Kamala Harris, another California Democrat. The nonpartisan primary election in the governor’s race is June 2, 2026. Several candidates who did not participate in the televised debate are also running in the primary, including Rep. Eric Swalwell, who is a Democrat, and the sheriff of Riverside County, Calif., Chad Bianco, who is a Republican.

READ MORE: Newsom’s Failures Exposed in California Gubernatorial Debate

Hardly a day goes by without news of some performers performatively announcing that they’ll refuse to take the stage at the Trump Kennedy Center, or the press portraying a canceled event in that light.

This week, composer Philip Glass said he wouldn’t allow the National Symphony Orchestra to play a symphony he wrote honoring Abraham Lincoln. A touring production of the musical Hamilton canceled in March 2025 because, its producer, Jeffrey Seller, explained, “some institutions are sacred and should be protected from politics.” Others who have backed out reportedly include musician Rhiannon Giddens, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and banjoist Bela Fleck, who explained on social media that “Performing there has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music.”

Some portion of contemporary artists, just like some portion of the rest of the country, doesn’t like Trump. If they don’t want to perform at the Trump Kennedy Center, no one is forcing them to, subject to the terms of whatever contract they entered into when they originally booked the engagement. But to frame it as Trump injecting politics into the supposedly previously sacred and apolitical Kennedy Center is just naive, ignorant nonsense.

It’s not as if the presidential box there during the Obama administration was packed with the president’s most vicious critics. And it’s not as if the Democrats aren’t themselves hoping to get it back under their control so that they can use it themselves. The best way to test that would be with a bill privatizing the thing by selling it to some high bidder in the entertainment industry. That’d be one way to get politics out of it. It’s unlikely.

Not everything portrayed in the press as a political exit may actually be that. Some departures or cancellations may have been motivated by economics or other reasons. The president of the Trump Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, fumed on social media, “Guess how many reporters actually reported the facts as to who asked who to end the EXCLUSIVE Opera partnership at the Trump Kennedy Center? Zero. We have a crisis in the media. Experienced editors are allowing young reporters to simply repeat, recycle and plagiarize other reporters without checking facts.” Grenell has also asked who is making it political: the Trump administration or artists deciding to boycott the center in the Trump presidency?

Trump himself said on January 26: “People don’t realize that The Trump Kennedy Center suffered massive deficits for many years and, like everything else, I merely came in to save it and, if possible, make it far better than ever before!”

My own preference would be to avoid naming any government structures for any living politicians, and to apply that rule equally to the Trump Kennedy Center and to the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station, President Barack H. Obama Highway in California, and the Barack Obama Presidential Expressway in Illinois.

But as the author of a book about President Kennedy, I can at least bring some experience to bear on the history of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Simply put: Yes, a performing arts center in Washington, D.C., created by Congress with the National Cultural Center Act, on federal land, with a parking garage funded by a congressional appropriation, and a board composed of and appointed by politicians will be political.

Advocates for building a performing arts center in Washington were straightforward about the political rationale for the project. The chairman of the District of Columbia Auditorium Commission, Agnes Meyer, testified to a House subcommittee on Feb. 7, 1957, “Washington is not only the Capital of the United States. It is the capital of the free world.” Meyer, a former New York Sun reporter whose husband, Eugene Meyer, owned the Washington Post and had been chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke in the early years of the Cold War and said America was “in a period when our Republic must capture the imagination of all free peoples.”

In a Jan. 31, 1957, report to President Eisenhower, “Plans for a National Civic Auditorium and Cultural Center,” Meyer—the mother of legendary Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham—wrote that a cultural center in Washington would “enhance its prestige throughout the world.” The report warned that “in the past, some foreign visitors have left the United States with an impression of American cultural poverty.” It proposed a Great Hall where “the Government may act as host to officials of many nations.” Meyer talked about what became the Kennedy Center the way Trump talks about his plans for a new White House ballroom: as a place for events “of high ceremonial importance,” such as the Inaugural Ball.

When the building finally opened, named after a politician, it got a hostile reception from New York. Perhaps the cultural capital saw a threat from the political capital horning in—with federal subsidies—on what had traditionally been New York’s turf. The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, in a front-page review in the Sept. 7, 1971, New York Times, dropped in a first-paragraph reference to the Nazi architect who was Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production: “Albert Speer would have approved.” Later, she hammered the point home: “This is gemütlich Speer.”

As if the Nazi comparisons weren’t enough, Huxtable also likened the new building to a Soviet Communist edifice, calling its spaces “disquietingly reminiscent of the overscaled vacuity of Soviet palaces of culture.”

Wrote Huxtable: “[T]he building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”

Art’s use for arguably political purposes long predates the Nazis, the Soviets, or the Nixon administration’s 1971 dedication of the Kennedy Center. It goes back at least to Solomon’s Temple, to ancient Greece, to the Egyptian pyramids, and to the Medici family’s patronage of the Italian Renaissance. Just as with the politicians who are the patrons, sometimes the art is great, and sometimes it is mediocre.

READ MORE: There Has Always Been Politics at the Kennedy Center

The New York Times employs a “fact-check” reporter, Linda Qiu, who the paper uses to fact-check President Trump but not New York City’s truth-stretching Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Qiu’s latest article tackles Trump’s big speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It manages to mangle both what Trump actually said and what the truth is.

The Times fact-check says Trump “made a host of other inaccurate claims that The New York Times has previously fact-checked,” among them, “He falsely claimed that China had no wind farms. (China has more wind farms and wind power capacity than any other country.)”

Actually, here is the language from Trump’s speech, according to a transcript posted by the World Economic Forum:

China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet, I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that? That’s a good way of looking at it. They’re smart. China’s very smart. They make them. They sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but they don’t use them themselves.

They put up a couple of big wind farms. But they don’t use them. They just put them up to show people what they could look like. They don’t spend. They don’t do anything. They use a thing called coal, mostly. China goes with the coal. They go with oil and gas. They’re starting to look at nuclear a little bit, and they’re doing just fine. They make a fortune selling the windmills, though, and I think really, that’s one that they wouldn’t be surprised if it stopped. They were shocked that it continues to go. They were very friendly with me. They’re shocked that people continue to buy those damn things. They killed the birds. They ruined your landscapes. Other than that, I think they’re fabulous, by the way, stupid people buy them.

Contrary to the Times‘ false claim that Trump said China “had no wind farms,” Trump himself acknowledged in the speech that China “put up a couple of big wind farms.” The Times doesn’t share that part of Trump’s speech with its readers, misleading readers by withholding the full truth of what Trump actually said.

As for Trump’s basic point that China gets most of its energy from coal, not wind, even if you rely on China’s own unreliable data, the International Energy Agency lists coal and coal products as 71 percent of China’s energy production, and solar, wind, and other renewables combined at 5.4 percent.

As for the Times‘ claim that China “has more wind farms and wind power capacity than any other country,” that actually supports Trump’s point that “they don’t use them.” “Farms” and “capacity” are different than energy production. What matters is not the number of farms—China is a large-population country, and it operates on a communist central planning system that frequently disregards efficiency and market forces, so it’s not surprising that it would have “more” of anything—but how much energy the farms produce, and at what cost and return on investment.

The Times fact-check about China and wind is not attributed, but comes straight from the talking points of the Chinese foreign ministry, whose spokesman, Guo Jiakun, also responded by talking about installed capacity rather than energy generated and used. It’s the latest in a recent series of false Times reports about how China is surpassing America, which is itself a Chinese propaganda theme.

For its claim that “China has more wind farms and wind power capacity,” the Times hyperlinks its own previous fact-check article, which relies on data from “The World Wind Energy Association, a nonprofit based in Germany.” Yet the World Wind Energy Association used to be run by He Dexin, honorary director of the Chinese Wind Energy Association and a graduate of Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, one of the “seven sons” deeply involved in Chinese military research. The current secretary general of the Chinese Wind Energy Association, Qin Haiyan, is also the vice president of the World Wind Energy Association. The “World Wind Energy Association” isn’t exactly an independent or nonpartisan source.

Even China is tapping the brakes on wind development. The “Global Wind Report 2025” of the Global Wind Energy Council—a report whose regional lead sponsor is Sungrow, a Chinese company—acknowledges in its China section that “developers will be more cautious about future investments due to growing uncertainty about rates of return.” In 2023, China’s National Energy Administration issued a notice about decommissioning wind farms: “the wind farms that have reached the end of the designed service life for grid-connected operations shall be decommissioned.” It says that “Power grid enterprises shall be responsible for … the demolishment of the supporting transmission projects for decommissioned wind farms, and ecological restoration.”

I drive by some of these big wind turbines on the way over the Bourne Bridge to Cape Cod, and some percentage of the time they are standing still because the wind isn’t blowing. One of the ones off Martha’s Vineyard that was finally installed after intense political opposition sheared off and left fiberglass shards all over the beach in Nantucket.

The Times fact-check of Trump is similarly unreliable when it comes to food prices. The fact-check says, “He falsely claimed that grocery prices were ‘coming down.’ (Prices are still increasing.)” Yet this week the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price indexes for October and November 2025—delayed because of the government shutdown. They showed food inflation at 0.0 percent in October and 0.0 percent in November. In terms of percent change from a year ago, the PCE inflation number—which is the one the Federal Reserve most closely watches—for food declined to 2.2 percent in October and 1.9 percent in November from 2.4 percent in September. Truflation, a private, real-time data provider, reports food and overall inflation declining even more in January 2026.

Trump is out publicly talking about the possibility of 5.5 percent GDP growth or even 10, 12, or 15 percent growth with 1.2 percent inflation. Maybe the Times fact-checker could take a pause from falsely fact-checking Trump and devote a moment or two to retrospectively fact-checking the July 8, 2024, New York Times opinion piece from Robert Rubin and Kenneth Chenault about “The Enormous Risks a Second Trump Term Poses to Our Economy.” The S&P 500 has gone up more than 23 percent since then. Trump at Davos predicted that the “stock market is going to double, in a relatively short period of time.” The Times fact-check didn’t take on that statement. Maybe the fact-checker was just exhausted from chasing Chinese windmills. Or maybe, given how trigger-happy the paper is in general when it comes to calling the president a purveyor of inaccurate claims, it’s a sign that on some big-picture issues, Trump is looking more credible these days than those who were predicting his second term would be a disaster.

READ MORE: New York Times Fact-Checker Needs a Fact-Check