John T. Earnest came to a small synagogue in a small California city of 50,000 with a rifle and big dreams of killing Jews. In a manifesto posted on 8chan, he boasted, "I would die a thousand times over".

The Neo-Nazi wannabe killer listed Adolf Hitler as his inspiration. "My act will inspire others to take a stand as well,” he wrote in his manifesto. “And when this revolution starts gaining traction (if I am not killed) I expect to be freed from prison and continue the fight.”

Inside, an elderly Rabbi, a 60-year old woman, an 9-year-old girl, and other Jewish worshipers celebrating the final day of Passover showed him the true meaning of courage.

The older congregants in the sanctuary of Chabad of Poway, the city’s sole Orthodox Jewish synagogue, were reciting Yizkor, the prayer for deceased loved ones, an occasion that can summon even the most secular Jew to the synagogue, while the younger children were playing in the synagogue’s hall.

Had Earnest opened fire in the sanctuary, many of the congregants asking the Lord to embrace their parents and grandparents, and unite their souls with those of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all of their forefathers, would have joined them in death. But instead, the Neo-Nazi was drawn after the Rabbi and the congregation’s children who embodied the innocence and goodness he was driven to destroy.

The Neo-Nazi stopped in the lobby and opened fire on Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein and the children.

Rabbi Goldstein rushed to get the children out of the hall. He was wounded, and lost his right index finger, but kept saving the children. Lori Gilbert Kaye, a 60-year-old longtime congregant, jumped in to stop a bullet meant for the Rabbi and was killed. Her husband, a doctor, would fight to keep her alive.

Almog Peretz, an Israeli tourist who had faced Islamic terror at home, grabbed more children and rushed them to safety. He was shot in the leg, but that didn’t stop Peretz who recalled being under fire in Israel.

His brother-in-law, Israel Dahan, flipped over a table to shield the children. His daughter, 9-year-old, Noya Dahan, was hit by in the leg. But the 9-year-old girl later insisted on sharing a photo of herself smiling from the hospital.

Shimon Abitbul, an Israeli grandpa visiting his family, covered his grandson with his body.

Earnest had come in vowing to kill as many Jews as he could. He had boasted of his bravery and of his willingness to die. “Fear is the only thing holding you back,” he had bragged.

But in the face of their courage, he faltered. His rifle jammed. An Iraq War vet congregant rushed at him. And he ran for it.

The Neo-Nazi had brought a soundtrack including the Pokemon theme song and a track from a Halo video game to inspire him. His intended victims had brought their faith in God.

He had expected to break them. Instead their determination broke him.

An off duty Border Patrol officer who was a member of the congregation fired at him as he ran. The shots missed the killer, but struck his car. While the congregants waited for the police, Rabbi Goldstein, his bloody fingers wrapped in a prayer shawl, delivered a sermon encouraging his congregants to be brave. Earnest, afraid that he might be shot by police, called 911, left the car, raised his hands and surrendered.

The attack on Chabad of Poway did not happen in a vacuum. The Chassidic Jewish group has been a mecca for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including claims that they served as the interface between Putin and Trump. That claim didn’t appear in some fringe publication, but in a popular Politico article.

The quiet city where a Neo-Nazi gunman opened fire is over 2,700 miles away from the headquarters of the New York Times and Politico, but anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have a ubiquitous appeal for socialist fanatics, whether their role model is Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. The events thousands of miles apart showed how compelling anti-Semitism is for the urban newspaper editor and the deranged thug, for their shared dreams of a racial war that will fracture America into the broken horror of their utopia.

To Politico and to the gunman, a small synagogue in a small city was an outpost of the hidden empire of the Jewish conspiracy. To the alt-left media, a Chabad Rabbi might be the hidden link between Republicans and Moscow. To alt-righters like Earnest, it was a chain in a conspiracy of usury and war. To the New York Times, Politico and the Neo-Nazi killer, President Trump was just a dupe of the Jews.

The New York Times wants people to believe that there would be peace in the Middle East if it weren’t for the Jews. Politico wanted its readers to believe that Trump would be in jail if it weren’t for the Jews. And John Earnest believed that he would have a girlfriend and a satisfying life if it weren’t for the Jews.

Anti-Semitism is the last refuge of cowards. It’s the laziest hatred that requires the least creativity. The alt-left revived anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism. The alt-right dressed it up in hipster irony, in anime and video game references. But all they’ve done is slap a little fresh paint on a beat-up old car.

John Earnest was a coward. Not just because he ran when his weapon jammed and he feared facing down the grandparents and parents of the children he had just tried to murder without a gun in hand.

He was a coward because he blamed his problems on the oldest, worn-out bigotry on the books. Instead of finding the courage to live a meaningful life, he took away his own options with a murderous fantasy. But the even bigger cowards are to be found in an alt-right internet culture that egged him on for laughs. His true counterparts are the Islamic terrorists who, instead of building working societies, plot acts of mass murder in revenge for the historical conspiracy theories they blame for everything.

“You know, with the loss of my index finger, it’s going to be a scar for the rest of my life – to both – to remind us of literally how vulnerable we are, but also how brave we need to be. Everyone needs to be a hero. Everyone needs to step up and do something in the face of terror,” Rabbi Goldstein said.

A meaningful life is made up of bravery built on vulnerability.

Victimhood culture tells its victims that their vulnerability is a crime committed against them by a conspiracy of Jews, infidels, or racists that must be met with grievance and violence. Like Earnest, they believe that they are doomed. Their only salvation can come from destroying the lives of others.

And that is cowardice.

John Earnest didn’t really hate Jews. He hated himself. He tried to kill what he hated about himself by killing Jews. His failure is not unique. Earnest admired Hitler who tried to kill what he hated about Germany by killing Jews. His counterparts on the alt-left consist of socialists who tried to kill the flaws in Communism by killing Jews, and the Islamists who tried to do the same for the flaws in the Caliphate.

Other peoples, including, most recently Christians in Sri Lanka, can be substituted for Jews.

No amount of dead Jews would have saved Earnest from seeing the emptiness in the mirror. Just as no amount of dead Israelis will reconcile the contradictions of Islam and rebuild the Caliphate. Hitler and Stalin couldn’t make socialism work no matter how many Jews they killed. And no matter how many Jewish children he drowned, an ancient Pharaoh could never escape the fact that he wasn’t a god.

The Jews whom John Earnest came to kill had a secret. But it did not involve international finance, war or global conspiracies. It was a story of redemption for a man about to damn himself forever.

The end of Passover marks the splitting of the sea. As the waters parted, the Jewish slaves fled into the depths, expecting death, as the Egyptian armies closed on them. In the hall of Chabad of Poway, a few Jews fled, bleeding, with children in their arms, expecting death. Instead, miraculously, they were saved.

And Pharaoh watched, unbelieving, as suddenly a higher power made Its presence known in this world.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Senator Cory Booker has promised to introduce a bill to study a proposal for slavery reparations. The bill will be a companion to a bill by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee who had once declared on the House floor, “I stand here as a freed slave.” Since Sheila also believed that there are two Vietnams, that the Constitution is 400 years old, and that Neil Armstrong planted a flag on Mars, that may have been metaphor or the addled understanding of a woman who confused Wikileaks and Wikipedia.

Booker, who claims to care about the victims of sexual violence, might have been dissuaded from backing a bill introduced by a politician who was recently forced to resign from chairing the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation after firing a woman who was raped by one of her subordinates.

But Senator Booker has never found a principle that he wouldn’t passionately embrace and betray.

Just to make Booker’s move even dirtier, the reparations bill dated back to Rep. John Conyers, who was forced to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. Senator Booker is pushing a bill originated by a sexual harasser and championed in the House by a politician who retaliated against a rape victim. Instead of distancing his Senate proposal from Lee’s bill, Booker bragged about his dirty alliance.

But if we’re going to launch a commission to study slavery reparations, we should begin with Booker.

"I am descended from slaves and slave owners," Booker wrote in a campaign biography no one read.

Henry Louis Gates told Booker that his DNA is 45% European and 47% African. Should the privileged son of IBM executives write a check from the 45% of his DNA to the 47% of his DNA?

If Booker is entitled to reparations because a narrow 2% majority of his DNA is African, if 2% of his DNA shifted place, would he have to switch from cashing reparations checks to writing them?

The error rate of DNA tests is usually higher than 2%. Booker’s entire entitlement to championing reparations could be a margin of error. Should we really be dividing people into categories of entitlement and obligation based on a tiny percentage of their genetic code within a margin of error?

Booker is descended, by his own admission, from both slaves and slave owners. He’s the child of IBM corporate executives, and a product of Stanford, Yale and Oxford. Should he really be asking around for reparations because he happens to have 2% more African than European DNA?

The political schizophrenia of Booker’s genes is a perfect metaphor for the national paradox of trying to decide who should be paying reparations to whom in a nation of many different races, many of whom came here after the end of slavery, and of an African-American population that includes the descendants of former slaves and of post-slavery immigrants, all mixed together in one Pluribus Unum.

Asking Americans to pay slavery reparations to each other is as absurd as asking part of Booker’s DNA to write a check to the other part of his DNA. His ancestors of slaves and slave owners might have had debts and obligations, but intermixing has produced a nation that has transcended its history, not only politically, but also culturally and genetically. America 2019 little resembles the South of 1865.

The 2020 field has two major African-American candidates, Senator Cory Booker and Senator Kamala Harris, both of whom are partially black. They follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama who, like Harris, had a non-black mother. The push for Stacey Abrams to jump into a race that already has two successful black candidates, is motivated by the perception of some black activists that she’s more authentic, more representative of African-Americans, than Booker and Harris who are racially and culturally diffused.

The likelihood is that the next black president, like the previous one, will be the product of a complex genetic, political and cultural history rather than Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s simplistic narrative of a freed slave. And, like Obama and Booker, he may overcompensate for that complexity by championing simplistic racial narratives, to connect to an African-American electorate insecure about its changing identity, and to play on the guilt of white centrists and the white savior complex of progressives.

"There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America," Barack Obama had told assembled Democrats in 2004.

But the same politician who appeared to be telling an American story that transcended race was sitting in the pews at Trinity while the Reverend Jeremiah Wright cursed America, hurled racist invective not just at white people in general, but at Italians and Jews among the nationalist preacher’s varied targets.

The worldview of the politician who ran the country for eight years was informed less by his DNC sloganeering about a post-racial society, than by the resentments and racial rage of Jeremiah Wright.

In 2016, Obama dismissed reparations, not so much on moral, as on pragmatic political grounds.

"You can make a theoretical, abstract argument in favor of something like reparations," he told Ta-Nehisi Coates. "but I’m not so optimistic as to think that you would ever be able to garner a majority of an American Congress.”

Booker is currently less concerned with how reparations will play out on the national stage, than carving out a tribal chunk of the Democrat electorate in an overcrowded field. Like the other 2020 candidates who appear to have endorsed it, he’s really backing some sort of rigged social welfare program that will probably end up benefiting the full roster of minorities that make up the Democrat base.

Calling it slavery reparations is a lie meant to trick black people into voting for the party of slavery.

Like Obama, Booker reinvented his brand, going from a post-racial reformer urging empowerment to the same kind of corrupt racial demagogue victimhood pimp that he ran against in Newark. Which is the real Booker? Like Obama, there is no easy answer. There may never have been a real Booker or a real Obama. Only a politician reinventing himself to tell different audiences what they wanted to hear.

Senator Booker, a product of Oxford, Stanford and Yale, thinks that his audience wants to hear that they can’t compete on their own and deserve even more special treatment because of their race. And that to make progress, we need to tear the country apart to obtain the special privileges his 2% DNA demands.

Sadly, the Yale-educated son of corporate executives is probably right.

Malcolm X had often echoed the Nation of Islam’s teachings that white people were “blue-eyed devils”. Booker, with his blue eyes, is the sort of politician whom Malcolm might have called a “tricky blue eyed liberal”. He might even be one of those devils whom NOI doctrine teaches were created by an evil Jewish mad scientist who used eugenics to make white people in the hate group’s anti-creation myth.

In 2014, Rep. Conyers was billed as attending a forum on slavery reparations along with Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam leader and the original congressional champion of reparations have a long history. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, reparations’ current champion, has her own history with the hate group leader.

Farrakhan is a big fan of reparations. But his idea of reparations is carving a black state out of America. This state will probably be expected to make him king, emperor or caliph with absolute power over all.

Secession is racial separatism taken to its logical extreme. It’s why the Nation of Islam found common ground with the KKK and the American Nazi Party. Reparations offers a more modest separatist vision at a time when racial tribalism is more pervasive and more unworkable in a multicultural country.

Booker, like Obama, is a one-man example of the paradox of multiculturalism leading to tribalism.

The blue-eyed descendant of slave owners, who began mapping his political ambitions at Oxford, is trying to appeal to racial tribalism by invoking the evils of slavery one-hundred and fifty years later. In the diverse 2020 field, Booker is trying to stand out with a tribal appeal to militant black nationalists.

And trying to shamelessly divide us by race with a fake offer of cash for skin color.

If Senator Cory Booker really believes in racial reparations, he should do what Senator Elizabeth Warren did, and take a battery of tests to clarify the exact percentage of his DNA. If his tests show that he is 2% more African than European, the Yale man can cash a reparations check. If, however, his test shows that he has even 1% more European than African DNA, Booker should be the one writing the check.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

"Nobody should earn more than a million dollars," Bernie Sanders declared in 1974.

During his original Senate run, the socialist candidate claimed that “concentrations of wealth” were the greatest threat to America and could be ended with a 100% tax on wealth over $1 million a year.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders made over $1 million. He didn’t self-impose a 100% tax on his own wealth. That same year he gave less than 1% of his income to charity and bought a third home. As a young man, Bernie had claimed that a million was more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime. Now that he had a million, he discovered just how many things he could enjoy spending all that filthy lucre on.

In the early days of his campaign, Bernie’s fans touted him as the sort of ordinary guy who flies coach and gets scrunched in there with the rest of us. Then the money began pouring in and Bernie chartered a Delta 767 and took a jaunt to the Vatican to meet Pope Francis with the mostly empty plane serving a menu of lobster sliders, crab salad, red lentil soup, herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache, fine cheeses and white wine. As the old Soviet anecdote went, Bernie was finally living under communism.

“You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” Bernie had ranted about the economy. A year later, he had discovered that he needed a choice of lamb loin or lobster sliders.

And Bernie Sanders was willing to do anything to hang on to the good life. Even campaign for Hillary. As long as his nemesis was willing to charter the bill for his private jets so he could fight the 1 percent.

“I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe,” Hillary's rapid response director groused.

After Hillary lost, Bernie continued spending six figures on private jets. He had discovered that a million dollars could buy you the privilege to avoid not only coach, but rubbing elbows with the proletariat.

Bernie Sanders may be pushing socialized-medicine-for-all, but when he develops a serious medical problem, he’ll jet off to the best hospital in the world, while you wait around for the death panels. There will be no rationing of procedures and no delays while fourteen different components of the medical system debate who will pay for what. He will get the care he wants. And he’ll get it while you bleed.

The best medical care, like a third home or a jet, is something you can buy. And Bernie is willing to buy. He just doesn’t want the herd of rabble he is running to rule to have the same privilege that he does.

In his old age, Bernie is getting pretty testy about a bunch of socialist punks challenging him over his wealth. "I didn't know that it was a crime to write a good book which turns out to be a bestseller," he told the good people of Gary, Indiana while trying to sell them one-size fits all marching band uniforms.

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he declared in a bootstrapping invocation of capitalism and the American Dream. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

But the average American would have more luck following in the footsteps of Andrew Carnegie or Jeff Bezos. Bernie Sanders isn’t writing best-selling books because he’s the next Stephen King. You too can be a millionaire if you convince a German corporation owned by billionaires that millions of gullible idiots will buy anything with your name on it. And if you can afford to pay someone else to help.

Outsider in the House, Bernie’s original memoir, was co-written with an English prof. Our Revolution had just one author. But a ghostwriting and editing firm noted that copy-editing on Bernie’s book had been done by Tom Cherwin, who bills himself as a “ghostwriter and editor”. Bernie’s latest tax return shows a $10,000 editorial payment. That’s a sizable payment for merely editing Bernie’s rantings down to size.

There’s no crime in selling your gullible followers a ghostwritten book and then using the checks that the billionaires making money off your class warfare tract send you to live it up. Making money isn’t a crime.

Unless Bernie Sanders wins.

But Bernie is making it clear that he’s no longer opposed to millionaires. After all he’s part of the 1%. His latest tax proposal is named the "For the 99.8 Percent Act". Forget the 99%. After making a few million, Bernie is shaving off .2% to make room for him and other struggling socialist millionaires fighting the influence of wealth and power by those who, as of right now, have more of it than he does.

“We are the 99.8%,” is the new fractional message of the fractional candidate.

The proposal starts with estates of $3.5 million. Bernie’s own fortune is estimated at $2.5 million.

The theme here is, “Tax everyone richer than me.” The old socialist still believes it’s a crime to make too much money. He just upgraded his estimate of what too much money is. $2.5 million is just right. But when you’ve got $3.5 million, then you’re suddenly a capitalist oppressor of the proletariat.

"Our bill does what the American people want by substantially increasing the estate tax on the wealthiest families in this country and dramatically reducing wealth inequality," Bernie declared of his plan to target the 0.8%.

But what of the Americans who might still want to target that other 0.2% that Bernie occupies? Go and write a best-selling book and stop bothering him. A man works hard all his life denouncing millionaires, makes his first $2.5 million, and suddenly a bunch of socialists start acting like his money is a crime.

Maligning the 0.8% doesn’t have the same rhetorical heft as the 1%. That’s why Senator Elizabeth Warren, his fellow socialist millionaire, has a plan to target “ultra-millionaires”. They, like the 0.2% are the people wealthier than the self-proclaimed American-Indian and her paleface Hahvadh husband.

Warren’s estimated net worth is around $10 million. So she’s going after those with $50 million.

Bernie and Liz both believe that money is the root of all evil. But only evil people have more of it than they do. Envy is simple human nature. That’s why the Ten Commandments are none too fond of it. And why progressives are none too fond of the Ten Commandments. It’s natural to believe that I earned my money the hard way, but that the gains of anyone who gained more than me are ill-gotten.

Leftism just codifies this nasty trait into a conspiracy theory posing as an economic theory. And Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show us the exact numerical correlation between wealth and envy.

Bernie is convinced that his dubious sources of wealth are moral. He put his name on a book, durn it. Warren is equally convinced that there’s nothing wrong with the even more dubious ways that she amassed her wealth. But that “great concentrations of wealth” are an evil that we must fight.

They are passionate about imposing 50% and 77% tax rates on anyone wealthier than they are.

As a millionaire, Bernie is still a class warrior. He’s just in a class of wealthy men who fly private jets and rant about the evils of the men who own private jets. The goal posts of class warfare always move to transform anyone poorer than you into the working class and anyone richer into an evil capitalist.

In Los Angeles, I see Bernie bumper stickers on BMWs, Teslas and sports cars worth millions. I see Bernie signage on houses worth tens of millions. The owners, like Bernie, see no contradiction in their politics.

Socialism takes from some and gives to others. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren didn’t get rich and famous by accidents. They’re ambitious lefties with no scruples who were hungry for what others had. And, whether they had to go through asbestos victims or millennial dupes, they got what they wanted. It’s not the American Dream. But it might just be the Cuban Dream. Or the North Korean Dream.

Now that they’re in the 1%, they want what the 08% has. And if they make it into the 0.8%, they will inveigh against the 0.6%. If they became billionaires, they would argue fiercely that their billions are moral, but that it’s time we did something about the scourge of anyone with $10 billion or more.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

In the movie Escape From New York, the island of Manhattan was walled off and mined. For its fortieth anniversary, New York City will try to recreate its plot by walling off parts of Manhattan with toll booths. The walls of toll booths to impose congestion pricing on the locals will fulfill the dream of former Mayor Bloomberg whose wildest ideas now seem downright tame to the new Dem radicals.

You could try to bypass the toll booths along 61st Street by taking an Uber, but good luck.



New York City has also been leading a crackdown on ridesharing on behalf of taxi drivers who began committing suicide because they were no longer able to overcharge, rip off and rob tourists. Uber will be capped, taxed and pushed out of the city along with all the other cars to encourage people to use public transportation. Unfortunately, public transportation doesn’t work anymore.

You can still ride a bike, if you don’t mind suffering bruises, bumps and skull fractures.

The New York City subway is failing badly. To quote the New York Times, "Century-old tunnels and track routes are crumbling... Just 65 percent of weekday trains reach their destinations on time, the lowest rate since the transit crisis of the 1970s". Cars are being taxed to help fund this collapsing system. But the problem isn’t a lack of money: the money is being diverted by unions and political sweetheart deals.

Raising taxes doesn’t fix corruption. It worsens it.

Record numbers of New Yorkers are fleeing the Democrat disasters of the city and the state. But escaping New York by renting a car will also be more challenging because the state budget also includes a new tax on car rentals. And don’t even think of trying to fly out of one of New York’s terrible airports.

Walling off parts of Manhattan behind toll booths will make food deliveries much more expensive. And so, the disastrous state budget deal also bans plastic bags to make shopping for food equally miserable whether you do delivery or go to the supermarket. And don’t imagine for a moment that asking for paper will get you a pass. Paper bags will also be taxed because going to the supermarket is a crime.

Unlike Snake Plissken, once you escape from New York, your troubles will just be getting started. If you leave any property behind, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance will pore through your cellphone records, stalk your Facebook feed, stop off at your dentist’s office, and even check your fridge to prove that you still live in the Big Apple, and should be paying Governor Cuomo’s new salary.

But for those New Yorkers who stay behind, life keeps getting worse.

"This budget is probably the strongest progressive statement that we've made," Governor Cuomo declared, referring to the bizarre mess that the Democrat controlled legislature pieced together at 2.30 AM for no reason except corruption and a burning hatred for everyone living above 61st Street.

While the state budget was terrible news for people, it was great news for criminals.

"I’d say about 85 percent of the population will now be looking at a cashless bail system,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx, had boasted.

Because the one thing that the Bronx desperately needs is more criminals wandering its streets.

There was also good news for the state’s most successful criminal element with $100 million in taxpayer funds going to a commission, 6 of whose 9 members will be appointed by Democrats, to finance political campaigns. Political consultants in New York are now an official public subsidy and a welfare class.

Governor Cuomo will also get a 40% pay hike. It’ll take a lot of paper bag taxes to pay for that.

And, because New York State Dems now make Bond villains look like decent folks, there’s a $100 million tax on pain medications. If you’re suffering in pain, you will end up paying more for your medications.

When you need $100 million to pass on to politicians, why not take it from those who are suffering?

What kind of politicians raise taxes on people living in literal agony? Democrats.

Taxes have often been called a pain, but New York Democrats have achieved a true first by actually taxing pain. This Torquemada taxation is a new low even for New York’s pro-infanticide Democrats.

The only possible next step is to actually tax each individual scream.

New York Dems started out by pretending that they were trying to “help” fight opioid addiction with their pain medication tax and were protecting consumers. Now the mask is off and the official wording reads, "The economic incidence of the tax imposed by this article may be passed to a purchaser."

That’s a very legalistic way of saying that New York Democrats are offering their suffering victims a choice between screaming in pain and paying more money to the corrupt Democrat machine.

Stealing candy from babies would have been halfway civilized by comparison to this horror.

The new leftist Dems boast about how they’re destroying the old Democrat machine. But even Tammany Hall, for all of its greedy crimes, would not have stooped to this level of barbarism.

Only political monsters tax pain and torture people for money. Albany is now crawling with them.

But that’s how you get to a $175 billion budget. You do it by stealing from everybody and their grandmother, her paper bags and her pain medication. You recreate Escape from New York on 61st Street, you make it impossible to travel within the city and then you check the fridges of the escapees.

Assemblyman Doug Smith, a Republican, said that the only thing missing from the “midnight budget deal was a mask and gun.”

“The apparent economic strategy of New York Democrats is simple: ‘Put a tax or fee on everything you see,’” Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb said. “Grocery bags, internet purchases, vapor products, real estate transactions, prescription medication, rental cars, commuting in and around New York City all become more expensive when this budget takes effect.”

The complete contempt of New York Democrats for the rest of the state was captured in one single exchange during the bag debate between Senator Kaminsky and Senator Funke.

"If I have old Wegmans plastic bags at home, can I bring them to the store and use them again?" Senator Funke asked.

"Did you say an old white man's plastic bag?" Senator Kaminsky sneered.

Wegmans is a popular supermarket chain with plenty of stores in New York. But none in New York City. Senator Funke is a 70-year-old Republican. Senator Kaminsky is a 39-year-old former federal prosecutor occupying a Republican seat after Senator Skelos was taken down by disgraced former federal thug Preet Bhara, who appeared to be clearing his own way to power until Trump showed him the door.

Bhara has yet to slime his way into public office, but Kaminsky made it in by a few hundred votes.

Democrats occupied New York’s Senate, traditionally a Republican stronghold reflecting the larger state, by thuggish tactics. The purge of Republicans and moderate Democrats, like Sheldon Silver, paved the way for the takeover of both houses by a new Dem majority of crooks, extremists, bigots and lunatics.

Or there’s Senator Julia Salazar who has been accused of being all four of these.

Senator Kaminsky’s victory represented a crucial seat in establishing a ‘Californian’ legislature in New York eager to pass any leftist agenda, no matter how crazy, abusive or irresponsible it might be.

Banning bags, forcing people in pain to pay more for their medication, walling off parts of Manhattan, and freeing criminals are the wages of a one-party state assembling dirty deals at 2.30 in the morn.

“Elections have consequences,” Barack Hussein Obama once told Republicans.

They do indeed.

The consequences of a powerful Democrat majority in New York can be seen from 61st Street to your local supermarket and pharmacy. But more broadly, they mean driving everyone who works for a living out of the state, if they can find a way to get out, and then robbing them some more on the way out.

New York is suffering the steepest population losses of any state. New Yorkers are fleeing to places where they can afford a car, a home and medications. Where they can shop at a supermarket or order takeout, where they can cross the street without running into a tollbooth, and where they can be free.

And they’re getting out before the walls go up around Manhattan and the bridges are mined.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

On Wednesday, April 3, FBI agents converged on a Bozeman shooting range and took Fabjan Alameti into custody.

Alemati, an Albanian Muslim, had traveled from New York to Montana. "When the time will come for us to hunt them down, I will stand over them while I piece their bodies with hollow tips," the Islamic terrorist had boasted in February. "Inshallah, we take as many kuffars (non-Muslims) with us."

He had told a government informant back in January that his potential targets included military and government targets, as well as a “Jewish temple”.

Alameti’s terror plot back in January was the second such Islamic terror plot that month.



On December 14, 2018, Hasher Jallal Taheb was discussing some of the targets he had scouted in Washington D.C. They included the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and a specific synagogue.

In the middle of January, Taheb was arrested over in Georgia.

Taheb and Alemati had a number of similarities. Both men were twenty-one years old. Their terror plots were violent but scattershot. The range began with government building and ended with a synagogue.

Theirs were the second and third Islamic terror plots targeting Jewish synagogues in three months.

The trend began with Damon Joseph, a Muslim convert, who was arrested in December for a number of plots including one targeting a synagogue. Joseph’s inspiration was the Tree of Life Shooting.

“I admire what the guy did with the shooting, actually,” Joseph said, according to the FBI. “I can see myself carrying out this type of operations inshallah.”

“We would pick a synagogue or place Jews gather, scope it out, find all exits and entrances,” the Ohio terrorist said of his plans.

He was also twenty-one years old.

All three Muslim terrorists were ISIS supporters. They were the same age and scattered around the country, from Montana to Georgia to Ohio. They origins lay in different cultures and parts of the world.

And yet their terror plots all targeted Jews.

What was it that created this cluster of three Islamic terror plots against synagogues?

No specifics are given in the complaints. Even the names of the synagogues remain anonymous. The phenomenon was not noted by any media outlet. The same outlets that eagerly publish statistical compilations of attacks on Muslims, real or imaginary, once again turned a blind eye to this cluster.

Around the same time that these synagogue plots were being hatched, the ADL released a report that ignored Muslim violence against Jews. “Right-Wing Extremist Violence is Our Biggest Threat. The Numbers Don't Lie,” ADL boss Jonathan Greenbatt had declared.

Three synagogue terror plots in three months would suggest that Greenblatt’s numbers are lying.

Last year, there was a similar cluster, not of attack plots, but of incitement to violence.

In December 2017, an Imam in New Jersey had been caught preaching of the Jews, "Count them one by one, and kill them down to the very last one. Do not leave a single one on the face of the Earth."

In February 2018, an Imam in Texas had urged fighting the Jews and a Syrian refugee Imam in North Carolina had recited a hadith calling for the extermination of the Jews, "We will fight those Jews until the rocks and the trees will speak: ‘Oh Muslim, this is a Jew behind me.'”

The geographic diversity of these calls to violence in mosques from New Jersey to North Carolina to Texas, echoed the diversity of the latest Islamic terror plots in Montana, Georgia and Ohio. There is no particular reason to think that the three terrorists were influenced by imams from other states. What these numbers reveal is the incredible scope and range of Islamic anti-Semitism and violence in America.

In recent weeks, the conversation around Islamic anti-Semitism has involved Rep. Ilhan Omar. Like the various imams and terrorists, the newly elected politician reveals the diversity of Islamic anti-Semitism. What unites Muslim anti-Semites in America isn’t geography or culture. It isn’t a local Jewish population. Instead, as we saw in last year’s rash of mosque anti-Semitism, it’s the religious teachings of Islam.

Only last fall, a Philly mosque had uploaded videos of an imam spewing anti-Semitism and reciting a hadith depicting the murder of Jews.

It would be implausible to contend that rhetoric like this doesn’t influence anyone.

Apologists like to claim that there is a sharp dividing line between ISIS and Islam. The synagogue plot cluster and the mosque anti-Semitism cluster show that when it comes to the Jews, not to mention slavery and genocide, ISIS just turns Islamic theory into practice. That, after all, is what Islamism is.

To the three Muslim synagogue terror plotters, anti-Semitism was a fundamental component of their religious and political values. Killing Jews was as natural to them as attacking government buildings.

Last year, in the UK, Husnain Rashid was sent to prison for threats against everyone from Prince George to soccer stadiums, supermarkets, the British Army and Jewish institutions. The details fluctuate, but the Jews remain a consistent target of Islamic terrorism in Europe, America and the Middle East.

Even as the media emphasizes Islamophobia, Islamic anti-Semitism continues to be a rising problem. And the media suppresses coverage of the problem by not reporting on it and by changing the subject.

The media met Jewish protests over Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitism by depicting her as a victim of Islamophobia. Similarly, the media blacklists the story of a cluster of Islamic anti-Semitic terror plots by shifting the focus to Islamophobia. The accusation of Islamophobia not only suppresses critics of Islamist bigotry and violence, it also suppresses coverage of the victims of Islamic bigotry and violence.

Jewish organizations have failed to address Islamic anti-Semitism. And that betrayal has left American Jews defenseless, not only against the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Rep. Omar or of Islamic religious leaders in mosques across the country, but before a new wave of Islamic terrorist plots across America.

Few American Jews have any idea or have ever been told that they might have been killed this year.

The names of the synagogues targeted by the Islamic terrorists have been kept secret. This conspiracy of secrecy may prevent copycat plots by other Islamic terrorists, but it shelters congregants at synagogues and temples across the country from the knowledge of how close they came. Information like that might have caused them to rethink their politics, their support for Islamic migration, and their collaboration with Islamist groups that undermine law enforcement’s role in breaking up similar Islamic terror plots.

The names of the target synagogues have conveniently remained buried and their congregants have been kept in the dark. Men and women who might have died this year will go on supporting the policies of their killers. And the fact that three Islamic terror plots targeting synagogues emerged in the space of a few months will never reach their ears, their eyes, their minds, or their hearts.

The climactic period of Islam requires that Muslims exterminate the Jews. And that even the rocks and the trees join in this genocide. Muslim clerics often refer to this hadith. And in Montana, Georgia and Ohio, a new generation of Muslim terrorists isn’t waiting for the rocks and trees to speak to them.

They are readying to kill the Jews now.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

As another Passover begins, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" resound briefly and then fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem. Some of us are already there now. But will that make us free?

Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with the fall of a Pharaoh and the last sight of his pyramids and armies?

Freedom like slavery, is as much a state of mind as a state of being. It is possible to be legally free, yet to have no freedom of action whatsoever. And it is possible to be legally a slave and yet to be free in defiance of those restrictions. External coercion alone does not make a man free or slave, it is the degradation of mind that makes a man a slave.

What is a slave? A slave is complicit in his own oppression. His slavery has become his natural state and he looks to his master, not to free him, but to command him. Had the Jews of Egypt merely been restrained by physical coercion, it would have been enough to directly and immediately smash the power of the Egyptian state. But their slavery was mental. They moaned not at the fact of slavery, but at the extremity of it. When their taskmasters complained to Pharaoh, it was not of slavery, but of not being given the straw with which to build the bricks.

The worst slavery is of the most insidious kind. It leaves the slave able to think and act, but not as a free man. It leaves him with cunning, but not courage. He is able to use force, but only to bring other slaves into line. And most hideously, this state of affairs seems moral and natural to him. This is his freedom.

The true slave has come to love big brother, to worship at the foot of the system that oppresses him. It is this twisted love that must be torn out of him. It is this idolatry of the whip before which he kneels, this panting to know who his superior and who his inferiors are, this love of a vast order that allows him to be lost in its wonders, to gaze in awe at the empire of tomorrow which builds its own tombs today, that must be broken. These are his gods and he must kill them within himself to be free.

The Exodus is not the story of the emergence of free men who were enslaved, but the slow painful process by which slaves became a nation of free men, a long troubled journey which has not yet ended. That is why we celebrate Passover, not as an event of the past, but as of a road that we still travel, a long journey from slavery to freedom.

Having escaped from Pharaoh, they built a glittering calf, and having left the desert behind, they sought out a king. Every idol and tyrant was another token of slavery, a desire to put one's ear up against the doorpost and become slaves for life. The idols have changed, but their meaning has not. There is still the pursuit of the master, the master of international law, of a global state, the gods of the superstate who rule over the present and the future and dispose of the lives of men.

There are far too many synagogues that worship the Democratic Party, rather than G-d, that bow to the ghost of FDR, the glittering echoes of Harry, Adlai and John, and the great golden statue of Hope and Change squatting obscenely over it all. And in Jerusalem far too many eyes look longingly to Washington and to Brussels, to the cities on the hill which offer order, truth and peace.

It is easy to slip into this kind of slavery. The pyramids are grand, the slogans are clever and the future seems assured. It is only when the dusty messenger comes along to whisper that "He has remembered". that those who have not forgotten gather and some among those who have forgotten, remember that they are slaves.

In Egypt the system of the state had to be smashed, but not simply smashed, but discredited. It could not be a mere contest of power, but of reason. The war between slavery and freedom could not end until the system of slavery had become ridiculous, until Pharaoh appeared a buffoon and his power no more than organized madness. And yet even so for a generation liberated from slavery, this majestic system, the only one they had ever known, remained their template, and in times of crisis, their immediate instinct was to retreat back to the only civilization they had known.

The slavery of the present is a more subtle thing. It grips the mind more tightly than the body. It still remembers that men enslave themselves best. It knows also that true power comes from making all complicit in its crimes so that they are also complicit in their own degradation. The system only asks that each man enslave himself and kill his own children. And once he has done that, he will only feel it right to demand that everyone else do likewise.

Do it for the environment, for social justice, for the Pharaoh of every age and his ideology. Enslave your mind. Kill your children.

This is the slavery of the system. It requires few whips and many words. It nudges men to be their own taskmasters and to reach out their hands to the new Pharaoh in the hope that he will save them. It is this slavery which is so pervasive, which Passover wakes us from, if it has not already been perverted into the Passover of the system, into civil rights seders and eco-matzas with donations to Planned Parenthood which will do what the midwives did not, if has not become yet another tribute to the Pharaoh of Hope and Change.

"Once we were slaves," the ancient words call on us to remember that we have been freed. That it is no longer Pharaoh who enslaves us, but we who enslave ourselves. "Now we are free men." But what is freedom really? Is it the freedom of the system or the freedom of the self? The system proclaims that they are one and the same. And that is the great lie which ends in death.

Like the slaves of ancient Egypt, we are shaken, dragged out of our everyday routine and commanded to be free. But how do you command men and women to be free? You can lead them through the habits of free men and women who think of themselves as kings and queens, who drink wine while reclining, who sing loudly in defiance of all oppressors, who boldly proclaim "Next year in Jerusalem" while the Pharaoh of Hope and Change bares his teeth at Jews living in Jerusalem.

You can unroll the scroll of history and show them how they were taken out, but all this routine is useless unless they understand and are sensible that they are free. Free not in their habits, but in their minds. Ritual is the gateway to a state of mind. A ritual of freedom only succeeds when it invokes a state of mental freedom. Otherwise it is a rite, a practice, a habit whose codes may help some future generation unlock its meaning, but which means little today.

Passover is the beginning and the end. It is the start of the journey and the end of it and we are always in the middle, on the long road out of Egypt, discovering that there are more chains in our minds than we realized a year earlier or a hundred or a thousand years ago. Each step we take toward freedom also reminds us of how far we still have to go.

It is the ritual that reminds us that we are still on the journey, that though we have been lulled by the routine of the system, the trap of the present that like the soothing warmth of an ice storm or the peaceful feeling of a drowning swimmer, embraces us in the forgetfulness of the dying moment, concealing from us the truth that the journey is not over. The desert still lies before us.

This journey is the human journey. It is the recreation of what mankind lost when it defied G-d, when it turned with weapons on each other, when it built towers, created systems and tried to climb to heaven on the backs of slaves and pyramids. It is a transformative road that requires us to not only endure, but to learn.

Surrounded by willing slaves who preach the creed of slavery, we must speak for freedom. Though few seem to remember the journey or the chains, it is our duty to remind ourselves. The message of Passover fully begins only when the holiday ends and its habits carry over into our daily lives. Once we were slaves, now we are free.

White privilege, the hottest racist idea since cross-burnings at midnight and photos with Farrakhan, is a subject of academic study and media discourse. It’s hard to escape its pernicious message that an entire race is tainted by virtue of its skin color and that the accomplishments of any individual white person are due, not to his or her efforts, but to race, skin color, and a national infrastructure of white supremacism.

But who actually believes in white privilege?

A recent Pew race relations survey notes that white people are the least likely to believe that being white helps one get ahead in life. Racial activists see such results as proof of white privilege. Only white people, they insist, could be so oblivious to their racial privileges in the face of the oppression of non-whites. Your skin has to be whiter than vanilla not to realize how badly all the oppressed races have it.

So, who does believe in white privilege?

According to the survey, the race most likely to believe that white skin gets you ahead in life are Asians.

72% of Asians surveyed believe that being white provides advantages. They were, by far, the group least likely to accept that being white has no impact on success in life or that it’s actually a disadvantage.

It’s curious that the single most successful non-white race is so convinced of the benefits of whiteness.

Asian Americans outperform white Americans on everything from education to income to family status. Census Bureau statistics showed that Asian-American median income was at $78,000 while white median household income was only $62,000. At 3%, Asian unemployment is lower than those of whites.

Asian-Americans are more likely to have degrees and advanced degrees than white people. They’re also less likely to be divorced, and Asian-American homelessness rates are only a third of those of whites.

These statistics don’t paint a picture of a downtrodden minority. The attempts to play statistical games to prove otherwise rely on discredited statistical stunts and frantic arm-waving arguments. And yet what does it say that the people most likely to believe in white privilege are better off than white people?

On the other side of the dial, the race least likely to believe in the incredible power of white privilege are Hispanics. They are only 5% more likely than white people to believe that being white helps you get ahead in life. And they are as likely as white people to believe that being white has no meaningful effect.

Statistically speaking, Hispanics have lower median income, employment and education rates than white people. Yet they are also the most likely to be skeptical about the incredible power of white privilege.

These two contrasts show that belief in white privilege has nothing to do with oppression or privilege.

Asian-Americans and African-Americans have high rates of confidence in white privilege even though statistically the two groups are far apart in median income, education rates and other success metrics.

It isn’t success or lack of it that leads to a belief in white privilege. It’s racial differences.

Why are Asian-Americans and African-Americans the most likely to believe in the power of white skin, and why are Hispanics and white people the least likely to believe that it has magical success powers?

Hispanics may fall below Asian-Americans and whites in income levels, education and success metrics, but they also have the fewest racial differences with white people. Indeed, the entire idea that Hispanics are a separate race is an absurd construct of political correctness. Hispanics see the fewest racial differences with white people and are therefore the least likely to believe in magical white privilege.

White privilege, like all racist ideas, depends on the ‘otherness’ of a racial group. In this case, whites.

The races that are most likely to see white people as an ‘other’ are also the most likely to believe that being white confers magical success powers. The belief that being a member of another group confers special success privileges is a common, and not always, harmful stereotype and racial myth.

Asian-Americans are perceived, by non-Asians, as having a special ability to succeed. This notion has been codified in the Tiger Mom stereotype and even cruder clichés. Jews are also seen as having a special touch. This stereotype doesn’t just exist among Europeans and Americans, it’s also popular in China where books such as 16 Reasons for Jews Getting Wealthy, Know All of the Money-Making Stories of the Talmud, and Secret of Jewish Success: Ten Commandments of Jewish Success make the rounds.

These books may be misguided, but they view Jewish success through a Confucian lens and recognize that it is rooted in cultural skills. It’s the same reason Chinese academics remain fascinated by the Protestant work ethic. Likewise, Asian-American success springs from discipline and dedication.

American integration was based on the understanding that cultural skills could be adopted and learned. As Jews and Protestants had both learned from each other. And as the Chinese seek to learn from both. White privilege counters that with the toxic racist idea that success is, by definition, unearned. And that the best way to understand the success of a group is through the lens of racial conspiracy theories.

Group success isn’t something to imitate. Instead it should be condemned as a racial conspiracy.

But the same bigoted conspiracy theories that stigmatize white success as a racial conspiracy, can just as easily tar the success stories of Asian-Americans and Jews, both groups whose successes have often been viewed as the products of racial conspiracies, rather than of their dedication and hard work.

Racial differences make it all too easy to see people of different races as being members of a racial conspiracy. That is what white privilege contends. White privilege borrows the white nationalist slur of a Jewish, conscious or unconscious, racial conspiracy to explain not just Jewish success, but white success. It’s just as racist whether it’s articulated by Peggy McIntosh or Kevin McDonald. The underlying bigoted idea is just as racist whether it’s applied to all white people or only to Jews.

It’s not just racial differences, but the degree of integration that may also explain the survey’s results.

African-Americans are only 3% less likely than Asians to believe in the power of whiteness. But nearly a quarter of African-Americans believe that being white has no meaningful impact on success in life while only a fifth of Asian-Americans recognize that fact. Why are African-Americans more likely than Asian-Americans to recognize that whiteness confers no special powers on the average white person?

The answer may be integration.

Despite the racist conspiracy theories foisted on African-Americans by a radical racist leadership, they are more likely to have spent generations living and working side by side with white Americans. However a majority of Asian-Americans are immigrants, and a majority don’t feel culturally integrated. Most Asian-American immigrants report not feeling like a typical American. And this is the result.

The belief in white privilege among Asian-Americans in the survey reflects that lack of integration. Like racial differences, national and cultural differences can nurture stereotypes and perceptions of otherness. The conviction that being white helps you succeed doesn’t reflect the experiential reality of Asian-American success, but comes of viewing those they perceive as typical Americans as ‘other’.

The Pew survey demonstrates that belief in white privilege is not the outcome of oppression, but of misunderstanding, otherness and stereotype. The people most likely to believe that white people have an unfair advantage are not the oppressed, but the groups with the greatest sense of racial difference.

You are more likely to believe in the power of white privilege if you view white people as being very different, either from your own race, or, if you are a white progressive, from other races.

The best disinfectant for the white privilege stereotype, as for so many other bad ideas, is sunlight. Unfortunately, academia and the media, instead of countering prejudices, reinforce racial stereotypes and bigoted ideas such as white privilege. And that divides the country further into warring camps.

Like any other stereotype, white privilege should be denounced. And the racist assumptions underlying it should be exposed in order to educate those who have come to harbor this ugly idea in their hearts.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

In early April, a man was arrested after making a threatening phone call to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s office. Also, around that same time, a woman was arrested for sending a white powder to Senator Susan Collins’ office. The Collins letter claimed that it was coated in ricin and declared, “Good luck to you Susan, in the next life.” Another letter implied that it had a fatal dose of anthrax inside.

After the senator’s husband opened the letter, hazmat teams went to the house. Her husband and the dog, a lab named Pepper, had to be quarantined. A screening system was set up at the local post office where employees also feared being exposed to hazardous materials. The attacker is allegedly a member of the leftist Green Party who was angry about the senator’s vote to confirm Justice Kavanaugh.

The same media outlets that have behaved as if Rep. Omar might be killed at any moment because she received a threatening phone call have showed very little interest in a potential anthrax or ricin attack on a senator. And the media, which helped whip up the hysteria over Kavanaugh and Collins, has accused President Trump of incitement for merely quoting Omar’s hateful words about 9/11.

This wasn’t even the first fake ricin attack targeting Republican senators over Justice Kavanaugh.

Two staffers working for Senator Ted Cruz were hospitalized after a package with a white powder was sent to his office in the fall of 2018. Around that same time, traces of ricin were detected on an envelope sent to the White House and addressed to President Trump. The media showed less interest in an attempt to assassinate the President of the United States than in a threatening call to Omar’s office.

Speaker Pelosi urgently claimed that she had worked “to ensure that Capitol Police are conducting a security assessment to safeguard Congresswoman Omar, her family and her staff.” Where was Pelosi’s concern when Republican House members were being threatened and physically assaulted.

Despite Pelosi and the media’s implications, threatening calls to members of the House are routine.

They’re usually ignored because they keep happening to Republicans.

By the summer of 2018, there had been over 1,600 threats against members of congress. In 2017, there were around 2,000. That August, two people were arrested for death threats against 3 Republican House members, including Rep. Steve Scalise, who had already been shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter.

The threats were not just made against Scalise, but even against his children.

Somehow a death threat against a House member who had nearly been killed once was less newsworthy than the incredible victimhood of Rep. Omar’s office merely receiving death threats.

If we do the socialist thing and divide 2,000 threats among 435 House members, each honorable representative would be entitled to 3 or 4 individual threats. It would be much more newsworthy if Rep. Omar, especially considering her toxic habit of saying foul things about Jews and America, somehow weren’t receiving death threats. The media broadcasting the commonplace fact as if it were the biggest story of the year isn’t reporting, it’s an attempt to spin the threats to make Rep. Omar into the victim.

In the fall of 2018, Rep. Andy Harris was assaulted in his own office by protesters. Rep. David Kustoff was nearly run off the road the year before. But the media acts as if mere threats, a few among thousands, to Rep. Ilhan Omar, are more newsworthy than actual physical assaults on Republican congressmen.

Protests at then Rep. Dana Rohrabacher's office even injured a 71-year-old female staffer.

Are the threats against Rep. Omar more newsworthy than the threats to kill Rep. Tom Garrett’s wife, his daughters and even his dog?

No, but they are more politically useful.

By dwelling on the threats, Democrats don’t have to defend Rep. Omar’s hateful comments about America and Jews. Instead they can accuse her critics, including President Trump, of inciting violence.

But if President Trump criticizing Rep. Omar incites violence, aren’t Trump’s many media critics guilty of inciting violence against him and against House Republicans? The Huffington Post ran a piece calling for the execution of Trump. A senior Newsweek writer had tweeted of Republicans, “It should be their loved ones who die.” "If the shooter has a serious health condition then is taking potshots at the GOP house leadership considered self-defense?" wondered a regular at the New Republic and the Washington Post.

Even as the media was choking on its outrage over Trump’s implied criticism of Rep. Omar, the Boston Globe was trying to explain why it ran a piece encouraging waiters to taint the food of Trump officials.

Now that’s actual incitement.

This is the sort of misbehavior that even major media outlets traffic in even while they white knight for Rep. Omar, acting as if the vile bigot is a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued from Republicans.

Speaker Pelosi showed more concern over threats to Rep. Omar’s office then she has over any of the threats and even violent assaults inflicted on her Republican peers and colleagues.

Even when those threats have come from inside her “House”.

In the fall of last year, an intern for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a member of her party, doxed 5 Republican senators during the Kavanaugh hearings, posting their home addresses and home phone numbers online. The intern, Jackson Cosko, comes from a connected family and his mother had posed with Pelosi.

There is no sign that Pelosi ever condemned his actions or expressed concern about the senators.

Speaker Pelosi’s histrionics over Rep. Omar’s safety are a shameful exercise in cynical hypocrisy. Her party and its associates have been instrumental in violating the security of Republican elected officials, in the House and the Senate, so that they could be confronted and threatened. The organizations behind that harassment often intersected with the funding sources of her political movement.

The media’s pearl clutching is even more pathetic when it can hardly interrupt its own calls for the harassment of Republicans to pretend that any criticism of Rep. Omar is certain to lead to violence. After falsely claiming that President Trump was a Russian spy, that Justice Kavanaugh is a serial rapist, and that anyone who supports Trump is fair game for anything from harassment to execution, the media has as much moral authority on incitement to violence as Charles Manson and Jim Jones.

The only reason the media is emphasizing the death threats against Rep. Omar is because her rhetoric is too repulsive to defend by any conventional means. The media is trying to change the subject and smear Omar’s opponents because it’s too cowardly to make the case for anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

Being the recipient of death threats does not make you a good person. It doesn’t mean that you’re in the right. Rep. Omar has received death threats. As have Nazi, Communist, KKK and Black Lives Matter leaders. Being a public figure means that you will receive death threats. Using them to hide from a reckoning for your rhetoric is a political stunt worthy only of an institution as discredited as the media.

And, when it comes to threats of violence, and of their actual implementation, the facts are clear.

Republican elected officials have suffered disproportionately from harassment and threats of violence. The only House members to be physically assaulted in the last few years have been Republicans.

When the media and Pelosi ignore those facts, they are declaring that Republican lives don’t matter. And that Rep. Omar’s feelings are more important than the feelings and safety of House and Senate Republicans. And, like Omar’s hateful comments, that attitude is un-American and deeply wrong.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The fastest rising item in the country isn’t gold or bitcoin, it’s the cost of a public bathroom.

In ’08, a San Francisco Weekly article fumed that a park restroom in Golden Gate Park was costing taxpayers $531,219. Fast forward, a decade later the cost of a park restroom in the Golden Gate Boathouse had ballooned to $2 million or $4,700 per square foot.



The modern bathroom had a third All-Gender option that the ’08 bathroom didn’t. But adding a non-gender shouldn’t have quadrupled the price. Inflation would have kept the cost well below a million.

Why did a 15-foot by 28-foot bathroom cost millions? Part of the answer may be that San Fran privileges minority businesses and requires that 15% of work hours be carried out by “disadvantaged” workers.

New York City’s bathrooms were always pricey. In ’08, they ran to a million. A recent report noted that the overpriced real estate market had pulled off a new high with a $6 million bathroom. Fit not only for a king, but for Steve Austin. The bionic bathroom is a new record. Last year’s record was a $4.7 million bathroom in the Bronx. An average park bathroom in the Big Apple now runs to $3.6 million.

The Parks Commissioner blamed “market forces”. But while New York City is famously expensive with residents paying the cost of a home elsewhere for a closet in Manhattan, these bathrooms were being set up in parks. You can still pick up a Central Park West condo with multiple rooms for the cost of a public bathroom on Staten Island. Socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez like to claim that they could put the money of wealthy people to much better use.

Their own city government demonstrates that for the money it takes to get a Central Park apartment with French Empire styling and celebrity neighbors, socialists will give you a toilet. Eventually.

One public bathroom has been under construction for twelve years. That helps explain the cost.

The Bronx bionic bathroom began to be designed in ’06, with a projected completion date of ‘14. Procurement took another year. Construction took 2 years.

By contrast, the entire Empire State Building was built in a year from plans completed in weeks.

It’s not about bathroom size either. A tiny $2 million public bathroom in Brooklyn built two years ago only had 2 urinals and one toilet. It cost came out to $5,000 per square foot.

New York City’s Parks Commissioner blamed the free market. “We do not tell contractors what number to give us — they determine what the market bears,” he pleaded.

There is no market though. Just a broken and corrupt government spending money freely. That makes public bathrooms more expensive than luxury condos and leads to $450 bike racks costing $6,000.

In ‘04, Seattle paid $5 million for 5 self-cleaning toilets. The toilets could clean themselves, freeing Seattle from having to pay for an attendant, but couldn’t clean out the drug users and prostitutes. Four years later, Seattle tried to get rid of them by putting them on eBay. It asked for an $89,000 minimum bid. But no one in the private sector had any interest in flushing that kind of money down the drain.

Seattle finally had to let its million-dollar toilets go for $2,500 each. That’s what market forces look like.

The buyer didn’t try to actually use them. Instead he treated them like an investment, storing them and hoping to sell them to another city. Because city governments are where the real toilet money lies.

Now, Seattle is adding a Ballard Park bathroom for a mere $550,000. That makes it one of the few cities to cut the cost of a bathroom. But it’s a single occupancy bathroom known as a Portland Loo billed as the “perfect” public toilet which costs $90,000. But cities that buy them somehow always spend more.

San Diego bought two “Loos” and spent over half a million dollars to get them going. At one point there were fears that the bathrooms, which cost $175,000 to buy and ship, might run to $800.000.

Where did the money go?

$23,000 was spent by the city on permits. $245,000 on construction. And $41,000 on consultants.

Because you can’t install a public toilet without spending $20,500 per toilet on consultants.

But that wasn’t San Diego’s worst example of flushing money down the toilet. It also built a $2 million public bathroom designed by an artist to evoke Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Million-dollar public bathrooms are a growing controversy outside the big cities too. In upstate New York, Mayor Rick Davis of Tonawanda, a Democrat, came under fire for a “million-dollar bathroom”. The Democrat claimed that he was creating “a real community asset for generations”. In Pensacola Beach, there was outrage over the $1 million cost of a 900 square foot public bathroom. In Westport, Washington, there were protests and petitions over a plan to build an $840,000 bathroom.

Meanwhile bathroom cost inflation continues to rise even when using the same exact public toilets.

In 2016, San Antonio came under fire for spending $191,000 on a single Portland Loo. Next year, a second Loo was priced at $290,000.

But California and New York continue to lead the nation in runaway bathroom costs and battles.

A Santa Monica park restroom recently came in at $2.3 million. The city manager blamed fair-wage guidelines and an OSHA audit. But Santa Monica was already the home of some of the country’s priciest bathrooms. A Sacramento public bathroom for the homeless was estimated to cost as much as $1 million. In San Diego, residents tried to fight a million-dollar beach bathroom by turning to McCain.

“We are sure Senator John McCain is not in favor of toilets being built close to his condo,” locals claimed of the beach bathroom, which was armored to survive flooding.

Some were concerned that the toilet proposal, which goes back many years, would help illegal aliens.

“All the illegals coming in, being dropped off… what a nice place to go and shower,” a local woman commented.

It remains unknown whether the McCain had ever gotten around to opining on the million-dollar toilet.

It’s not impossible to build public restrooms more affordably. Carolina Beach is looking at 12 stalls for $120,000. Plumbing can be expensive, but it’s not that expensive. The rising cost of bathrooms isn’t due to a shortage, but to a combination of corruption and incompetence with local governments drawing up sweetheart deals and imposing regulatory burdens so that only a handful of contractors get the jobs.

Costs are raised by everything from an insistence on dealing only with minority contractors, to mandates imposed on contractors that raise their expenses, to deals with contractors made by politicians who are in their pockets, to the cost of meeting assorted local regulations. Activists complain that there ought to be more money in city budgets for the poor, when the money is being siphoned by regulations that are supposedly meant to help the poor, but in reality help contractors gouge taxpayers for more money.

As spending in blue cities hits new astronomical heights with massive billion-dollar budgets, the rising cost of public bathrooms, doubling, tripling and even quadrupling, passes by unnoticed.

But public toilet costs in blue cities appear to be increasing at an even higher rate than its budgets.

San Francisco’s budget doubled to over $10 billion during the same period that its public toilet cost quadrupled. During that same time, New York City’s budget increased by $30 billion to $88.7 billion.

At some point, the toilet bubble will burst. But for now, billions of dollars nationwide are being wasted on building public toilets that cost more than mansions do in some parts of the country.

These public bathrooms are not, for the most part, works of art. Nor will they be around for very long. But as long as they endure, they serve as monuments to Democrat incompetence and corruption.

Socialism is popular again as Dem politicians promise that the government can do everything better. Forget socialized medicine, free college or any of the other 2020 Dem trillion-dollar plans for utopia.

Visit New York, San Francisco or Seattle, and you’ll realize that socialists can’t even build bathrooms.

All they can do is flush money down the toilet.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was going to launch her kickoff rally right in front of President Trump’s front door. “No other candidate has done something like this,” she bragged. “We’re rallying at Trump’s doorstep to send a message loud and clear: We’re together, we’re brave."

By the time she showed up in front of “Trump’s doorstep” at the Trump International Hotel off Manhattan’s Central Park, the President of the United States was traveling back from Florida to Washington D.C. He was nowhere near the hotel where Gillibrand had decided to “confront” him.

There was nothing “brave” about venturing into the Upper West Side, where the locals would rather commit ritual suicide with a spork or shop at Walmart, before voting for Trump. Starting your rally in a place where Hillary Clinton won 80% of the vote isn’t brave. It’s cowardly. Gillibrand would have shown more courage by going back to her old district where Hillary only won 54% of the vote.



But instead her campaign threw up a giant American flag and then brought out two illegal aliens.

“Our next president will lead with bravery. Our next president with be Kirsten Gillibrand," declared Monica Sibri, an illegal alien who won't be able to vote for Gillibrand.

It was a balmy spring day in the Big Apple with sunshine and a high of 60. The NYPD, out in force, had roped off blocks to accommodate the crowds of the brave expected to turn out on Trump’s doorstep.

The actual audience barely filled half a block according to photojournalist Pamela Hall. The Washington Times estimated that the turnout amounted to 1,000 people. The New York Times offered no estimates, but conceded that the crowd was “small”. It was so small that most of the media coverage consisted of close-up photos to avoid exposing just how few people had bravely showed up to the 2020 kickoff rally.

You can find more people than that on a Sunday in Manhattan waiting at a trendy coffee place.

Out of desperation, the New York Times led its coverage with a painfully close-up shot of a secret service man looking up at Gillibrand’s swollen ankles with a yellow moving truck in the background.

Pamela Hall’s photos showed block after block of empty gray pens waiting in splendid loneliness.

This wasn’t a small town in Iowa or New Hampshire where failing presidential candidates can find themselves speaking to two dozen people. It was Manhattan on Sunday afternoon. A few hundred feet away, joggers were running up and down, tourists were gawking at the sights, including Trump’s hotel, families were strolling through Central Park on one of the first warm days of spring after a cold winter.

None of them wanted to come and hear the senator from New York speak in her own state.

“When we tell Trump enough is enough, I want him to hear your voice along with mine,” Gillibrand had pleaded.

Not only wasn’t Trump there. No one else was there either.

Either the millennial yuppie hipsters clotting the Upper West Side were scared of Trump or they weren’t very interested in Gillibrand. Since she occasionally polls at zero, the possibility is real.

The kickoff rally reminded everyone of why she polls at zero.

Despite her recent sexual harassment scandal, the campaign tried to pivot back to the #MeToo movement. Out came Andrea Pino, the star of the Weinstein Company’s propaganda doc, The Hunting Ground. Pino insisted that, “Kirsten Gillibrand has fought for women" and for rape victims.

Meanwhile, Senator Gillibrand had just been forced to fire her close personal friend, driver and adviser, Abbas Malik, after multiple sexual harassment incidents in her office, which it covered up.

Getting back on her #MeToo high horse was a bad idea. But so was resurrecting The Hunting Ground.

The Hunting Ground had been heavily promoted by Harvey Weinstein, a serial rapist, and its claims have been widely discredited. Appropriately enough, Gillibrand had appeared in The Hunting Ground.

Harvey exploited the pre-#MeToo movement for virtue signaling while raping women, why shouldn’t Senator Gillibrand be able to cover her office’s complicity in sexual harassment the same way?

Pino preached that Gillibrand is, "for every American that dares to imagine an America that serves all of us — not just the white, rich and the powerful.” Rich, white and powerful would describe Gillibrand.

After the illegal aliens and the stars of a Harvey Weinstein campus rape documentary, the Gillibrand campaign brought out the star power. Connie Britton, an actress you may not remember from Spin City, assured the crowd that Gillibrand would help them the way she had helped her adopt an African baby.

The caption identified her as “Actress and Activist”.

Britton was always a bad actress, but she had never been worse than when she claimed that Gillibrand can harness "the power of the storm" and that the bravery of a politician who has flip-flopped on every major issue in her career "comes from her unwavering core of integrity".

The writing on Spin City was never this bad.

Then, while the music played, "Hair toss, Check my nails, Baby how you feelin'?, Feeling good as hell", the prom queen with no one at her prom, sauntered up to the stage.

The song cut off right before, “If he don't love you anymore.”

Some candidates struggle to find a song that sums up their campaign. Kirsten’s was the radio edit version of a song that was popular three years ago with all the obscenities taken out. Senator Gillibrand might not have gotten anything else right. But that does sum up her campaign.

Senator Gillibrand thanked Connie Britton for being a friend and an incredible actress, and in her best prom queen voice, thanked “everyone who has gathered here today.”

Everyone being the population of a Manhattan coffee shop.

While flippantly pushing back strands of her coifed hair, Senator Gillibrand informed the crowd that the Constitution was always meant to “grow” and “adapt” in the tone of a teenage girl giving a class report.

“Even the Star-Spangled Banner ends in a question,” she insisted.

It actually ends with an assertion. Senator Gillibrand is running for the highest office in the land while being unfamiliar with the full version of the country’s national anthem.

What do you do when you launch a presidential campaign and there are more reporters, interns, and activists than actual voters? Since it’s the 2020 race, you scream even more loudly against Trump.

“He puts his name in bold on every building," Gillibrand babbled, looking back and forth at her two teleprompters. "He does all of this because he wants you to believe he is strong. He is not. Our president is a coward."

Gillibrand wouldn’t be the first member of Congress desperately taunting Trump in the hopes that he would notice her and give her some credibility. But sadly, Trump didn’t so much as diss her on Twitter.

The rant escalated. The hotel was a “a shrine to greed, division, and vanity”. Unable to taunt Trump, the senator from New York was reduced to taunting an inanimate object. She told the small gathering that, “the greater strength by far, is ours” even though the evidence made it all too clear that she was wrong.

Gillibrand rambled on about the Mueller report, threw in Nixon and JFK references for the kids, and proposed socialized medicine, universal pre-K, and the Green New Deal. “We should aspire to net zero carbon emissions in the next ten years,” she proposed.

If she wants net carbon emissions in the next ten years, she can start by turning off the power to New York City. The mass deaths would be the only realistic way to get to carbon neutrality in a decade.

But, like most politicians, Senator Gillibrand doesn’t understand what she’s proposing and doesn’t care.

The theme of her rally and campaign was “brave”. And she wants to be brave by proposing the same stuff that everyone else in the 2020 field is, while shouting that Trump, who is far away, is a coward.

And she was doing it to an audience that hadn’t even bothered to show up.

The New York Times interviewed one of her former interns who dissed her rally and turnout. Not only couldn’t Gillibrand get her supporters to turn out, even her interns were looking down at her.

But not all the attendees at the Gillibrand rally lacked passion.

A number of Jewish protesters had shown up, furious at her appearance at the anti-Semitic Women’s March, her refusal to oppose BDS, and her other betrayals of the Jewish community.

A woman in a MAGA hat waved an “Elect Trump” banner. Other signs read, "Kirsten the Commie", "Trump 2020", "Pro-BDS Anti-Semite Gillibrand", and "Far Left Hates America".

“Why don’t you support Trump,” the woman holding up the “Trump 2020” banner asked a Jewish liberal. “He’s done a lot for this country. And he loves Israel and the Jewish people.”

“She’s in favor of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions of Israel, that makes her an anti-Semite,” a protester told a reporter.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand had not only failed to get a crowd to come out to her kickoff rally, but she had managed to attract Jewish protesters in the most Jewish city in America.

This wasn’t a kickoff rally. It was a humiliating disaster.

“Will we be brave?” Gillibrand asked the crowd. “You answered that question just by being here.”

Showing up to a rally on a Sunday afternoon to cheer her on was the epitome of bravery.

"Years from now we will look back at this moment," Gillibrand emoted, in the voice of the prom queen telling all the less popular kids how much their praise means to her.

Then, as her husband and children got up on stage, she awkwardly gyrated and left to the sounds of, "Cause he don't love you anymore/So walk yourself right out the door."

Once again, she had perfectly summed up her campaign with a song.


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

On March 31, a South Bend grandma brought her grandson to the hospital. The 11-month-old baby boy had been shot. His grandmother’s car had also taken fire. It was another early morning in South Bend.

Around the same time, Mayor Buttigieg, was toting up the $7 million in donations from his charm offensive as his bid for the 2020 Democrat nomination got underway. The national media never bothered reporting the shooting of an 11-month-old boy in the city he was supposed to be running, but instead confined its coverage of South Bend matters to a publicity stunt wedding officiated by Buttigieg.

The horrifying shooting of an 11-month-old boy on the millennial mayor’s watch was not an unusual incident. In the last few days, even as the media was gushing over Buttigieg’s presidential ambitions, two Indiana University South Bend players were injured in a shooting on Notre Dame Avenue, a blind date ended in a shooting, and yet another shooting added to the bloody toll in the real South Bend.

Those are quite a few shootings for a city of barely 100,000 people. But South Bend is a violent place.

While Chicago is notorious for its murder rate, in 2015, Buttigieg’s South Bend actually topped Chicago’s 16.4 homicides per 100,000 people with a homicide rate of 16.79 per 100,000 people. Those numbers put Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s city on the list of the top 30 murder capitals in the country for the year.

In January, three shootings in one week killed two teens and left a woman paralyzed from the waist down. In one summer week, the casualties included a 12 and a 13-year-old. Last year, a man shot 6 people when he opened fire on 50 partygoers in a house and was sentenced to 100 years in jail.

By 2017, shootings had risen 20% on Mayor Buttigieg’s watch. Rapes increased 27% and aggravated assaults rose from 183 in 2013, the year before Buttigieg took office, to a stunning 563 assaults.

It’s hard to know which are flying faster, bullets in South Bend or dollars into Buttigieg’s campaign.

Some of these stories, particularly the recent shootings of two baseball players which shocked Indiana University, should have been covered by the national media, which instead chose to broadcast Buttigieg’s publicity stunt of officiating at a pregnant woman’s wedding in a hospital. Had the media stuck around, it could have reported on the trail of shooting victims making their way into the hospital.

But reporting on an 11-month-old being shot in their hot new candidate’s city wouldn’t be as much fun.

The media’s bias has never been subtle, but its disinterest in a presidential candidate’s track record has never been this blatant. Mayor Buttigieg’s candidacy is being covered as if he weren’t the mayor of an actual city with actual problems. Instead his prospects have been covered purely in terms of his identity, a gay millennial, his past career before taking office, and his current witticisms and applause lines.

At no point in time does the media stop to tell the viewers and readers it is regaling with stories of Mayor Buttigieg’s charm that he runs the most dangerous city in Indiana, recently rated as one of the “worst cities to live”, where nearly half the residents live at the poverty level, and even the water is bad.

These are significant data points in the track record of a politician aspiring to run the entire country.

The media keeps asking Mayor Buttigieg which of its wishlist of radical socialist policies he’s willing to sign on to, the Green New Deal, eliminating private health insurance, and freeing more convicts, rather than asking him which policies he used to try and solve problems in South Bend. And how they worked.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has tried to pass off South Bend’s crime problem as a national issue. But South Bend’s violent crime rates, double the Indiana and American average, run counter to national trends.

Buttigieg responded by doubling down on Group Violence Intervention, a trendy community outreach strategy to gang members, which despite being widely touted by the media, doesn’t work. Gimmicks, ranging from AI to wonkery, were rolled out and the shootings, the rapes and assaults have continued.

Mayor Buttigieg excels at buzzwords and gimmicks. He’s just terrible at actually running a city.

That’s why property crime in South Bend is rising. It’s why the city is overrun with gangs. It’s why South Bend is poor, blighted and miserable. Violence is just one of the many symptoms of Buttigieg’s failures.

South Bend’s top employers are the local schools and hospitals, and the local government. And a local casino. Unemployment and taxes are higher than average. Meanwhile the average income is below $20,000. The poverty rate is 25%. African-American poverty rates are double. Hispanic poverty rates are 10% higher than the national average. And even Asian-Americans are poorer than usual in South Bend.

Buttigieg’s failed city is a tragic counterpart to Lake Wobegon where everything is below average.

The media has ignored the reality in South Bend while touting Buttigieg as a rival for the hearts of Rust Belt voters. But Buttigieg hasn’t won by winning over traditional Rust Belt voters. South Bend’s white population has dropped steadily on his watch and the city is on track for majority minority status. The remaining white population is skewed toward a white lefty elite coming for its educational institutions.

South Bend isn’t a typical Rust Belt city. It’s a typical blue city, divided sharply between poor minorities and a leftist elite without any of the culture or tech industries that keep New York or Los Angeles going. Its traditional population has been leaving steadily and that departure only accelerated during Buttigieg’s disastrous time in office.

Much has been made of Buttigieg winning reelection by 80%. This isn’t a testament to his unique charisma. Democrats have had a lock on the mayorality in South Bend for two generations.

The media cheers that Buttigieg won 80% of the vote. It neglects to mention that it was 8,515 votes. That’s about the 8,369 votes that came in during the primaries. Buttigieg raised $337,161 dollars while his Republican opponent, Kelly Jones, had raised $584 dollars. The millennial wunderkind needed $40 bucks a vote while his unknown Republican opponent managed at around a quarter a vote.

Like South Bend’s poverty and crime statistics, these are figures that the media doesn’t report because it would reveal that their shiny new candidate is a hollow façade with nothing inside except spin.

Mayor Buttigieg isn’t winning 80% because he’s universally beloved. That percentage isn’t a testament to his popularity, but to a political system in which hardly anybody except a few lefties bothers to vote.

The truth about “Mayor Pete” is that he’s the son of a Marxist prof working in Notre Dame who used the death throes of a dying city to polish his brand and then jump into the 2020 race over dead bodies.

South Bend is a human tragedy. And while Buttigieg isn’t solely responsible for his woes, he has exploited it, instead of trying to fix it, using buzzwords and gimmicks to build a national brand.

That’s something he has in common with fellow failed hipster mayor and 2020 candidate, Cory Booker.

But Senator Booker was at least clever enough to put a little distance between his tenure in Newark and his 2020 bid. Mayor Buttigieg is betting that the national media won’t bother looking at South Bend.

So far he’s been proven right.

The media keeps touting Buttigieg’s Ivy League credentials, his identity as a gay politician, and his charm. When it mentions South Bend, it’s only to claim that he “turned it around” and that he won his last election by 80%. South Bend hasn’t been turned around. Downtown has gotten a hipster revamp, while the rest of South Bend chokes on crime, violence and misery. But Buttigieg knows that the national media will never bother doing more than reporting on new bike paths and an organic grocery.

The 11-month-old boy who came into the hospital with a wound in his shoulder won’t catch their eye. But as Mayor Buttigieg keeps raising money hand over fist, South Bend continues to bleed and die.

And Buttigieg is hoping that he can sneak into the White House before the blood gets on his hands.



Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.