Hello, and welcome to TGIF. We sent Nellie Bowles to the reflecting pool this week, and she sadly ingested too much green algae, which landed her in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed. We keep her in our prayers. I’m Will Rahn, filling in and ready for you to roast me in the comments.
Here’s a quick reminder to head to our merch shop to pick up one of our fast-selling America 250 T-shirts and Free Press golf balls. Now let’s do the news of the week!
→ The mini Mamdanis: Just a year after his stunning victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani completed his first round of purges this week.
Mamdani’s three handpicked candidates for the U.S. House all won their primaries Tuesday night, effectively doubling the number of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members in Congress over the course of an evening.
So how did that happen? Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump? Were they standing in the way of the mayor’s “affordability” agenda? Were they moderates in any real, practical sense? Did a salacious tryst with Sydney Leathers come to light?
Pfft. Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough, silly. “Free Palestine” is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters. They’ve given up on global warming. Do Black Lives still Matter? Unclear. Abortion, tax hikes, gun control, nationalized healthcare: All now take a backseat to Israel and AIPAC, an American group that funds pro-Israel candidates, and the big, bad bogeyman on the left. A generation after Pat Buchanan was drummed out of the GOP for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” the vanguard of the left has decided that Ronald Reagan’s onetime communications director was right, actually.
You don’t need to be Bibi Netanyahu’s number-one fan to conclude that this has all become totally deranged. Criticize the Israeli government all you want. Stand against the settlements. Plenty of Israelis certainly do so. But why was the Sunrise Movement—a supposedly environmentalist organization—gleefully posting photos this week of some poor woman who apparently elected to get a “FUCK AIPAC” tattoo on her forehead?
Call me old-fashioned, but I associate face tattoos with meth, mental illness, and Mike Tyson. Not. . . anti-Israel political posturing?
And what’s this lady going to do when the left inevitably moves onto its next cause du jour? I’m not a big fan of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the two Weather Underground leaders who had plum seats at the opening of Barack Obama’s ugly-as-hell presidential center last week. Yes, they were communists who carried out a bombing campaign against the government. Yes, Dohrn was a big fan of the Manson Family’s murder spree. But at least they had the good sense not to get “VICTORY FOR THE VIETCONG” tattooed on their foreheads. Such a thing might well have cost them their post-terrorism posts in snobby academia.
Seriously, where are you going in life with a FUCK AIPAC tattoo, other than, perhaps, you know, Congress?
